Community Organizer in Chief
According to the community organizer model, a leader’s job is to discover and increase public dissatisfaction with “the system.” The organizer functions as a broker, extracting concessions for his client, the oppressed group, while maneuvering to assure future business. Transferring this model to the presidency is problematic in several ways.
Claiming that the”system” is unfair posits a have-have not distribution of wealth and power not embraced by most Americans. Most people do not believe that this country and its institutions are fundamentally unfair. They tends to believe in the fundamental fairness of a free market and in individual effort rather than government allocation. Citizens generally identify with the system even if they do happily gripe the day away. The community organizer generally works with passive people who feel they are outside the system.
Audience knowledge that it will pay the bill also limits the appeal of a spread the wealth strategy, a strategy that is inevitable once you have decided that there is a class struggle to be won. While it’s generally accepted that the left will target the rich, most people are sensitive to overreach in this area. Obama’s repeated attempts at reassurance have failed owing to his inconsistency: is high net worth the enemy, or those making $250K per year, or just $150K? In community organizing, the taxpayer is not part of the discussion: the players are the broker, the oppressed group and the targeted organization.
Obama also flounders as he blames more and more people for frustrating his solutions. The financial services industry, insurance companies, auto manufacturers and even doctors are targeted as greedy plutocrats, polluters or exploiters. Middle-class protesters are invalidated if they carry a sign or are merely properly dressed. Knowing that they are all on the hit list, the targeted groups will tend to unite.
In contrast, the community organizer is successful when he takes on his victims one at a time, while the later targets stand by, hoping that they will be spared. Because he is trying to remake society, Obama cannot apply the community organizer’s dictum that the target must be narrow and fixed.
Setting one group against another reveals an unsettling strategy. Once targeted, one does not forget. When private individuals, including even the GM CEO, are targeted, the president can no longer play the benevolent broker working for the “common good.” Even his supporters must experience a twinge of fear of this newly emerged avenging angel.
Ayers and Alinsky, Theory and Practice
Obama has dumped his pastor, dissed his grandmother, ignored the material want of his extended family, and his wife has trashed her country. But the Obama’s have not dumped William Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist, nor have they given up the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the original Community Organizer.
Ayers long ago decided, after having narrowly avoided prison for terrorist bombings, that education is the new revolution. He is in famous company, given the number of dictators and revolutionaries who have focused on indoctrination of the youth as the easiest means of consolidating their future power.
As for Alinsky, Obama has clearly adopted his ground game tactics on the grand scale. It is now revealed that his primary wins over Hillary Clinton in caucus states were assisted, if not made possible, by bussed-in Chicago ACORN workers exploiting the weak residency & identification requirements of those states. The same manpower is being used in Ohio with the connivance of corrupt state officials.
As for the Fannie/Freddie disaster, again the policy of spreading the wealth (Ayers’ socialism/communism) was executed with the help of the (Alinsky approved) ACORN ground game, including the harassment of bankers at their homes.
Meantime, critics of Obama, such as Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, are threatened by dirt diggers working for the candidate of light. Again the ground game, using large numbers of activists.
The consistency is striking: at the beginning of his career, Obama succeeded in removing his opponents in the State Senate race, including his erstwhile mentor, by invalidating the signatures on their applications of candidacy. Obama’s innovation is to always game the system, and do it better than anyone else ever has.
