Barack the Obamessiah has attempted to use his experience as a community organizer as being his qualification for President. The Republicans have mocked him, questioning what exactly it was that he accomplished with that organizing. Details and definitions have been in short supply, but a few items have trickled out that I wanted to pass along to you so you can understand some of the Obamessiah's best qualifications are. Byron York has been instrumental in forcing this information out into the public's eye, so take a look at some of his work:
York's story delves into how Obama got the job of community organizing in the first place. Basically, an activist was looking for someone to help some laid off steelworkers in Chicago. Obama wanted to do something along the lines of civil rights work, so it was a close enough match for both. So how did it turn out?
To be blunt: he failed.
His next idea was to network with local churches to improve the area, but he wasn't a member of any church at the time, which undermined his own cause. Enter the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama chose this as his church home and stayed there for 20 years, until his politically-pressured run for President forced him to quit the membership rolls. According to local preachers who worked with Obama, the two biggest successes he led as a community organizer were the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area's oldest housing projects. York goes into more detail on both projects, but the point is that they were only moderately successful, and Obama decided to leave community organizing because it didn't offer the potential to really change things the way he wanted to.
Some excerpts from York's conclusion:
Another interesting take on Obama's community organizing credentials is from John B. Judis at The New Republic. After going through a lot of Obama's history, Judis writes that Obama learned from the Alinsky crowd but created his own spin:
And there we have the crux of Obama's problem: he is becoming more and more apparently insincere. From his bashing of bitter people clinging to God and guns to his numerous examples of elitism, the American people are finding it harder and harder to identify with him, and that means he is finding it harder and harder to appear sincere.
Finally, here are some excerpts from a disturbing story at Investor's Business Daily. Both Barack and Michelle Obama have been steeped in the activist tradition in the form of 'public allies':
Now we begin to see the seeds of why the Obamas want universal education, health care, and everything else, don't we? It appears that they want to breed a generation of social activists who will do nothing more productive with their lives than picket, demonstrate, and nag anyone they don't agree with. They can do that because the government -- if Obama gets his way -- will provide everything those social activists need to live without having to earn it.
This is what they want, and this is why they want it.
Now we have a better understanding of the Obamessiah's 'community organizing' days, what they involved, and how they helped form the man he is today. Now it's up to the American people to decide if those experiences make him more or less qualified to become President of the United States.
There's my two cents.
Sources:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWMxNGUxZWJjYzg1NjA0MTlmZDZmMjUwZGU3ZjAwNmU=&w=Mg==
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=305420655186700
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2e0a7836-b897-4155-864c-25e791ff0f50
Barack Obama often cites his time as a community organizer here in Chicago as one of the experiences that qualify him to hold the nation's highest office. "I can bring this country together," he said in a debate last February. "I have a track record, starting from the days I moved to Chicago as a community organizer."
When Obama says such things, the reaction among many observers is: Huh?
Audiences understand when he mentions his years as an Illinois state legislator, or his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. But a community organizer? What's that?
Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
If you substitute "Bush" for "Reagan," you have a fairly accurate description of Obama's 2008 campaign. That's not a coincidence; it suggests that something about community organizing was central to Obama's world view back then, and has remained central to his development as the politician he is today. What was it?
I counted myself among those who didn't have a good idea of what a community organizer does. So I came here to learn more about Obama's time in the job, from 1985 to 1988. What did he do? What did he accomplish? And what in his experience here stands as a qualification to be president of the United States?
Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that "direct action."
Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be "an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions." Once such hostilities were "whipped up to a fighting pitch," Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer's goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.
When Obama says such things, the reaction among many observers is: Huh?
Audiences understand when he mentions his years as an Illinois state legislator, or his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. But a community organizer? What's that?
Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
If you substitute "Bush" for "Reagan," you have a fairly accurate description of Obama's 2008 campaign. That's not a coincidence; it suggests that something about community organizing was central to Obama's world view back then, and has remained central to his development as the politician he is today. What was it?
I counted myself among those who didn't have a good idea of what a community organizer does. So I came here to learn more about Obama's time in the job, from 1985 to 1988. What did he do? What did he accomplish? And what in his experience here stands as a qualification to be president of the United States?
Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that "direct action."
Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be "an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions." Once such hostilities were "whipped up to a fighting pitch," Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer's goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.
York's story delves into how Obama got the job of community organizing in the first place. Basically, an activist was looking for someone to help some laid off steelworkers in Chicago. Obama wanted to do something along the lines of civil rights work, so it was a close enough match for both. So how did it turn out?
The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; Kellman took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. "The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries," Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. "Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That's all he did. And he made big bucks doing it."
That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman [the activist who hired him] nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn't be coming back.
That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman [the activist who hired him] nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn't be coming back.
To be blunt: he failed.
His next idea was to network with local churches to improve the area, but he wasn't a member of any church at the time, which undermined his own cause. Enter the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama chose this as his church home and stayed there for 20 years, until his politically-pressured run for President forced him to quit the membership rolls. According to local preachers who worked with Obama, the two biggest successes he led as a community organizer were the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area's oldest housing projects. York goes into more detail on both projects, but the point is that they were only moderately successful, and Obama decided to leave community organizing because it didn't offer the potential to really change things the way he wanted to.
Some excerpts from York's conclusion:
We look to formative experiences to help us understand presidential candidates. Visit an aircraft carrier in wartime and you'll learn something about John McCain. Pilots fly off the deck, and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don't. One day, McCain didn't, and began the time as a prisoner of war that both revealed his character and launched his political career. No matter what he has done since, the U.S. Navy is the culture that made McCain, with his heavy emphasis on duty, honor, and country.
Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?
The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a "Camp Obama" program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama's opponents admit is a very impressive operation.
But Obama's time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for.
When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago's problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.
And what if he gets it? He'll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He'll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn't expect much to actually get done.
Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?
The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a "Camp Obama" program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama's opponents admit is a very impressive operation.
But Obama's time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for.
When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago's problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.
And what if he gets it? He'll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He'll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn't expect much to actually get done.
Another interesting take on Obama's community organizing credentials is from John B. Judis at The New Republic. After going through a lot of Obama's history, Judis writes that Obama learned from the Alinsky crowd but created his own spin:
Based purely on his organizing background, one would have expected Obama to become a bread-and-butter politician, a spokesman for his constituents' immediate needs. Instead, Obama became a politician of vision, not issues--one who appealed to voters' values rather than their immediate self-interest. As a state senator in Illinois, he was best known for his advocacy of government reform. Asked in September 1999 to explain why someone should vote for him for Congress against incumbent Bobby Rush, Obama told the Hyde Park Citizen that, unlike Rush, he had "a vision." And, as a Democratic presidential candidate, he has run on an abstract platform of "change" that appeals to many young and upscale voters, but has fallen flat among the white working-class voters whom Alinsky once courted.
Obama has also eschewed the retiring persona of the organizer. Initially awkward as a speaker, he became a charismatic politician whose run for president has produced something very much like a movement. And, while his campaign has used some techniques from community organizing to rally state-by-state support, it is the antithesis of the ground-up, locally dominated, naturally led network of community groups that Alinsky envisioned. Obama, in short, has become exactly the kind of politician his mentors might have warned against.
Still, one has to wonder: In making the transition from organizer to politician, did Obama go too far in rejecting one of the cardinal principles of community organizing? True, appeals to selfinterest can sometimes lead organizations astray. But such appeals are also a necessary part of community organizing--and politics as well. Few candidates could hope to win an election at any level without convincing their constituents that they understand their immediate hopes and fears. And presidential candidates are no exception. Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton certainly had the ability to persuade voters that he identified with their interests. So did Ronald Reagan. Al Gore and John Kerry did not.
In this election, Obama can count on the votes of African Americans in Roseland as well as many upscale voters attracted by his message of change. But he also needs to win support from ... working-class voters who, today, are more worried about high gas prices and rising heath care costs than about the prospect of blacks moving in next door. To win their votes, Obama needs to do precisely what he once taught organizers to do: speak to the self-interest of ordinary people.
So far, this has not been Obama's strong suit as a presidential candidate. To his credit, he has certainly talked about gas prices and health insurance. But, as Obama would have told his trainees 20 years ago, conveying concern requires more than saying the right thing; it involves seeing the world from the vantage of those you are trying to win over--and convincing them that your empathy is sincere.
Obama has also eschewed the retiring persona of the organizer. Initially awkward as a speaker, he became a charismatic politician whose run for president has produced something very much like a movement. And, while his campaign has used some techniques from community organizing to rally state-by-state support, it is the antithesis of the ground-up, locally dominated, naturally led network of community groups that Alinsky envisioned. Obama, in short, has become exactly the kind of politician his mentors might have warned against.
Still, one has to wonder: In making the transition from organizer to politician, did Obama go too far in rejecting one of the cardinal principles of community organizing? True, appeals to selfinterest can sometimes lead organizations astray. But such appeals are also a necessary part of community organizing--and politics as well. Few candidates could hope to win an election at any level without convincing their constituents that they understand their immediate hopes and fears. And presidential candidates are no exception. Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton certainly had the ability to persuade voters that he identified with their interests. So did Ronald Reagan. Al Gore and John Kerry did not.
In this election, Obama can count on the votes of African Americans in Roseland as well as many upscale voters attracted by his message of change. But he also needs to win support from ... working-class voters who, today, are more worried about high gas prices and rising heath care costs than about the prospect of blacks moving in next door. To win their votes, Obama needs to do precisely what he once taught organizers to do: speak to the self-interest of ordinary people.
So far, this has not been Obama's strong suit as a presidential candidate. To his credit, he has certainly talked about gas prices and health insurance. But, as Obama would have told his trainees 20 years ago, conveying concern requires more than saying the right thing; it involves seeing the world from the vantage of those you are trying to win over--and convincing them that your empathy is sincere.
And there we have the crux of Obama's problem: he is becoming more and more apparently insincere. From his bashing of bitter people clinging to God and guns to his numerous examples of elitism, the American people are finding it harder and harder to identify with him, and that means he is finding it harder and harder to appear sincere.
Finally, here are some excerpts from a disturbing story at Investor's Business Daily. Both Barack and Michelle Obama have been steeped in the activist tradition in the form of 'public allies':
Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife became executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies in 1993. Obama plans to use the nonprofit group, which he features on his campaign Web site, as the model for a national service corps. He calls his Orwellian program, "Universal Voluntary Public Service."
Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."
[Public Allies'] real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.
"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and "equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.
The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don't go into corporate America," Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the "money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."
"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech, "we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go to college, and then go back into government.
The government now funds about half of Public Allies' expenses through Clinton's AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that some see costing $500 billion. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.
The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military — and stick American taxpayers with the bill.
Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."
[Public Allies'] real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.
"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and "equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.
The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don't go into corporate America," Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the "money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."
"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech, "we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go to college, and then go back into government.
The government now funds about half of Public Allies' expenses through Clinton's AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that some see costing $500 billion. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.
The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military — and stick American taxpayers with the bill.
Now we begin to see the seeds of why the Obamas want universal education, health care, and everything else, don't we? It appears that they want to breed a generation of social activists who will do nothing more productive with their lives than picket, demonstrate, and nag anyone they don't agree with. They can do that because the government -- if Obama gets his way -- will provide everything those social activists need to live without having to earn it.
This is what they want, and this is why they want it.
Now we have a better understanding of the Obamessiah's 'community organizing' days, what they involved, and how they helped form the man he is today. Now it's up to the American people to decide if those experiences make him more or less qualified to become President of the United States.
There's my two cents.
Sources:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWMxNGUxZWJjYzg1NjA0MTlmZDZmMjUwZGU3ZjAwNmU=&w=Mg==
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=305420655186700
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2e0a7836-b897-4155-864c-25e791ff0f50
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