Obama: Platform for Revolution

Democrats’ Platform for Revolution
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, May 05, 2008

Americans are well acquainted with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements. Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama speaks of “change,” he means change in the sense that a profoundly significant, though not widely known, individual -- Saul Alinsky -- outlined in his writings two generations ago.

Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics, which he termed “organizing,” that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Obama is a committed disciple of Alinsky’s very specific strategies for “social change.”

Obama never met Alinsky personally; the latter died when Obama was a young boy. But Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method. As The Nation magazine puts it, “Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing.…” In fact, for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method. Obama and his fellow agitators made demands for many things in the Eighties, including taxpayer-funded employment-training services, playground construction, after-school programs, and asbestos removal from neighborhood apartments. Journalist and bestselling author Richard Poe writes: “In 1985 [Obama] began a four-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project. Later, he worked with ACORN and its offshoot Project Vote, both creations of the Alinsky network.” (In recent years, Poe notes, both of those organizations have run nationwide voter-mobilization drives marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams.) The Nation reports, “Today Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.”

As you read this, you will hear in his words the echo of many familiar, outspoken leftist agitators for “change.”



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...a revolution -- to which Barack Obama the Democratic presidential candidate, who is an Alinsky disciple and protégé, refers euphemistically as “change.”

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