Did SAUL ALINSKY TEACH OBAMA EVERYTHING HE KNOWS ABOUT CIVIC UPHEAVAL

Throughout Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and his subsequent time in that office, two things have been said again and again: 1. He has a grudge against America. 2. He takes his marching orders from Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), particularly as encapsulated in the book “Rules for Radicals.”

For example, from “Rules for Radicals,” consider Alinsky’s words of wisdom for emerging community organizers:

[You must help] the people in the community…feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. [An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.

These are the kinds of things Obama was reading when he poured through the pages of “Rules for Radicals,” and these are the kinds of things he would have been taught by the community organizers who trained him. And what have Obama’s tactics as President been to this point, if not tactics of playing one class against another to raise levels of frustration and of creating the very disenchantment about which Alinsky wrote, in order to nurture a passion for change?

Alinsky taught him well. And Alinsky’s son was the first to admit it, when he wrote a letter to the Boston Globe in praise of Barack Obama following the 2008 Democrat National Convention:

Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well