What Did Obama Do As A Community Organizer?

What Did Obama Do As A Community Organizer?
By Byron York

And is it really a qualification to be president?

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?

(snip)

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.

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So. Bammie knows how to get people to increase their identity as a minority group around something (which makes people draw apart from one another, their community, and only identify with their own--the opposite of unity) and he can get them to agitate, work-stop, picket, protest, holler and yell, engage the media etc. until they get the government to give them some money.

Sure, they have a main target--a job center, street lights fixed, a bus route established, various 'outreach' efforts, but there is no mention of cost effectiveness and accountability; who knows into which pocket the government money is going? Who really knows if it fixed the 'problem' it was supposed to fix?

Teaching people to see themselves as perpetual victims--that the government is supposed to continually assuage--is NOT 'bringing communities together', nor is it teaching any useful skill except how to be loud--and stay loud--until Washington pays you to hush up. This is what Bammie did for three years--until he found a way, by his own admission, to get more power and make more money.

He's the original Slide-By Man. He obtained an Affirmative-Action college career--and an Affirmative Action-salaried wife to match. He traded his senatorial influence for his wife's bonuses and high salary. He spent his life in a church telling him this was all his due (they'd help him meet the right people and get the right numbers).

Now, what's he going to trade America for the highest seat in the land?