Chicago, Obama, and Health Care Reform

The American Thinker ^ | August 26, 2009 | Abraham H. Miller

[Scanian]

There has been no lack of writing about the influence of Marxist Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama's political ideology. But what appears to have escaped notice is the influence of the political culture of Chicago on Barack Obama. These influences, of course, are not the same. Alinsky was a formidable opponent of the Chicago Democratic Machine. Obama was, when necessary, a consummate machine insider.

Alinsky for all his flaws would never have gotten into bed with the likes of Tony Rezko or joined a law firm that represented slum lords.

If you want to understand the political agenda of Barack Obama, forget Alinsky, stop calling Obama a "socialist," and start thinking of Barack Obama as a guy who received his political baptism, not from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but from the Chicago machine.

Chicago politics is not about ideology. It is about, "Who Gets What, When, and How," to quote the inimitable Harold D. Laswell, one of the outstanding political theorists of the last century.

The sine qua non of Chicago politics is power, getting it and keeping it. Everything else is incidental. Even corruption is a byproduct of power and is functional only if it enables you to stay in power.

In Chicago politics, you don't make waves, you don't back losers, and you "don't talk to nobody nobody sent." Chicago politics is always about hierarchy and centralization.

Chicago politics is also parochial. In the City of Neighborhoods, ethnic consciousness is strong. An Irish machine, for years, ran a Polish city by making sure that the Poles got a big piece of the pie. There is seldom a perception of a common good. There is the amalgamation of different ethnic interests. In Chicago, the whole is clearly the sum of its parts, and the lubricants for the parts are political spoils.

If you want to understand Obama's health care policy, you need to start where Obama starts. You need to start with Chicago. You need to look at constituent interests.

Obama won in 2008 because, among other things, he mobilized the electoral periphery. He mobilized young voters and minority voters, people who traditionally had a lower probability of showing up on Election Day. Chicago politics is about mobilizing the vote. "Vote early and often" is the city's sardonic refrain.

Obama needs his newly socialized base. He needs them to keep coming to the polls. In the vein of Chicago politics, he needs to deliver benefits to them.

Unrewarded, the electoral periphery will revert back to apathy. Health care is a reward to this base of people who are on the economic as well as political periphery.

Talk-radio host Sean Hannity can trumpet medical savings accounts on one day and talk about the forty percent of Americans who don't pay taxes the next, and he will be immune to the inconsistency because Hannity's listeners are taxpayers. But a medical savings account means nothing if you don't pay taxes.

[orchid]

Many years ago, the award winning author and columnist Mike Royko said the motto of Chicago is “ubi est meum?”
Where’s mine? Still valid today.

[Scanian]

How I wish Royko had been around to cover the rise of Obama.

[nathanbedford]

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” he said. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”(emphasis supplied)

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance,” said Lloyd. “[T]he problem is not only the warp to our public philosophy of free speech, but that the government has abandoned its role of advancing the communications capabilities of real people.”

That an appointee of the president of the United StatesCould utter such a statement and retain his position of trust is an abomination and an affront to every patriot who ever died defending the First Amendment.

There can be no doubt that the man who appointed this scoundrel has no regard for the Constitution of the United States of American. We are literally being governed by a man who rejects the fundamental values and the constitutional precepts of our nation. As such, he is both alien and dangerous.

Barack Obama must be opposed with every legal means and morally destroyed.