Democrats’ Platform for Revolution
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FrontPage Magazine ^ | 5 May 2008 | John Perazzo
Posted on Mon 05 May 2008 05:10:20 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
When Hillary and Obama speak of “change,” they mean the complete remaking of society via the radical, subversive methods of Saul Alinsky.
| Democrats’ Platform for Revolution |
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. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West.” Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama and Clinton speak of “change,” they mean 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. Both Obama and Clinton are committed disciples 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.”
Hillary, for her part, actually got to know Alinsky personally. She was so impressed with Alinsky’s theories and tactics vis a vis social change, that during her senior year at Wellesley College she interviewed him and subsequently penned a 92-page thesis on his ideas. In the conclusion of that thesis, she wrote:
If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, [t]he result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared -- just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.