Chicago pastors still remember Obama making the rounds of local churches and conducting interviews—in organizing lingo, "one-on-ones"—where he would probe for self-interest. The Reverend Alvin Love, the Baptist minister of a modest brick church amid the clapboard bungalows of the South Side, was one of Obama's first one-on-ones. During a recent visit to his church, Love told me, "I remember he said this to me: There ought to be some way for us to help you meet your self-interest while at the same time meeting the real interests and the needs of the community.'" . . .
He was sometimes more interested in connecting with folks on the South Side than organizing them. He studied the characters he encountered so closely that [fellow organizer Mike] Kruglik says Obama turned his field reports into short stories about the hopes and struggles of the local pastors and congregants with whom he was trying to commune.
Where some of Alinsky's disciples speak of his work with religious fervor, Obama maintained some detachment during these years. . . .
As it was, he ran into the same roadblock as his trainers had. "Obama," Galluzzo told me, "was constantly being harassed by people saying, Oh, you work for that white person.'" On one occasion, he eagerly tried to make his pitch about joining DCP [Developing Communities Project] to a Reverend Smalls. Smalls wasn't interested. "I think I remember some white man coming around talking about some developing something or other," he told Obama. "Funny-looking guy. Jewish name." His hostility only grew when Obama explained that Catholic priests were also involved. "Listen ... what's your name again? Obamba?" Smalls asked without waiting for an answer. "Listen, Obamba, you may mean well. I'm sure you do. But the last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems." Obama left the meeting crestfallen.
On a Sunday morning two weeks before he launches his presidential campaign, Obama is at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side, gently swaying from side to side under a giant iron cross. From the outside, the church looks more like a fortress than a house of worship, with high whitewashed brick walls topped with security cameras. Inside, Trinity is the sort of African American community that the young Obama longed to connect with when he first came to Chicago. The church's motto is "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian," and sunlight streams through stained glass windows depicting the life of a black Jesus. The Reverend Doctor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Trinity's pastor since 1972, flies a red, black, and green flag near his altar and often preaches in a dashiki. He has spent decades writing about the African roots of Christianity, partly as a way to convince young blacks tempted by Islam that Christianity is not "a white man's religion."
On this particular Sunday, the sea of black worshippers is dotted with a few white folks up in the balcony, clutching copies of The Audacity of Hope they've brought for Obama's book-signing later. Obama, sitting in the third row with his wife and two daughters, Malia and Natasha, stands, claps, prays, and sways along with the rest of the congregation. During the sermon, he watches the preacher carefully and writes notes. When asked by Wright to say a few words, Obama grabs the microphone and stands. "I love you all," he says. "It's good to be back home." The 150-person choir breaks into a chorus of "Barack, Hallelujah! Barack, Hallelujah!"
This adulation is a far cry from how Obama was received by Wright when they first met in the mid-'80s, during Obama's initial round of one-on-ones. Like Smalls, Wright was unimpressed. "They were going to bring all different denominations together to have this grassroots movement," explained Wright, a white-haired man with a goatee and a booming voice. "I looked at him and I said, Do you know what Joseph's brother said when they saw him coming across the field?'" Obama said he didn't. "I said, Behold the dreamer! You're dreaming if you think you are going to do that.'"
A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn't attend services. "It might help your mission if you had a church home," he told Obama. "It doesn't matter where, really. What you're asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you're getting yours from."
After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright's church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for "Buppies"—black urban professionals—and didn't have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles—what the church calls the "Black Value System"—included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"
The crosscurrents appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to solve. "It was a powerful program, this cultural community," he wrote, "one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing."
As a result, over the years, Wright became not only Obama's pastor, but his mentor. . . . Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his Senate victory in 2004, and he recently name-checked Wright in his speech to civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama.
The church also helped Obama develop politically. It provided him with new insights about getting people to act, or agitating, that his organizing pals didn't always understand. "It's true that the notion of self-interest was critical," Obama told me. "But Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest." He continued, "Sometimes the tendency in community organizing of the sort done by Alinsky was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful. We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal.' Those are just words. I have a dream.' Just words. But they help move things. And I think it was partly that understanding that probably led me to try to do something similar in different arenas."
In 1995, Obama shocked his old friend Jean Rudd by telling her he wanted to run for the state Senate. Back in 1985, Rudd, then working at the Woods Fund—a Chicago foundation that gives grants for community organizing—had provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. When Obama returned to Chicago to practice law, he joined the board of Rudd's foundation. Now he was going to the other side. "That's a switch!" she told him. Obama insisted that nothing would change. "Oh no," he said, according to Rudd. "I'm going to use the same skills as a community organizer." . . .
But when those supporters become a liability, Obama has not been afraid to take a direct, confrontational approach. Reverend Wright learned this recently, on the evening before he was scheduled to deliver the invocation at Obama's presidential announcement speech in Springfield. According to The New York Times, after Trinity's Afrocentrism—which had originally drawn Obama to the church in the 1980s —had become a sticky campaign issue, Obama called his old friend and told him it was probably best if the pastor didn't speak, after all. The following day, Wright could be seen silently watching the proceedings from the sidelines along with other Obama supporters. . . .
In our last conversation, . . . I asked Obama if his reputation for purity is a little overblown. He chuckled "I wouldn't be a U.S. senator or out of Chicago or a presidential candidate from Illinois if I didn't have some sense of the world as it actually works," he said. "When I arrived in Chicago at the age of twenty-four, I didn't know a single person in Chicago, and I know an awful lot of folks now. And so, obviously, some of that has to do with me being pretty clear-eyed about power."
It is interesting that both Barack and Hillary were serious students of Saul Alinsky's methods.
I don't think it would take the common man more than 20 mins to determine Wright was a racist crackpot. And if Obama claims he was fooled not sure I care to see another easily fooled fool in the WH.
So according to this story, Obama is really interested in individuals, is irritated at the prejudice he encountered against Jews, Catholics and white people and notes that if he were really a naive babe in the woods as some have suggested, he could hardly have risen in Chicago politics so quickly after arriving in the city without knowing anyone.
All entirely consistent with what we already know about him.
Was this posted to discredit Obama in some way?
No. It's a very positive story.
Like many of us, I'm trying to understand Obama better, since I expect him to be President.
I've read his second book -- haven't read the first one yet.
Jim Lindgren
~ Barack Hussein Obama
I cannot imagine there is a single person who even casually peruses the comments at VC who is unaware of what Barack Obama's middle name is. Unless you are prepared to start referring to the presumptive Republican nominee as John Sidney McCain III (bet you didn't even know his middle name before now) and Obama's rival as Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (or her middle name), can you please stop engaging in such idiotic propaganda?
John GaltSaul Alinsky?He is, in fact, the archetype of the anti-American leftist academic, and the guiding light of the Communist-inspired union movement that crippled American industry. From this site:
"Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909. Hillary Rodham’s thesis is very revealing of Alinsky’s view of American life. It says, “…after graduating from the University of Chicago, Alinsky received a fellowship in criminology with a first assignment to get a look at crime from the inside of gangs. He attached himself to the Capone gang, attaining a perspective from which he viewed the gang as a huge quasi-public utility serving the people of Chicago.” Alinsky -- in that and other experiences -- became an academic-turned-radical, a personality type first found among the press covering the Russian revolution of 1917-18 and that became much more common five decades later, forming the basis of the Vietnam anti-war movement. He and others like him would find America’s adversaries -- within and outside the law -- more attractive than America itself.
Saul Alinsky’s radicalism was expressed in his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” In that book, Alinsky said, “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.”"
Yes. "All entirely consistent with what we already know about [Hussein]." Indeed.
/me recursively ignores GV :)
This may be the first time Conspirator copped to the motivation for a post. Thanks for the transparency, Prof Lindgren.
I find the article frightening. Something is being Organized, but we don't know what.
I'm just curious: why the seemingly random, pointless use of boldface? Lindgren obviously wants us to stop and say, "oooh, now I see," but I'm underwhelmed.
Hey, none of these folks got where they are today without being good at politics ...
Obama is not organizing the overthrow of America for either the "Communists" or the "Islamicists". We're not a cult, nor do we follow him mindlessly. I came to support him, first off, more because of his mindset on how to rebuild and redirect the military after pulling out of Iraq, for one point, and a number of other supporters think his plans in that regard are crazy.
What he is doing, what he learned in part from the Organization, is giving his supporters encouragement to work in their communities for whatever cause they choose. This is not hyperbole, this is something I've heard from more than one staffer, on more than one occasion. Yes, they would be primarily Democrats, but there are more GOPers working for Obama than is obvious. And he's passed down the signal for them to take what they are learning from working in his campaign, and to apply it for their causes.
And the article's simply not about that, because it's not about what he did -- which can be found with 15 minutes on Google, if you wish to know -- but what he learned. The article's about process, not ideology, and looking for that in it is like looking for Aaron's batting secrets in the box scores.
If you really are concerned that Obama's some sort of crypto-...whatever, try poking around and looking at his voting and legislative record on THOMAS. Or, if you want a summary, check out this '06 blog post on his record.
Thanks for clearing that up!
Be you left or right in your politics, if you are in the organizing business and don't study Alinsky, you are committing malpractice.
This article sheds some light on BHO's skills and originality.
It also shows that he is a pragmatic political animal. That is a good sign, for not many would want a political naif for President. I voted for Carter. One of those was enough.
Fredrick Hayek was the ideological mentor of Reagan and Thatcher; Alinsky the mentor of Clinton and Obama.
Enough said.
If anyone has read Alinsky one realizes that one of the major "rules" for radicals is to assess one's position within the current political zeitgeist, and plan accordingly. I think one of the most politically adroit moves Obama has made is his ambiguity. He has realized the current trend of an uneducated and uninformed voter base, combined it with a highly motivated and vehimently LEFTIST group of "organizers" (read staffers), and has taken the country by storm. Of course he allows his supporters to advocate whatever cause they choose, because, due to his ambiguity, that is the cause posit as the "change" Obama will bring. As long as they pull that lever who cares.
I think perhaps the most illuminating fact in this article is Rev. Wright's apparent conversion from Islam to a more socially acceptable "Black Liberation Theology" Christianity. I'll bet Alinsky is smiling in approval as the flames of hell lick at his feet. Obama and Wright have recognized the current political climate and have veiled their political (and I would posit religious, but would not want to offend objectives Woodrow, Ricardo, and their ilk) objectives appropriately. They are masters of the Alinsky way,"Winning at all cost." Subsequently, the questions about the ambiguity of the Obama platform, are ones that will only be answered from the oval office. So, perhaps it would be better to have a Lefty we know, like those listed above, than to have an unknown entity as the most powerful man in the now-free world. But it's too late for that now.
Thus, the basic idea of community organizing is to help people help themselves. Anyone who has organized a letter writing campaign in a community has done some community organizing.
Obama's book makes clear that he is pragmatic and not ideologically driven. What works? What is effective?
In fact, Barak's political campaign is community organizing on a grander scale -- organizing communities of voters to come together to get people to the voting booths &to help him get elected. He certainly has been very effective in organizing his political campaign. And those skills will help him become a great President.