PrintAugust 12, 2009
Obama Failed to Master Alinsky's Rule #12
Alinsky's 12th Rule of Tactics: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying, ‘You're right - we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.'
Why is President Barack Obama suddenly drowning in a sea of widespread resistance to his centerpiece legislation? Because it has now become quite clear to Harry & Louise Q Citizen that this was a man without a "constructive alternative" to the out-of-control healthcare system he has badgered and rhetorically beaten bloody to a pulp.
Obama himself, Organizer in Chief, had no plan. He proposed no plan to Congress. He has let committee after committee of witless tax-and-spend, haggard old liberals write the convoluted mess they're calling healthcare reform, and has virtually done nothing for own his part but bash the insurance companies, the doctors and even the patients, who ask for individual control over their own life-and-death choices.
This, dear readers, is the fundamental difference between an empty-suited celebrity and a nuts-and-bolts executive: flim-flam artistry vs. substance and real results.
Barack Obama, the eternal campaigner, held a healthcare town hall, which even Helen Thomas and her just-as-liberal cohort, Chip Reid of CBS, called "orchestrated," "tightly-controlled," and seemingly "less transparent" than any previous White House occupants had ever dared. The questions posed to the President, it's now quite obvious, must indeed be orchestrated because he is tasked with selling legislation that he himself has neither read nor understands. And the worst of this becoming-nastier-by-the-day conundrum is that the whole cockamamie plan is built upon a disastrously failed European-socialist model, which has proven again and again and again to raise costs, lower quality and ration care. The only real difference seems to be that the Democrats' plan will allow those already at the table to reap even more profits than before, and we will be the ones footing the outrageous tab.
The President trips over his explanations with one real gaffe after another because he utterly failed to master Alinsky #12 before we allowed his ascension to the power-perch in the highest office in the land.
This Obama failure to form workable solutions to gigantic problems should come as no surprise to any American. When a supposedly literate public elects a man to the most powerful position in the universe upon a resume that would fit neatly upon the back of a postage stamp, the result is easily predicted long before Inaugural Day.
Honey, even a nitwit knows that when a president must hire out his real job to 32 czars, he was never CEO material.
When Saul Alinsky's early observers voiced the concern that he was building a host of agitated mobs, who could be overtaken and controlled by a skillful "fascist demagogue," those fears were well-founded.
What happens when a stranger to one's community comes in from nowhere and begins to ingratiate himself with the locals, with the sole intention of forming a political body of disgruntled folks, ready to demand from their government whatever the organizer tells them they really need?
The result of such a deceitful maneuver is a lot of very angry people, making demands without a single clue that the organizer knows what he's talking about. If he were truly one of them, if they had known him all his life, if he lived down the street and had grown up among them, they would know whether his words could be trusted, whether his intentions were truly good and whether he had the real smarts to lead them.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a perfect example of a true leader, and the antithesis of an Alinskyite community organizer. Dr. King wasn't leading a movement of complete strangers. Nor was he dropped into Atlanta by a gang of professional troublemakers, intent on gaining political power. Dr. King, and his father before him, were echelons of the black, upper-middle-class community in Atlanta. They had lifelong friends in every black community south of the Mason-Dixon. They were so well-known, so utterly respected by all, that when Martin spoke, people - black and white alike - knew there was absolute substance behind his thunderous voice. Even the Democratic Party racists who opposed him, gave him grudging private respect.
King had no need of deceptive Alinsky tactics; he had moral authority steeped in roots going back generations in the same home town.
Such is not at all the case with what Alinsky euphemistically called the "community organizer." A community organizer is by definition an outsider, someone hired not by the community itself, but by outside political operatives attempting to gain a foothold in the community.
Precisely the way a young Barack Obama was hired by outsiders to infiltrate a Southside Chicago community in the late 1980s.
Barack Obama dropped in for a few years on the Southside of Chicago. Rather than actually doing anything to improve the community where he was sent to "work," he made political friends and established a political base from which to launch his Organizer in Chief presidential campaign. His chief liaison from those days was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., a very influential friend of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.
By the time Barack Obama returned from his sojourn at Harvard Law to his adopted home base of Chicago, he was no longer a man who wasn't sent by anyone. He was a political somebody, about to launch a meteoric rise to a job for which he is utterly unprepared. And this sad fact shows itself more apparent with every passing day.
When Bill Clinton put forth the notion of Barack Obama as a "fairytale" and was trounced for it, Democrats should have listened. They now have a man in the office of the presidency, for whom they must provide cover every single day. Why? It's simple. Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can't even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip.
Leaders don't fall from the sky without proof they ever made friends and dated girlfriends and earned grades and had businesses and wrote papers, folks. Leaders have visible trails; they have made a record of their successes and proudly show them whenever asked. Barack Obama resides in the White House without ever showing a shred of genuine evidence that he is the greatly-gifted man he and his media sycophants say he is. And 52% of the American electorate has bought this faster than they would buy a used car from a slick-suited salesman on a shady lot.
Suckers United for Change. Wow. I'm impressed.
Dr. Obama? I would sooner trust Dr. Frankenstein.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.
