PrintAugust 19, 2009
The Alinskyite's Big, Fat Governance Failure
What happens when the thing a president knows best is a set of tactics designed to take power from the "haves"? When the most highly prized info a president ever garnered could be summed up as nothing better than gaming an electoral system with ACORN pay-for-registration schemes?
What happens when a president is very skilled in deceptively cloaking these less-than-altruistic means in rhetorical "moral garments" and his lies finally start catching up with him, destroying his credibility? When a president has never actually run anything successfully, not even his own paper route or a PTA meeting or a small town's city council?
What happens when power-grab tactics, taught by a rabble-rousing revolutionary, suddenly catapult a charismatic demagogue into the highest power-perch in the world?
Well, then, Barack Obama's big, fat governance failure happens.
Here we are, on the worst morning-after any romance writer could conjure, facing a future in the harsh light of day, and beginning to know that all the lovely sweet nothings, murmured in our ears the night before, were just the stuff of fanciful fairytales.
Even stupid-is-as-stupid-does Bill Maher has pleaded with his president to stop the campaign and do the job already.
Even Helen Thomas has seen through the wall of false transparency, the sweetest nothing of all in the One's glittery basket of campaign promises.
Even Camille Paglia is aghast at the healthcare debacle and wants all the underlings fired.
Tsk. Tsk. Even the millions of faithful celebrity Tweeters have gone back to play-acting and Facebookers have found a better face over which to swoon.
The sad and sorry fact is that anyone with even half a brain and a single ounce of common sense would have -- and should have -- seen this big, fat governance failure the day before, without having to wait until the sickening morning after.
I shall forever remember 2008 as the year when the ninnification of America reached its peak.
It's as though 59 million Americans joined hands and shouted at the top of their little lungs, "Yes, We Can March off This Cliff."
It's every mother's adolescent-groupthink nightmare.
Now that the cult-of-personality demagogue is indeed our elected President, even his own faithful Alinskyite minions can no longer be summoned to clamorous action. As the New York Times reported last week, folks who fell right into bed - with amorous passion aplenty -- the night before, swooped up in the hopey, dopey, changey campaign, have now gone back to their real lives of making a living, raising their kids and trying to survive the utterly-failed Crimulus Stimulus and the still-lingering recession.
Morning-after reality has set in faster than a popsicle melts in the August sun.
So, what actually has gone wrong here?
Here's the scoop for anyone who's been living under the rock of mainstream media's propaganda lock. Barack Obama used the power tactics from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which he honed in Chicago, to play this Country's voters for fools.
Alinsky's power tactics are all about gaining power and have absolutely nothing to offer in the way of practical solutions for effective American governance. Even Alinsky alerted his acolytes to this glaring hole in the revolutionary garment he was devising. Devising solutions was supposed to be the other half of the equation, a part that has not only been written by scads of socialists for the past century. But the big problem is that these programs have been tried again and again, with the same devastating results every single time.
The only tactic left to a power broker with no clue is to try as hard as he can to revive the dead horse of socialism and parade it around the ring like a horror-filled remake of Weekend at Bernie's.
So, when a politician jumps the gun and sprints for the presidential power-perch without first thinking through the country's problems and trying to come up with some actual new things to try, he is sunk in a mudhole of his own making long before Inaugural Day. When a politician has no executive experience, and suddenly finds himself in the hottest hellhole CEO job in the world, he is treading water from day one.
What to do? For starters, hire 32 czars to do your job for you.
The Constitution be damned! Bring me my czars!
What to do about all the promises made? Turn everything over to the haggard old, tax-and-spend liberals in Congress and their power-pimping lobbyists.
Even Barack Obama himself admitted in his "Audacity" book that lawyers aren't good at solving problems, that they're trained to win arguments, not formulate policy or find workable solutions. He also denounced political operatives in print, summarizing that too many lawyers and too many political operatives were the very source of the mountainous un-workability of our federal government.
Then, why oh why, is his whole administration a flailing mix of lawyers and political operatives?
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise.
We had the president's own shadowy record, with far more deletions than "allowable" information, which should have raised the skeptical antennae of anyone with half an ounce of common sense. What is the single reason why anyone assumed and portrayed as brilliant-beyond-brilliant hides his own scholarship and grade transcripts? If these records were demonstrably brilliant, they would be on prominent display.
You betcha!
In the end, we have one big -- possibly horrendous -- instance of the president's own self-fulfilled prophecy:
"We all know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest of sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed or intolerance."
- Audacity of Hope; Barack Obama; p. 8
What we have here is a president who knew well how to gain power, but hasn't a clue how to make that power work for the good he said it would. A president who, for the sake of expedience, attempts to ram unread legislation down the throats of the American public without proper debate. A president, whose greed for power was far more important a priority than taking the time to gain the actual experience good governance requires. And a president woefully intolerant of those who disagree with him on matters of policy.
Candidate Obama gave us some "high-flying words," all right.
But President Obama has given us nothing more substantive than power, expedience, greed and intolerance.
A very bad bargain indeed.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and a newly syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.
