Rules For Radicals: A Mid-Convention Booster Shot

With Republicans heading home from Cleveland and Democrats gathering in Philadelphia, the national political convention season has reached its midpoint this weekend. I thought it would be the perfect time to give readers a booster shot of the political tactics we're likely to encounter from now until the election in November. The tactics were developed by Saul Alinsky, long recognized as the founding father of community organizing, and best articulated in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals. Alinsky was a native of Chicago, trained at the University of Chicago, and a veteran organizer and political activist in Chicago neighborhoods. Alinsky's name may not be familiar to most Americans but they are certainly aware of Chicago's other successful and internationally famous leftist community organizer. Barack Obama.

We've already had an eight-year tutorial on community organizing tactics coming out of the White House. We shouldn't expect the use of such successful tactics to be confined to left wing politics especially given that we have all the ingredients for a vicious presidential campaign in the coming months. 

My copy

To help readers identify, understand, and appreciate the rules as well as respond to their power to influence American voters, here they are as written with supporting information is in brackets:

1. Power is not only what you have, it's what the enemy thinks you have. [Power is derived from two main sources - money and people.]

2. Never go outside the expertise of your people. [It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.]

3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. [Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.]

4. Make the enemy lie up to its own book of rules. [You can kill them with this because nobody can possibly obey all of their own rules.]

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. [There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating.]

6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long become a drag. [Don't become old news. Even radical activists get bored.]

8. Keep the pressure on. Never let up. [Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, recover, regroup or re-strategize.]

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. [Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.]

10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. [Violence from the other side can become a positive because the public sympathizes with the underdog.]

11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. [Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.]

12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. [Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people, not institutions, people hurt faster than institutions.]


I trust readers will benefit from this information as we face what may well be the most significant national election in our time.

In closing, readers should know that after seven years in Washington in the 1960's I was a lefty radical by 1971.  That's the reason I have a first edition of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals [1971]. It's been read more than once, a bit yellow here and there, and the dust jacket has a few small tears and scuffs; otherwise, it's in excellent condition. Now I look at the rule book and its players from two quite separate points of view as the tactics have become mainstream in the world of politics. Time and experience has taught me well and I've moved right of center on political and economic issues but liberals young and old will be happy to know that I never once liked Richard Nixon. 

Pajama Boy: Fashions By The Krell

You science fiction movie buffs out there know all about "monsters from the id." Those creatures are always very telling. Sometimes they're dangerous not only to others, but to the very people who created them. We may have a case in point with Pajama Boy.

It seems one of the latest Obamacare promotional ads from Organizing for Action features Pajama Boy.  The ad may be revealing much about the perception of the liberal minds running the show regardless of whether or not it attract clients. The usual lefty media suspects are running interference for "PB" and his sponsors but I doubt much can be done to disperse the creepiness. National Review Online's Charles Cooke has some humorous commentary about Pajama Boy and what he represents to the great minds responsible for managing our national government until January 2017. Do enjoy the comments as well.

Obama Channels Ethelred

Ethelred the Unready, King of England, 978-1016

Almost fifty years ago, Professor Gordon, English through and through, made OTR's study of the History of England most enjoyable. One of the professor's favorite references throughout the year was Ethelred the Unready.   Ethelred was more "ready" than his name implied; however, we do remember him today for his decade-long payment of tribute - protection money - to the King of Denmark. Eventually the payment wasn't enough to keep the Danes from invading England and forcing Ethelred to flee across the English Channel to safety in Normandy. There's more to this history, but more significant for us these days is the parallel between Ethelred's protection money and Obama's appeasement to the insanity of Islamic jihad. Those in the know should have their money on jihad. Victor Davis Hanson - classicist, war historian, and date farmer - has a fine analysis of the foreign policy disaster that has unfolded over the last four years.  

Arab Spring Gives Way To The Long, Hot Summer

Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered yesterday by Islamic fanatics. Three months ago he was in the forefront of efforts to free Libyans of the dictatorship of Muammar Qadhafi 

The idea of cultivating Arab self-determination without strong guidance from the West has produced diseased fruit. Victor Davis Hanson provides readers with all the information they need about current events in Libya and Egypt and perspectives on the future of the Middle East under Obama's foreign policy.

It's Election Time, And Time For A Saul Alinsky Playbook Refresher

My copy

 A few years ago a post appeared in this blog about Chicago's internationally famous leftist community organizer. No, not the one  currently occupying the White House. OTR's subject was Saul Alinsky, the founding father of the modern-day community organization movement. Alinsky died in 1972 shortly after the publication of his most famous work, Rules For Radicals (1971). Though both political parties use these rules, they are particularly alive and well - and well-polished - in the thoughts and actions of Barack Obama. He is after all the other internationally famous leftist community organizer from Chicago, and his coalition is in control of the Democratic Party.

Again, expect both political parties to uses various aspects of these tactics. but expect Obama and his party to release a relentless attack on their opposition as their odds on losing the election increase. You can bet the declining economy will guarantee us a dirty, vicious race on the part of the underdog. To help readers identify, understand, and appreciate the rules as well as respond to their power to influence American voters, here they are as written; supporting information is in brackets:

1. Power is not only what you have, it's what the enemy thinks you have. [Power is derived from two main sources - money and people.]

2. Never go outside the expertise of your people. [It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.]

3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. [Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.]

4. Make the enemy lie up to its own book of rules. [You can kill them with this because nobody can possibly obey all of their own rules.]

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. [There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating.]

6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long become a drag. [Don't become old news. Even radical activists get bored.]

8. Keep the pressure on. Never let up. [Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, recover, regroup or re-strategize.]

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. [Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.]

10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. [Violence from the other side can become a positive because the public sympathizes with the underdog.]

11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. [Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.]

12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. [Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people, not institutions, people hurt faster than institutions.]


In closing, readers should know that OTR was a lefty radical in 1971. Time and experience taught him well as he moved right of center - new liberals will be happy to know that he never once liked Richard Nixon. Now he  looks at the rule book and its players from two quite separate points of view as the tactics have become mainstream in the world of politics. He trusts his readers will benefit from information in this post as they likely face the most significant national election in our time.

Source: Wikipedia

"We Have Not Yet Reached The Whole" - The Real Meaning Of Obama's "You Didn't Build That" Statement

WWJD

An enormous amount of commentary has swept across cyberspace in the few days since Barack Obama's "you didn't built that" moment in Roanoke. Leave it to Power Line and to Scott Johnson to expose the underlying truth of Obama's statement and give all freedom loving Americans cause for action come November. Here is Johnson's point:

Under Obama’s doctrine, there is no just limit on the power of the government to take the individual’s property. The property isn’t that man’s alone; he alone did not earn it. What the government does not take from the individual by taxes or regulation remains his conditionally, on the sufferance of the state.

No teaching could be more foreign to the founding principles of the United States than Obama’s doctrine.

Once again, our friends at Power Line provide their readers with insight into the meaning of the American experience, then, now, and into the future.  Your link to this essential post is here. Readers will find the comment thread very enlightening.

Obama Guts Clinton's Landmark Welfare Reform of 1996

Yesterday evening, National Review Online reported on an astonishing story that most readers will never hear if they get their news solely from the usual suspects of - take your choice - the MSM, Jurassic media, or Obamedia. What happened?

This afternoon, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive undermining the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that have been the foundation of that law — one of the most successful domestic policy reforms in the 20th century.

Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The underlying concept of welfare reform was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid.

The welfare reform law was very successful. In the four decades prior to welfare reform, the welfare caseload never experienced a significant decline. But, in the four years after welfare reform, the caseload dropped by nearly half. Employment surged and child poverty among blacks and single mothers plummeted to historic lows. What was the catalyst for these improvements? Rigorous new federal work requirements contained in TANF.

The fundamental transformation of the United States into a model European socialist failure continues unabated. The full article has links to the backstory and the policy itself.  Read it here.

Obamacare Mandate As Tax and Spin

Reprogramming Session      A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The White House is working overtime to dispel the legal reality that the Obamacare mandate is a tax. It it were to be sold successfully to the American public as a fee or penalty, the mandate would be  unconstitutional. Power Line's John Hinderaker has the story here.

And here is a take on the debate by The Washington Post's Fact Checker.

Fast And Furious: What Did Obama Know, When Did He Know It?

Watergate Complex and adjacent Kennedy Center

 The Obama administration's Fast and Furious gun running program will go down in history as an object lesson in how not to manage potentially controversial policies and programs. For over two years, Fast and Furious has been a smoking but reasonably dormant story for the nation's traditional media. After all, in their eyes we're experiencing the most transparent administration in history. Today, they can no longer ignore a story that brought a contempt of Congress citation to Attorney General Holder's desk. Today, they can no longer ignore a contempt citation that suddenly forced President Obama to exercise executive privilege over thousands of Fast and Furious documents. Last week's Holder problem is this week's Obama problem. Last week search for transparency is this week's search for a cover up. Had Obama invoked executive privilege two years ago, the investigation of Fast and Furious would likely be a small footnote in the history books. Now it's taking on the hallmarks of Watergate.

And all of this is spilling across the media just 120 days before the November election. With virtually no positives to bolster his campaign and a Supreme Court decision coming next week that could demolish his health care overhaul, a Watergate is the last thing Obama needs.

Unfortunately, this story simply reinforces the amateur, if not reckless, management Americans have endured under this administration. It's like a horrendous big-budget Hollywood flop: bad plot, bad direction, bad acting, cheap CGI, overcooked score, sloppy cinematography, poor editing, and a bad end.

For more interpretation of Fast and Furious:

Hiding Behind Executive Privilege, National Review Online 

The Politics of Fast and Furious, Power Line

Those Fast and Furious Documents Must Be Dynamite, Power Line

The Fast and Furious Scandal is turning into Watergate, The Telegraph, H/T Drudge

A Must-Read From Peggy Noonan On Obamadammerung

This Wall Street Journal post by Peggy Noonan is impacting the blogosphere on several fronts as a notable appraisal of what's going on with Obama presidency. Note that she wrote this analysis before yesterday's "The private sector is doing fine" gift to the Romney campaign.

Noonan has spent forty years observing the American scene and deserves the attention of readers from the full political spectrum.

Don't Be Too Political When It Comes To The White House

Lech Walesa:

Electrician
Union leader
Nobel Prize winner
President of Poland
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
Did you know that the government of Poland wanted it's national hero, Lech Walesa, to receive the Medal of Freedom for the late Jan Karski at a White House ceremony on Tuesday?  The White House refused, saying he was "too political." For those who don't remember, Walesa and his Solidarity movement freed Poland from the grip of Soviet communism in 1989. At the same ceremony, Barack Obama hung the Medal of Freedom around the neck of Delores Huerta, a labor organizer and the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Rory Cooper, writing for National Review Online, had this comment about the circumstances:

So socialist politics are acceptable, but not the politics of a man who stood up and fought socialism.

The likelihood is that President Obama didn’t want Walesa in the White House because Walesa has made critical remarks toward the president’s policies and in 2010 warned that the United States was slipping toward socialism. But rather than taking the mature and diplomatic path and respecting Walesa’s right to have a differing perspective, Obama chose to shun his lifetime of achievements.

Read the rest of Cooper's remarks here. What a sorry state of affairs.

Will Obama Be Thrown To The Wolfe Next Tuesday?

John Wolfe, a perennial candidate

Next Tuesday could shock some readers if they use the legacy media as their sole news source. There are two Democratic candidates for President on the Arkansas primary ballot. Barack Obama is one of them. John Wolfe is the other. A poll last week has Obama leading Wolfe 45 to 38. This is another manifestation - see the primary results in Oklahoma and West Virginia - of the sweeping discontent with Obama in his own party. Could the unknown John Wolfe wreck Obama's chances for a second term in the same way that the well-known Eugene McCarthy did to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968?  John Hinderaker's post at Power Line has the details.

Der Fuhrer Finds Out Obama Ate His Dog

The meme has way more than four legs, but this one ranks near the top.

 H/T to Instapundit and Powerline  - OTR almost beat them to it.

Obama At The Tipping Point?

From virtually all directions we're learning that the last ten days have been tough ones for Obama. Today, the blogosphere is alive with analysis pointing to serious and unsettling consequences. Here is a taste of the rhetoric:

I don’t know what the political effect of all this will be. But intellectually, this is the week where Barack Obama jumped the shark. In a deep, fundamental way, he is no longer a serious man. Nor an honest one. His public words are now purposefully bleached of truth. And that is a painful thing to have to say about an American president.

Forty years ago, we had another president burdened with unpopular policies and wrapped in self-deception. Nixon turned to alcohol and wandering the White House halls late at night talking to paintings.  Months later he resigned rather than face certain impeachment. Today's political scenario will likely follow a far different track. Regardless, if the past week is any indication, it will be very rough going. Glen Reynold's Instapundit post has more on the story.

Rearranging The Contraceptives On The Titanic

The Icebergs, Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1861, Dallas Museum of Art

OTR's been rather quiet on the political front lately. The subject depresses him, but he simply has to emerge from his comfort zone to give high praise to the Obama administration for their superb skill at managing the national debate. Here it is, International Women's Day and the hot topic from coast to coast isn't the remarkable accomplishments of women over the past century and longer. Instead, it is a woman's right to free contraception administered - some hope - through a national insurance program . Behind this contraceptive shield - sorry, couldn't help myself - the nation faces gas prices at $5 per gallon and rising, national unemployment rising to 9.2% last month, declining manufacturing orders, hidden inflation that will soon turn to hyperinflation cresting on a $15,000,0000,000,000 deficit, rising dissatisfaction with the nation's direction, Arab springs marching into political realities, and Israel preparing to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities in a matter of weeks.

If the Obama forces can sustain their control of the national narrative this effectively into Summer, they should have no trouble dispatching a Republican challenge that seems to be philosophically locked in other peoples' bedrooms. Such dramatic irony should be reserved for the fiction of the stage.

The White House: The National Fishbowl

Jodi Cantor is a reporter for The New York Times. That said we could expect nothing about the current occupants of the White House except tea and sympathy. OTR has no objection to that presentation. Whatever normal life a family had dissipates rapidly upon entering the White House grounds for four or possibly eight years of living in the national fishbowl. It would be difficult enough to adjust with years of prior political experience. Imagine the family of an up-and-coming senator suddenly finding themselves in that residence. Imagine them being the first family of color. Imagine a First Lady whose credentials rival those of her spouse. In a phrase, "it ain't going to be easy." This Huffington Post article seems to have the most detail on the subject.

Spreading The Wealth Around In 1934

Some weeks ago, OTR decided to take a break from domestic politics as a core theme for his blog. Political discourse is everywhere on the Internet and, if you have enough years in the American experience to remember the better times, most of that discourse is painful if not downright frightening. But ignoring pain seldom leads to a better outcome, especially when the learned physician, history, renders such a clear diagnosis.

In 1934, most Americans were adjusting to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's year old administration as it introduced a government-directed economy as a means of overcoming the Great Depression. That same year, in Louisiana the populism of the previous generation merged with the Marxist zeitgeist sweeping Europe. The personification of that movement was Huey Long.

Dave Blount, posting at Moonbattery, has this to say about Long:

To this day the name Huey Long rightly fills freedom-loving Americans with dread, because he personified the threat of the same collectivist totalitarianism that produced Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia taking root on our soil.

Blount's post also links to Long's Share the Wealth plan, a scheme bearing a scary resemblance to the hope and change proposed by Barack Hussein Obama. Blount continues:

The mentality represented by Obama and the Occupy Wall Street crowd isn’t new. Neither is the economic peril that makes us vulnerable to it. What would be new is the sufficient lack of character for Americans to succumb to it.

We have been there before. This is a wake up call we cannot ignore.

Waiting For The Rabbit

Tomorrow night our "hope and change" president speaks about his new plan to address joblessness and the economy, two points that have plagued his administration from its outset thirty-two months ago. OTR doesn't hold much hope for anything new in this upcoming proposal because Obama and his policymakers have an extraordinarily narrow ideologically driven view of how a big and small economy works. This is an administration driven by the academy and well-versed in the command and control of centralized government theory. Their plan will "craft a vision" for recovery based on spending more money borrowed from China, increased taxation on the perceived greed of "the wealthy," and "targeted infrastructure investment for clean energy." This translates into debt, class warfare, and subsidized green industry.

Americans are in general are a practical, pragmatic and smart people.  They've heard debt, class warfare and subsidized green industry for thirty-two months and it's beginning to wear even on the unicorn wing of the Democratic Party. This phenomenon among Americans isn't new as history does indeed repeat itself. Back in 1976, the electorate placed James Earl Carter in the White House in response to the political dark ages brought upon us by the Nixon years. Carter's entry was a clean sweep, wrapped in optimism and its own visionary thinking, including new departments for education and energy. Carter, like Obama, governed an America hobbled by stagflation and expensive energy. His administration was characterized by its inexperience and by the "hands on" attitude of its leader. Late in his term and stymied by a lack of options to address a drifting economy and crushing energy shortage, Carter's frustration emerged in his famous "crisis of confidence" speech where he placed much of the blame on ordinary Americans and their lifestyles. To a large degree Carter was right, but Americans took umbrage at his remarks and used this speech as well as a series of crises in 1980 to vote him out of office.

There's one more part to this story. It involves Carter's encounter with a swamp rabbit a few months before his "crisis" speech. That incident involved a terrified rabbit's attempt to escape the hounds by seeking refuge in the president's rowboat. It was a small lake and a small boat, and the President wasn't about to share it with a frenzied Sylvilagus aquaticus. Who would? Nevertheless, the story emerged of Carter splashing the water with his paddle and forcing the hapless bunny into the hinterland. Though there were no photographs until well into the next decade, the vision of a harried president thrashing at a killer rabbit were fixed in time and place.

OTR sees many parallels--how can one not!-- in the Carter and Obama presidencies. Tomorrow's speech may well be another one unless this president can redirect his policies toward hope and change based in practical and pragmatic capitalism. Otherwise it's going to sound like all the rhetoric we've heard these last and long thirty-two months. And the patience among Americans is already thin. Should Obama bring us more of the same, he simply will be waiting for the rabbit.

Obama's $535,000,000 Green Flash

This is another bad day for those who pay federal taxes.

Fifteen months ago, Obama used Solyndra, a solar technology company near San Francisco, as a shining example of green job creation. Below is the video of that speech. The first four minutes is Obama as conversationalist. The real speech begins at 4:00.



This company was so "successful" it received a $535,000,000 guaranteed loan from the Department of Energy. Today, Solyndra announced it is filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and laying off 1100 employees . OTR's little Sharp Elsi-Mate EL-240 Solar Calculator-on his desk for twenty years-tells him that Solyndra burned through that loan at the rate of around $116,000 a day. There are so many things wrong with this scenario at so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. OTR will leave it at two:

1. Unrealistic expectations
2. Striking incompetence

Barack Obama likely knows very little about Solyndra. He may have the vision, but he's relying on the green energy gurus in his administration to make the tactical decisions. In this case, they made some very poor choices and made him look mighty foolish in the process. And this is just one of many stumbles at the starting gate for next year's re-election campaign. Not good if you're a "hope and change" fan.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has the story here.

UPDATE: An Oklahoma billionaire and major fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign is the principal owner of Solyndra. Anybody smell something?

Could Growing Executive Authority Be A Problem?

When your support among a select groups of Americans drops 36% in two years, what's a politician to do? Of course, you exercise your executive authority when possible-as every wise executive does-to stop the bleeding. The Obama administration has done just that by implementing portions of the Dream Act that was defeated on the Hill. The action replaces wholesale deportation of "safe" illegal aliens with a case by case review and decision. This should please many in the Hispanic community. Read more about this story, in addition to some excellent comments, at this NRO link posted by Mark Kirkorian.

Interestingly, this decision is also a perfect fit for the "White House Friday afternoon bad news dump" and coincides with the President's departure for his Martha's Vineyard vacation. Convenient? Yes. But remember that this activity isn't new. It's been an increasingly common practice for decades.