Michael Barone takes a closer look this week at the hubbub over Sarah Palin’s slam against community organizing.
Community organizing along the lines of Saul Alinsky strikes me as a
quintessentially Chicago phenomenon, and Obama, with no previous ties
to Chicago, decided to move there when he took up community organizing
in the 1980s and returned there to do it again after he finished
Harvard Law School. Alinsky’s style of community organizing is premised
on the continuing existence of a partially corrupt and deeply
incestuous political machine that cannot be dislodged but can be
pressured. I recall one community organizing project launched, I think,
by Alinsky: He wanted some change in public policy, so he had people
sit in all the toilet stalls at O’Hare International Airport and remain
there for hours. O’Hare was the favorite project of the late Mayor
Daley (and of the current Mayor Daley as well), and the sit-in resulted
in a quick capitulation by “Da Mare.”But Obama seems to have rejected the Alinsky model. That’s the thesis of a fascinating article by John Judis in the New Republic.
Citing Obama’s memoir and some independent reporting, Judis argues that
Obama decided that community organizing was a dead end and concluded
that electoral politics was the way to make real change.
Barone goes on to ask: “Why should we be obliged to take a reverent view toward community organizing when Obama evidently did not?”
A Winston-Salem audience will have a chance later this month to learn more of Barone’s thoughts about the 2008 elections. He’ll speak at a Headliner luncheon Sept. 24.
