Obama speech: President Alinsky ( The Michigan View 09.09.11)

Posted by hpayne on September 9, 2011

A student of Saul Alinsky, the radical social activist, President Obama lives by Alinsky’s credo: “In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.” His “jobs” speech Thursday night was vintage Alinsky.

It was about maintaining power in the crucial election year ahead. It had nothing to do with jobs or fixing the economy.

“The millions of Americans who are watching right now: they don’t care about politics,” began Obama. At that moment, you knew this was not a serious policy speech. It was only about politics. Consistency is not a virtue. Indeed, the substance of the speech was warmed over talking points of the last three years of stimulus and payroll tax candy.

Alinsky Rules of Power Tactics #4 is “make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

Bang! There it was in graph nine: “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans ” including many who sit here tonight. ”

But perhaps the speech’s most offensive piece applied Alinsky Rule #13 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

“This larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own ” that’s not who we are,” lectured Obama.

If you want to help the country, you persuade, not polarize. Yet this gross caricature of conservatism was the equivalent of GOPers dismissing Democrats as Communists – in the people’s chamber. This was a declaration of campaign war, not economic construction. It has been his theme for three years of the most divisive presidency in modern American history.

And in this he may have violated Alinsky’s Rules of Power Tactics #7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

Yes, it has.

 

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