Obama May Be Lost In His Own Experiment

Both Obama and Hillary were avid students to the ideas of Saul Alinski; Obama through his mother's boyfriends with romantic formulative links to his roots. I hope I'm just wrong, but Obama may need to follow his idealized feelings of socialism through to conclusion, thereby destroying our lives, in order to prove to himself that he can make it work any better than the failed attempts throughout history. He is protected now from the effects of what may be his experiment because his future is assured, as president. Perhaps we can forgive Saul Alinski his support of socialism as he refers to Dostoevski, who was writing about the Bolshevik Revolution, the people’s revolt against monarchy; a period analyzed by pensive writers and history books. Saul Alinski did not have the advantage of having seen USSR fail and the wall between East and West Germany fall as it tore itself apart under it’s own weight with the catalyst of Ronald Reagan’s leadership. In light of our recent history, Obama’s and Hillary’s interests in Mr. Alinski send shivers down the spine.

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing in the prologue,

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default."^[4]

Alinsky codified and wrote a clear set of rules^[5] for community organizing. His rules for radicals are now used as key tactics to learn in the training of new community organizers and were the tactics used by then candidate Barack Obama to win the 2008 election. If Obama has given in to following principles set forth by Alinski and is following the path in honor of his mother’s boyfriend, has he allowed wiggle room in case things don’t work out? I think it’s entirely possible he’s willing to experiment to the end with our futures. We may find out too late if his legacy and experiment are more important to him than our former way of life, because, after all, he and his pals are imune from our future, since high ranking officials have their own medical and retirements futures and are not limited by the laws they create for the rest of us.