More politics

So, here is an Obama article at the bottom. I have been wondering what "community organizer" means, and I guess this article explains it. He's not exactly for or against Obama, he just thinks it's interesting that Obama makes it sound all warm and fluffy and soup kitchen-y by only vaguely alluding to those years.

There's quite a big stink now amongst the Dems that Sarah Palin has less experience as a whole than Obama. In some cases, that's true. And it is a worry. I want to see her in an interview and in a debate or three before I make up my mind. McCain took a heck of a gamble, and it may or may not pay off. I'm impressed she even said yes, because her life is never going to be free again. Secret Service agents are going to be her best friends for a long time. They say she's "unknown outside Alaska", but that's not true. Many a pro-lifer got the news of her son's birth last April and immediately decided to keep an eye on her. I know I did.

She has a four month old boy, Trig, who has Down's Syndrome. I hate how reporters keep saying, "unfortunately, she has a son with Down's". Hey, unfortunately she didn't abort him! But also, it's unfortunate she has him, why didn't she kill him? Is that what they are saying? Really? I don't know how anyone can really believe this drivel, but they do. Also, Down's varies A LOT. I have known those who cannot speak and do wear diapers, and I have known one who ran an art gallery in Mendocino, CA, and another who went to community college while her sister was in college with me, both of us becoming special ed teachers. Her son may not be as high needs as certain people with agendas are implying. I saw a boy with Down's at the bathroom at a ball game last night. He was doing pretty darned well. You could tell he's disabled, but so is my sister, and most people can just deal with it. They don't try to kill them or think, "It's too bad they're alive."

Folks are now also calling into question whether she will be neglecting her four month old for this work on the GOP ticket. Well, I am assuming there is a nanny or there are grandparents who help a lot. Not to mention her husband. He has a loving family of siblings, too. Folks who don't know any large families have no idea how much help siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins can be. I'm sure he's well cared-for. Sure, I love the idea of a stay-at-home mom as much as the next conservative, but I'm so excited to have someone NOW (Nat. Org. for Women (not THIS woman)) should be happy about, but can't be. She's all a woman "should be", and yet because she's religious and pro-life, she can't be applauded. Nice double standard there.

Will she do well as VP? I'm really not sure. I want to hear what she will say. I think she has an iron core, and that alone might really get her through what she does not know. Think Teddy Roosevelt. Don't mess with the big stick.

Obama news here:

Obama's "community organizer" phase was about political power, not soup kitchens


John Maki (Bio)
Filed under , Monday July 28, 2008

"Community organizer."

If you've heard the term, you likely learned about it through Barack Obama's memoir or one of his speeches where he talks about his time working in poor neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side in the 1980s. He refers to this time in his life a lot. Obama leans on it, hard, while stumping. But what does it mean?

"One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up ... And there's no more powerful tool for grassroots organizing than the Internet."

-Barack Obama

What do community organizers actually do? How do they do it? And how has Obama's experience as a community organizer shaped his run for the presidency?

Since 2002, I have worked with several Chicago-based community organizers and even done some organizing myself. My experience has taught me to view Barack Obama, Chicago's most famous community organizer, in a different light than you will likely encounter from most political commentators.

Community organizing is old-fashioned, bare-knuckle politics for the little guy.

Were you picturing Obama in a soup kitchen instead? It is not your fault. When Obama talks about his time as a community organizer, he does not go beyond a vague and benign description of how he worked with unemployed steelworkers and their families to fight for change. Media coverage of Obama's days as a community organizer has not been much better. Most journalists tend either to repeat stories that Obama has told in his books, or merely interview people who worked with him at the time without giving you a clear idea of what community organizing entails.

The words "community organizing" themselves probably present the biggest problem.

Hearing the touchy-feely sound of "community," you may assume organizing has something to do with community service, like working at a homeless shelter.

But there is nothing touchy or feely about community organizing. It has more in common with the brutal contact sport of Chicago politics than it does with any kind of charitable act, such as serving food to homeless people. And like the neon-green relish that garnishes a Gold Coast dog, community organizing is pure Chicago.

Saul Alinsky: Godfather of modern community organizing, cleaning up cesspools by appealing to self-interest

The history of community organizing begins in the slums of Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, when Saul Alinsky organized the people who lived in the Back of the Yards, the neighborhood Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle. Alinsky was himself a South Sider and knew that the Back of the Yards was not only one of the worst slums in the country, the neighborhood was also, as he put it in a 1972 interview for Playboy Magazine, "a cesspool of hate: the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the sentiment in spades."

That was fine with Alinsky. His goal was not to get the people he organized to love each other, just work together. As Alinsky once put it, "to [expletive] your enemies, you've first got to seduce your allies."

Alinsky's key insight was that while poor people who lived in places like the Back of the Yards do not have access to traditional forms of power, they do have numbers. He believed that if enough poor people realized it was in their interest to work together and fight for particular issues, they could pressure people in power to give them what they want.

To build a base of support, Alinsky formulated a set of strategic principles he later taught people at the Industrial Areas Foundation, an institute he established to disseminate the art of community organizing. In 1965, shortly before he was assassinated, Malcom X said that Alinsky knew more about organizing than anybody in the country. Today, there are probably few community organizers alive who either do not have a direct connection to Alinsky or to one of his students.

One of the most important lessons that Alinsky taught community organizers is not to rely on high-minded ideals like "brotherly-love or "the common good" to get people to fight for particular goals. Instead, as a community organizer you are always looking for ways to appeal directly to a person's self-interest, whatever that may be. This is not to say ideals do not matter to community organizers. But at the end of the day, an ideal is only as good as what it can help you accomplish.

So, if you are a community organizer and want to organize an area, you first try to meet with as many indigenous leaders as possible, the kinds of men and women who populate neighborhood churches and civic groups that others will listen to and naturally follow. The purpose of these one-on-one meetings is not to become their friend. You want to find out what their self-interest is so you can use it. This includes milking their personal connections to expand your base of support. As a community organizer, the sole source of your power is your relationships. And the more people you have in your pocket, the more likely it is that you can use them to get what your base wants.

Here is a typical community-organizing scenario. Let's say you are a community organizer who has cultivated and trained a strong base of support and identified a particular problem to attack. You then target a public official who can get you something you want. Let's call him Official X. He chairs an appropriations committee that is deciding whether to fund a program your base supports. You and your base request a meeting with him. Official X agrees and asks that you come to his office. Before you go, you coach a core group of your base, the people you call ‘your leaders,' on what to say and how to behave at the meeting.

After painstakingly rehearsing everyone's roles, so that no part of the meeting is left to chance, you are ready to do the real thing. You take your leaders to the meeting, and you have one of them present your base's demands. Your leader explains to Official X what you want him to do, and why it is in his self-interest to do so. Whatever arguments your leader uses to make their case, he also makes sure that Official X understands that he will pay a price for not helping. If Official X stands in your way, your base is going to try to find a way to hurt him, whether it's by attacking him through the press, or turning out people to vote against him. If this tactic makes Official X angry, you could not care less. You do not want people in power to like you. As a community organizer, you want them to respect and fear you.

But you also make sure that Official X knows so long as he helps you out, you will help him out too. After all, as a community organizer, your job is not to change the system; it is to master and use the system's rules to your advantage.

If you think these tactics resemble standard forms of political intimidation, you are right.

As I said before, community organizing is old-fashioned, bare-knuckle politics for the little guy.

This is also what most coverage of Obama's days as a community organizer fails to appreciate. For whether you are an Alinksy-schooled community organizer or a Chicago politician, you are a student of power. If you have survived long enough to succeed in either position, like Obama has, you have learned not to worry so much about the power you have. What keeps you up at night is the power you do not have. In community organizing and politics, you know the only thing that can hurt you is what you cannot control.

Since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, he has been accused of moving to the center and flip-flopping on positions he adopted during the primary. This criticism misses the point. In his recent moves, Obama, the community organizer, is simply trying to build new alliances as he neutralizes threats to his power. It is what any Chicago-trained community organizer worth his salt would do.

Update: I tried to write a neutral analysis of how Obama's community organizing experience has influenced his presidential campaign. Archpundit -- a stellar Illinois politics blogger -- see this experience as a significant advantage for Obama. Check out his take here.