Sam Smith: The Clinton-Obama-Alinsky Myth

PETER SLEVIN of the Washington Post deserves some sort of award in media mythmaking for his piece recreating Clinton and Obama as disciples of the great activist Saul Alinsky. They have in fact followed the teachings of Alinsky about as well as George Bush has followed those of Jesus Christ.

To be sure, they both went to the church and prayed. But life moves on and as Alinsky pointed out, "When the poor get power they'll be shits like everyone else." The same goes for Wellesley and Harvard Law School idealists.

Clinton, in fact, put her thesis on Alinsky under lock and key once her husband began running for president, something that Slevin buried in his long encomium. And it is hard to think of anything in recent years more certain to have gotten Alinsky angry than HRC's deceitful, confusing and insurance company-pandering health plan.

The Obama story is different. He actually worked for several years on Alinsky oriented projects. But that was a long time ago and to present him as a current disciple of Alinsky is just plain false. He is today your run of the mill liberal politician who doesn't want anybody mad at him and wouldn't even be a card in the race if he didn't hold the race card.

I mentioned to a black friend that Obama reminded me a lot of the sort of black lawyers you meet at top Washington law firms. "Yeah," he replied, "the Negro at the front door."

They are fine to handle your mergers or litigation, but if you are trying to save a country going down the tube, you're probably better off with someone who hasn't spent his whole life trying to position himself safely in a hostile white America. This is not in the slightest to his discredit personally; it's just not the job description on the table.

There can be in these glass-ceiling breakers a self-protective caution that enables them to survive but also makes them less likely to break ceilings for others.

I know something about Alinsky because I wouldn't being doing what I'm doing if it weren't for an Alinsky organizer who hit our Capitol Hill neighborhood in the 1960s and strongly urged me to start an activist neighborhood newspaper.

For the next few years I was immersed in Alinsky style populism while many of my white friends were engaged in something far closer to the classical stereotype of the 1960s. If there is one theme that has set my subsequent journalism apart from the more typical left media it has been an Alinsky-encouraged approach rooted in community, populism, placing issues ahead of ideology and suspicion of power in all its forms.

Reading Slevin's article I was tempted to assume that this was another cynical Washington Post effort to spin America's story, in this case to steal the populist thunder from John Edwards, the candidate closest to the Alinsky spirit and the man with whom Alinsky would feel most comfortable. But perhaps this is unfair, because I know how little understood the Alinsky style and values are anymore. It is not surprising that either Clinton and Obama are so removed from these; they are, in fact, typical liberals in this regard.

Still you can't have it both ways and no one should think of either as practitioners in the model of a man who once said, "Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict."

SLEVIN'S ARTICLE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152_pf.html

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