On April 6, 2011, Ruben Navarrette Jr., a leading Hispanic journalist and television commentator, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “More and more Latinos are wising up to President Obama’s phony immigration two-step.” Navarrette opined that Obama panders to Latinos by criticizing Republicans for being too tough on immigration enforcement while pandering to non-Latinos by being even tougher.
Navarrette concluded, “So it is no wonder that Obama is left with this rhetorical hash and words that don’t match his actions.”
The Obama two-step can be traced back to the influence of Saul Alinsky (1902-1972), founder of America’s community organizing movement. Marian Wright Edelman, who served on Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), spoke at his funeral. She also knows Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and has observed, “Both Hillary and Barack reflect that understanding of community-organizing strategy. Both just know how to leverage power.”
Alinsky has had more effect on the agenda of the Democrat Party in the 21st century than any other American. Along with Obama and Clinton, many Democrats follow the Alinsky agenda in seeking change in U.S. political discourse.
True revolutionaries, Alinsky cautioned, do not flaunt their radicalism but rather change the system from within. He held that infiltration of the U.S. political system was a matter of time, patience, and the use of churches, unions, and political parties as catalysts.
Alinsky held that change is achieved by community organizers infiltrating the middle class. At the same time, he had contempt for the middle class, except for its usefulness in “controlled conflict” to take power from the “haves.” He would brag, “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class.”
Today, President Obama and other leading Democrats reference the “middle class” in nearly every speech. They have recently added “extremists” and “the tea party” to define Republicans and any voters who dare question the Democratic line. Organizers of the street protests against Gov. Scott Walker applied Alinsky rules for radicals by recruiting unionized teachers along with other public employees as demonstrators.
As with many radicals, Alinsky did not always practice what he preached. He grew up in Chicago and was a graduate of the University of Chicago. He sought to help the poor by organizing the middle class, yet he himself married well and had a home in California’s rich Carmel, far from his organizing haunts in the Windy City.
After Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University and worked in New York City, he chose a move to Chicago to train as a community organizer. He taught the Alinsky method of organizing for Chicago’s Developing Communities Project and worked on behalf of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, just as Saul Alinsky had before him.
Alinsky had been adept at organizing clergyman, among them Chicago’s Bishop Bernard Sheil. Obama, in turn, was adept at currying favor with the Chicago chic and academics, who later supported his campaigns for the Illinois state Senate, U.S. Senate, and presidency.
Saul Alinsky’s son David, in an August 2008 letter to the Boston Globe, opined that Obama’s training as a teacher and Chicago community organizer was reflected in his bid for the presidency as a tribute to Alinsky senior.
Among the “have-nots” today are the lower 50 percent of the economic strata that pay no federal income tax. Some are welfare recipients for whom welfare has become a lifestyle. In their midst are a growing number of undocumented immigrants (illegal aliens). Alinsky ideology is apparent in President Obama’s immigration stand, as he promises the Hispanic population comprehensive immigration reform with a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens.
Even in 2009 and 2010, when the Democrats had full control of the Senate, House of Representatives, and the presidency, they did not make any serious attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Now, as President Obama begins his re-election campaign, he advises Hispanics to be patient and look for immigration reform, but not during his re-election campaign — pure Alinsky.
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