Organizer-in-Chief Obama Severs Community Roots

A community organizer for Chicago's poor at the start of his political career, President Barack Obama might be forgetting where he came from, judging by how unhappy he made some local aid agencies with his State of the Union speech. One organizer in attendance was stunned to hear the president call for cuts in funding to community groups, the Washington Wire blog of The Wall Street Journal reports.

President Barack Obama

The next day, David Bradley of the National Community Action Foundation put out a statement blasting the president’s proposal — a possible sign that an old alliance may be fraying.

“I knew it was going to be a bad budget,” Bradley told Washington Wire.

“I had absolutely no idea that [community aid funding] was going to be singled out in the State of the Union.

"This was theoretically a liberal, Democratic president who said he liked the program — and threw it overboard,” Bradley said.