Community Organizer In Chief

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Barack Obama claims he worked for a "small group of churches" as a community organizer. In fact, he was hired by a radical Alinskyite group, and Saul Alinsky's own son has outed him.

Buried last month in the Boston Globe's letters to the editor was a three-paragraph letter congratulating Obama for putting on a great show at the Democratic National Convention.

That open-stadium rally in Denver, with it's packed crowd and perfectly timed chanting of key phrases, "had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky-style," opined the letter-writer. The reference was to the hard-boiled Chicago socialist and father of radical community organizing.

"Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness," the author continued. "When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008," the author said. "It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

The person who signed the letter, Lee David Alinsky, a longtime public TV producer in the Boston area, is indeed the son of the late radical. Alinsky no doubt felt compelled to make the tribute on behalf of Obama because Obama refuses to even acknowledge his Alinsky training in public.

He is quick to say that the community organizing he did in Chicago was "the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." But he never tells us who educated him, not even in the two memoirs he's written. He also fails to disclose who hired him. Obama claimed in the recent national service forum at Columbia University that he worked for "churches" while organizing on the South Side of Chicago.

Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. Obama in fact worked for a subsidiary of the radical Gamaliel Foundation, a Chicago-based Alinsky group, and he was paid by the radical Woods Fund, which supports Gamaliel. Gamaliel's Web site and history page make plain that it evolved from the Alinsky school of organizing. Its training methods acknowledge an "agitational" style of organizing.

Obama also fails to disclose that he himself became a trainer of community organizers for the radical Gamaliel network. He also won't disclose that he contributed to a Chicago forum called "After Alinsky," where he argued for a "systematic approach" to community organizing and more "power" to bring about social change.

Serving on Gamaliel's board of directors is John McKnight, who wrote a letter of recommendation for Obama to Harvard. McKnight is a noted "student of Alinsky" and former ACLU director who now teaches at Northwestern University.

McKnight also sits on the board of the National People's Action, or NPA, a particularly thuggish group of Alinskyite agitators who sing the following ditty when picketing the homes of business and government leaders: "Who's on your hit list, NPA? Who's on your hit list of today? Take no prisoner, take no names. Kick 'em in the ass when they play their games."

Some community organizers are well-meaning and harmless. But not the ones Obama threw in with. They intimidate and agitate for more government home loans, more government job programs, a ban on police profiling, more benefits for illegal aliens, felon voting rights, minimum wage hikes, "environmental justice" and so on.

What they do is not harmless. What they demand is not noble. But Obama wants to give them more money and power, and organize them on a "large scale." He can run from his radical organizing record, but he can't hide.

Email