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Obama’s 'change' comes through agitating a community, not uniting all communities

Ted Belman - 4/4/2008

Why did Obama not pursue a corporate law practice but instead looked to community work as his life’s work? Why has he identified with agents of radical change, including William Ayers a convicted terrorist, throughout out his adult life. Why did he join a Black Nationalist, Africacentric Church? Why did he write (see Damning Quotes from Obama)

* (Obama) vowed that he would “never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”

* “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Honolulu’s paucity of African-Americans meant he had to learn to be black from the media: “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.”

* About student life and race at Occidental College Obama wrote “There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.” He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

* While in college, Obama wrote(he) disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks.

Ryan Lizza, in March ‘07, filled in more of the reality in The Agitator

In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn’t fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation–community organizer–it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change. Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”

His excitement wasn’t rooted merely in youthful enthusiasm but also in the psychology of a vagabond. By 1985, Obama had already lived in Hawaii, where he was born and raised by his white mother and grandparents; Indonesia, where he lived briefly as a child; Los Angeles, where he started college; and New York, where he finished it. After these itinerant years, he would finally be able to insinuate himself into a community–and not just any community, but, as he later put it, “the capital of the African American community in the country.” Every strain of black political thought seemed to converge in Chicago in the 1980s. It was the intellectual center of black nationalism, the base both for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Moreover, on the eve of Obama’s arrival, Harold Washington had overthrown Richard J. Daley’s white ethnic machine to become the city’s first black mayor. It was, in short, an ideal place for an identity-starved Kenyan Kansan to immerse himself in a more typical black American experience.

Not long after Obama arrived, he sat down for a cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a fellow organizer named Mike Kruglik. Obama’s work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight the city for things like job banks and asbestos removal. His teachers were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago trained social scientist. At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation”–making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”

This philosophy makes Obama the antithesis of the uniter he claims to be.

More than 20 years later, Obama presents himself as a post-partisan consensus builder, not a rabble-rouser, and certainly not a disciple of Alinsky, who disdained electoral politics and titled his organizing manifesto Rules for Radicals.

[..] Obama’s self-conception as an organizer isn’t just a campaign gimmick. Organizing remained central to Obama long after his stint on the South Side. In the 13 years between Obama’s return to Chicago from law school and his Senate campaign, he was deeply involved with the city’s constellation of community-organizing groups. He wrote about the subject. He attended organizing seminars. He served on the boards of foundations that support community organizing. He taught Alinsky’s concepts and methods in workshops. When he first ran for office in 1996, he pledged to bring the spirit of community organizing to his job in the state Senate. And, after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Recalling her remark in 2005, Obama wrote, “I take that observation as a compliment.”

By defining himself as a “community organizer” above all else, Obama is linking himself to America’s radical democratic tradition and presenting himself as an heir to a particular political style and methodology that, at least superficially, contrasts sharply with the candidate Obama has become. Community organizers see themselves as disciples of Thomas Paine and the colonists who dumped tea in Boston Harbor. Historically, they have revered the tactics of the labor militants of the 1930s, and they became famous in the ’60s for the political theater championed by Alinsky, illustrated most memorably by his threat of a “fart-in” at a Rochester, New York, opera house to bring attention to the Kodak company’s refusal to hire blacks.

Needless to say, this doesn’t sound much like the placid politician who wrote The Audacity of Hope. And it raises questions about Obama’s authentic political identity that require traveling back to the years when community organizing gave him the best education of his life.

A year after graduating from Columbia, Obama spotted an intriguing help-wanted ad in The New York Times. The Calumet Community Religious Conference (ccrc), a group that aimed to convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change, was looking for a community organizer to run the group’s inner-city arm, the Developing Communities Project (DCP). Obama soon arranged to meet in New York with the organizer heading up the job search.

Obama had spent the previous year on a fruitless quest. He worked briefly for a Ralph Nader outfit in Harlem teaching college kids about recycling and then on a losing assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn. But he longed for an experience that connected him to the civil rights era. “In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs,” he wrote in Dreams, “I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned.” Obama wanted to join the club.

“What really inspired me,” Obama told me during one of several conversations about his work as an organizer, “was the civil rights movement. And if you asked me who my role model was at that time, it would probably be Bob Moses, the famous sncc [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] organizer. … Those were the folks I was really inspired by–the John Lewises, the Bob Moseses, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Ella Bakers.”

[..] In Dreams, Obama spent some 150 pages on his four years in Chicago working as an organizer, but there’s little discussion of the theory that undergirded his work and informed that of his teachers. Alinsky is the missing layer of his account.

Born in 1909 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alinsky had prowled the same neighborhoods that Obama now worked and internalized many of the same lessons. As a University of Chicago criminology graduate student, he ingratiated himself with Al Capone’s mobsters to learn all he could about the dynamics of the city’s underworld, an experience that helped foster a lifelong appreciation for seeing the world as it actually exists, rather than through the academic’s idealized prism. Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories–some true, many embellished–from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention despite his tweedy, academic look and thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

Alinsky was deeply influenced by the great social science insight of his times, one developed by his professors at Chicago: that the pathologies of the urban poor were not hereditary but environmental. This idea, that people could change their lives by changing their surroundings, led him to take an obscure social science phrase–”the community organization”–and turn it into, in the words of Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt, “something controversial, important, even romantic.” His starting point was an early fascination with John L. Lewis, the great labor leader and founder of the CIO. What if, Alinsky wondered, the same hardheaded tactics used by unions could be applied to the relationship between citizens and public officials?

[..] But, while Alinsky is often viewed as an ideological figure–toward the end of his life, New Left radicals tried to claim him as one of their own–to place Alinsky within a taxonomy of left-wing politics is to miss the point. His legacy is less ideological than methodological. Alinsky’s contribution to community organizing was to create a set of rules, a clear-eyed and systemic approach that ordinary citizens can use to gain public power. The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power. Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!”

Galluzzo shared with me the manual he uses to train new organizers, which is little different from the version he used to train Obama in the ’80s. It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: “power analysis,” “elements of a power organization,” “the path to power.” Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. But Galluzzo’s manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. “We are not virtuous by not wanting power,” it says. “We are really cowards for not wanting power,” because “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.”

The other fundamental lesson Obama was taught is Alinsky’s maxim that self-interest is the only principle around which to organize people. (Galluzzo’s manual goes so far as to advise trainees in block letters: “get rid of do-gooders in your church and your organization.”) Obama was a fan of Alinsky’s realistic streak. “The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self-interest was met,” he told me, “and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.”

Chicago pastors still remember Obama making the rounds of local churches and conducting interviews–in organizing lingo, “one-on-ones”–where he would probe for self-interest. The Reverend Alvin Love, the Baptist minister of a modest brick church amid the clapboard bungalows of the South Side, was one of Obama’s first one-on-ones. During a recent visit to his church, Love told me, “I remember he said this to me: There ought to be some way for us to help you meet your self-interest while at the same time meeting the real interests and the needs of the community.’”

With this background and mentality it is easy to see that Pastor wright and Obama are soul mates both believing in the same things and the same methods.

They are dividers not uniters. Only by dividing can you gain power. Change comes through agitating a community, not uniting all communities.