What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  Throughout the twentieth century, there had been various incarnations of the revolution. As Bill Ayers put it as his group bombed the Pentagon, “Kill all the rich people,” he ordered. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” Decades later, the old revolutionary was still at it, invoking themes of income inequality as he instructed the useful idiots of Occupy Wall Street on how best to overthrow American capitalism.

  Alinsky, his contemporaries, and their radical successors knew that, given Americans’ fierce rejection of these fundamentally anti-American views and policies, it would help to have a crisis as a pretext. If a natural crisis did not exist, one could be created through the radical grass roots. This is one of the reasons why he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940 “to train people to reorganize” and which he used to infiltrate traditional organizations such as churches. After Alinsky’s death in 1972, IAF morphed into successor groups, including ACORN, Citizen Action, National People’s Action, and the Gamaliel Foundation. The Gamaliel Foundation describes its vision as “shared abundance for all,” which is a polite way of characterizing wealth redistribution. In the summer of 1985, newly minted community organizer Barack Obama joined Gamaliel, where his work was paid for by the Woods Fund. Later, from 1993 to 2002, Obama would serve on the board of the Woods Fund with … guess who? … the terrorist and self-described “socialism advocate” Bill Ayers.

  If the existing capitalist system were to be destroyed from within, those invested in the system could be expected to put up a fight to try to stop it. In order to marginalize them, Alinsky recommended neutralizing the opposition through humiliation, mockery, questioning of motives, smears, outright lies, and ultimately aggression if necessary: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  Alinsky preached polarization, not negotiation. Alinskyite organizers are taught to be tough when confronting what they call “the enemy” but to paint every move not as ideological but pragmatic. Hence Obama’s constant refrain that he’s a neutral pragmatist, the “adult in the room,” just trying to get results. “Look Ma! No ideology!” The first rule of Alinsky’s “power tactics”? “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” Demonize the opposition, remind them of the power you hold, and leverage it to stir chaos, divisions, and destruction, all while casting yourself as the reasonable broker.

  Team Obama internalized these lessons well. After college, Obama moved to Chicago to be trained in community organizing by Gerald Kellman, an Alinsky protégé, who schooled Obama in the Alinskyite “power tactics,” including hiding their true goals by any means necessary. Obama himself went on to teach those Alinsky tactics at the University of Chicago. In 1990, he wrote an article called “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” which was published in that hot periodical Illinois Issues and as a chapter in After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

  On page xix of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes, “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.”

  In chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky emphasizes the objective: “The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive—but real—allies of the Haves.... The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.... The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.” (Emphasis added.)

  It must have been a mere coincidence that Michelle Obama quoted from this passage during her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Referring to a visit her husband had made to a Chicago neighborhood, she said, “Barack stood up that day and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’” She continued, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do—that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.” If only America would follow Barack through the back of the magical Marxist wardrobe. She had used the radicals’ phrase “fighting for the world as it should be” before, so her invocation of Alinsky at the convention should not have come as a surprise to anybody paying attention. Most Americans heard that phrase—“fighting for the world as it should be”—as a siren call to idealism, a summons to a noble mission of improving the nation and world. But what the Obamas meant by “fighting for the world as it should be” and what most Americans understood that to mean were two very different things. Their “world as it should be” was one built on “social and economic justice” in which the have-nots would seize power, money, and resources from the haves. The “two Americas” would be jammed into one in which the playing field was forcibly leveled.

  Although Obama was leading the kook parade, his chief political strategist, David Axelrod, had his own revolutionary street cred. Before he got to Obama, Axelrod was mentored by Chicago journalist and political activist Donald C. Rose, who was a member of the Communist Party front, the Alliance to End Repression. Axelrod met Rose while a student at the University of Chicago, and Rose took him under his wing. They worked together over the course of several years, with Rose and another communist-linked mentor, David Canter, showing Axelrod the ropes of community organizing and mobilization through the 1982 Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington and the 1992 U.S. Senate race of Carol Moseley Braun. The group with whom they worked also helped to elect Obama to Braun’s Senate seat and ultimately to the presidency.

  Obama took the Alinsky techniques national beginning in 2004, playing the role of the “reasonable” liberal intellectual, even as he planned the ultimate redistributionist takeover. Alinsky’s dream—of destroying the existing capitalist system and replacing it with a redistributionist one—was about to be realized, beyond ol’ Saul’s wildest dreams. In fact, on August 31, 2008, the Boston Globe published a letter to the editor from Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky. He cheered Obama for having mobilized the masses at the Democratic National Convention “Saul Alinsky style.” “Obama learned his lesson well,” he wrote. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully.”

  On Super Tuesday 2008, Obama proclaimed that the radicals’ dream was within reach: “This is it! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for! We are the change we seek!” Precisely. And ever since that day, Obama has carried around a makeup compact, and during quiet moments alone he pulls it out, peers down into its tiny mirror, and whispers, “We love you.”

  Obama never made a deep secret of his beliefs or intentions. He wrote extensively about his mission to bring “social and economic justice” to America in both of his books and spoke often about his redistributive beliefs. He voted that way too. He was so into redistribution that he even had a “tramp stamp” of Mao Zedong tattooed onto the small of his back. Oh wait: that was former White House communications director Anita Dunn. In 1995, the same year he published Dreams from My Father, Obama said this: “… working on issues of crime and education and employment and seeing that in some ways certain portions of the African American community are doing as bad if not worse, and recognizing that my fate remains tied up with their fates, that my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country. Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.” (Emphasis added.)

  Two points are evident here: (a) Obama believes that the “collective” is superior to the �
�individual” and that “collective salvation” must take precedence over individual action or freedom; and (b) it’s our fault that the country hasn’t reached that vaunted “collective salvation” yet because we’ve been selfish, capitalist pigs, but he was going to move our consciousness to a higher, less greedy plane.

  In 2001, as an Illinois state senator, he gave an interview to WBEZ radio and advocated wealth redistribution as reparations for slavery and other injustices toward “previously dispossessed peoples.” He said, “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”

  And then Obama made one of the most revealing statements of his political life: “[The Warren court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”

  Consider his explosive words: “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” This is a revolutionary sentiment. Obama is calling for actively charging against what the Founders intended and enshrined in the Constitution. His comments go further than simple leftist arguments about the “living Constitution” in which the document conceptually passively evolves. He is calling for a concerted and deliberate effort to shatter the very constraints the Founders put in place—to prevent abuses of the kind he’s advocating! This is the very essence of Obama’s redistributive radicalism: it’s all about “breaking free” from the Founders’ constraints to build a wholly different kind of America. His entire kook philosophy is summed up in that one sentence.

  He continued: “It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.) In fact, the Constitution explicitly limits the powers of the government because the Founders feared wild-eyed activist power hogs like Obama. But it is those same limits from which Obama would like us to “break free.” No wonder he’ll take any opportunity to get the words “Constitution” and “negative” in the same sentence.

  There was, however, one phrase in the Constitution Obama found particularly useful to his mission. As he began running for president in earnest, he and his inner circle, Axelrod, Iranian-born Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett, strategist David Plouffe, and wife, Michelle, kept the focus squarely on the carefully crafted image of Barack as Symbol. He understood the necessity of keeping himself as ambiguous as possible, saying in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, “I am a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He knew the power intrinsic in the ability to be both a blank screen and a chameleon, and he exploited it brilliantly. He hit every emotional button precisely when it needed to be hit: “change” after eight years of President Bush and wearying wars, “yes, we can” optimism when the nation was down in the dumps, and, most important, “hope” that “things could be better.” Plus, let’s be honest: liberals in this country just love getting “free” crap, and he promised it to them.

  Herein lies the brilliance of the Obama deception. Obama took the historical, traditional, and natural American impulse for a “more perfect union” and turned it on its head. And he accomplished this feat of constitutional perversion with very few people noticing.

  Starting in 1995 with the publication of Dreams from My Father, Obama has seized the phrase and the meaning of “a more perfect union” and co-opted it for the redistributionist cause. The phrase “a more perfect union” means different things to different people. To most Americans, it means the constant vigilance needed to ensure maximum individual liberty, as the Founders intended.

  When Obama invokes “a more perfect union,” however, he means one that “spreads the wealth around” while diluting American exceptionalism until it’s nonexistent. Getting America to that version of “a more perfect union” is the ultimate mission of the leftists, who loathe America and everything for which she stands, from individual freedom to global dominance.

  When he spoke about creating a “more perfect union,” he believed that he was the only one who could—or should—be doing the perfecting. When he made his garishly ostentatious statement, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he was really saying, “I’m the one who will at last change the very nature of America. I will judge when you’ve made enough money and who should get it instead. I will judge what health care you should receive. I will decide that the country must atone for its past sins and I will lead its penance.”

  In the spring of 2008, Obama’s campaign was rocked by revelations that he had sat in the pews of Trinity United Church of Christ for over twenty years, listening to, absorbing, and apparently agreeing with the anti-American rantings of Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Audiotapes and videotapes surfaced of Wright pounding the church podium as he spewed anti-American invective.

  That Obama sat in Wright’s church for over twenty years, never registering a protest against any of Wright’s inflammatory statements, threatened to define Obama as the anti-American radical some already suspected him to be. The controversy needed to be nipped in the bud quickly if his campaign were to survive.

  On March 18, he gave a speech on his relationship with Wright, which he announced he was ending, and then spun his comments into a broader thought piece on race and American ideals.

  Obama’s address about Wright became known as the “more perfect union” speech. He began, “‘We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.’ This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign—to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.... It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children,” Obama said. “But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.”

  Despite throwing both Wright and his white grandma under the bus in order to save his presidential campaign, Obama received wide praise for the speech, which was considered by many to be the best of his political career. But while most people were focused on his perfectly orchestrated message of racial “unity” and “healing”—epitomized by the man himself—he had embedded a much more powerful message. The union must be “perfected,” not in the way most Americans understand that constitutional concept, but as the kooks intend it.

  He has peppered other speeches with the phrase “a more perfect union,” and each time he has used it in service to the redistributionists’ ideal of “remaking America.” On August 6, 2009, he got word that the Senate voted to confirm his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, self-described “wise Latina,” to the nation’s highest bench. He gave a statement that sounded much like his 2004 convention speech, saying that the Bronx-born Latina exemplified “the very ideals that have made Judge Sotomayor’s own uniquely American journey possible.” And
then he added that “the Senate has upheld today in breaking yet another barrier and moving us yet another step closer to a more perfect union” by confirming someone who would help to carry out Obama’s dream of “breaking us free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

  Most Americans heard one thing when he spoke of “perfecting the union” whereas he intended something completely different, just as they had when he and Michelle spoke of “fighting for the world as it should be.” In fact, throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama let people fill in the blanks of his “blank screen” with whatever assumptions they wished, and he never disabused them of their own fantasies.

  Obama allowed white voters to assume that a “more perfect union” meant closing the door on slavery and racism once and for all. He allowed black voters to see racial triumph. He allowed college kids and other young voters to see a youthful, hip guy who liked the same hip-hop music they did and who would pave the way for a brighter future for them. He allowed the wealthy to alleviate rich guilt by appealing to a sense of “justice” as he asked them to pay more of “their fair share.” He allowed the poor to think that his support for big-government programs meant that they would always be taken care of by the state. He allowed women to swoon and men to feel like he was a hoop-shooting, ESPN-loving, brackets-picking best buddy. He was the perfect political Rorschach test.

  The money shot on his Rorschach strategy came five days before the election when a voter in Sarasota, Florida, named Peggy Joseph attended an Obama campaign rally. Asked by an interviewer what she saw in Obama that drew her to vote for him, she replied, “I never thought this day would ever happen. I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s gonna help me.”