Newt, you ended tonight’s debate in Jacksonville with another comparison between President Obama and Saul Alinsky. I’ve heard you make the same comparison on news talk shows and in your campaign stump speeches. It’s obviously meant to be a disparaging comparison, and I’ll admit that I didn’t know who Saul Alinsky was. I doubt that the majority of Americans know who he was. So I googled him.
And you know what Newt? He was a great guy. Now I’m starting to think that you don’t know who he was.
Here’s a short history lesson. Saul Alinsky was a community organizer, (like Barack Obama), who strived to improve poverty stricken communities in major cities across the United States. He started in the slums of Chicago. His early efforts to “turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who said Alinsky’s aims ‘most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.’”[i]
His success in Chicago led him to other large cities with slums or ghettos from Kansas City to Detroit to New York and Southern California. Although some of his tactics were unconventional, he’s considered a master organizer. In fact, his book Rules for Radicals has been handed out to Tea Party organizers as a guideline on grass roots organization.
Just before his death in 1972 he described his plans to take his organizations to help middle class America who he felt were living in frustration and despair and worried about their future.
In his own words from his 1946 “Reveille for Radicals” he states:
“A People’s Organization is a conflict group, and this must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A People’s Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life.”
He was not a communist or socialist or Marxist, in fact, he never belonged to any political organization. He just happened to think that poor people and the middle class needed help giving themselves a voice.
The fact that you continue to refer to him in a denigrating manner leads me to believe that you disagree with his principles of organizing poor or middle class communities in order to improve themselves.
So then Newt, what are you for? Oh that’s right, you’d rather spend money on a lunar colony.
Oh my you do make me laugh!
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