“Saul Alinsky is referred to in this piece. He’s Hillary’s spiritual leader in terms of creating her own chaos.”

Rush Limbaugh, April 9, 2008

“This sort of clever manipulation was at the heart of Alinsky-style ‘community organizing’ in the interest of revolutionary change. He taught, through his books and seminars for radical acolytes, how to convince the common folks that the organizer was merely their tool, willingly offering his own time and service so that they could succeed in throwing off the yoke of their masters.”

www.patdollard.com, “Hussein, the Money Wizard,” June 9, 2007

Media and blog coverage of Barack Obama, his field program, and his campaign’s ascent has been especially interesting in its overall confused treatment of legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky (Hillary Clinton, as detailed above, has suffered the same kind of muckraking). The memory of Alinsky (now dead 26 years), who popularized and largely put into motion the organizational styling that have been credited for Sen Obama’s most recent successes, has been handled in some circles similarly to the way in which the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (and Sen. Obama’s middle name, for that matter) was; as if he were an erratic, anti-American aggitater whose influence should cast an air of doubt onto that of the candidate.

A leftist who so openly identified with the term “radical” might not so much mind these associations.

However, considering how much Alinsky influenced the tactics of the American left and right, this pot-stirring is simply inaccurate. Alinsky pushed for a people-powered revolution. He might not have fully understood the scope of how his tactics would by systemized and used by folks on all sides of the spectrum, but used by social justice groups for more than a decade, the ascent of his techniques is not just limited to radical leftists. They would become the tools of an increasingly-organizer-oriented mainstream Democratic Party, especially within the context of Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy. The GOP would nearly perfect the art of the GOTV push thanks to the very same tactics. We would see his rules used to popularize the issues and image of mainstream political candidates. Reaching even further across the spectrum, John Altevgot, a former Christian radio host and conservative political activist, has called Alinsky his hero.

While it might politically sexy for partisans to attribute a sense of “anti-American” guilt unto Sen. Obama by association with Alinsky, this is a deceitful, inaccurate attack. Alinsky’s methods, while rooted in a partisan divide, came to transcend them and have been used by those on all sides of the spectrum. Alinsky was the grandfather of the way that we all — right or left, pre or post partisan— organize, and his actions have influenced how we all perpetuate our respective causes. Right, Left, Center, mainstream or fringe, the honest thing for all of us to do would be to celebrate and civilly discuss the tools that Alinsky brought to our table.

-Filed in People