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Alinsky Rules Return For Obama

Politics: The hippie horde attempting to mob and "occupy" Wall Street this week has a method to its madness. It's all about getting President Obama re-elected by employing classic Alinskyite tactics.

At first glance, the latest protests staged by left-wing rent-a-mobs in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere don't look terribly different from the World Trade Organization and global debt-amnesty spectaculars of a decade ago. Radicals swarm against some hated totem, chant, break a few Starbucks windows and leave scads of garbage for someone else to clean up.

But the "Occupy Wall Street" mob that shut down the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend and drew 700 arrests bears all the earmarks of a professional political machine effort to keep Obama in the White House.

This time, banks were the target, as mobs bore down on Wall Street and posted demands on their Twitter feed to tax and arrest bankers. They knew a soft spot when they saw one.

Polls show the public continues to blame banks instead of administration policies for the economic downturn and widespread joblessness. Singling out banks is a tactic torn right from the playbook of Obama's political mentor, Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky.

"The goal," wrote David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.com of Alinsky, "is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and unworthy of salvation."

"The key to radical social change," wrote Stanley Kurtz in his Alinsky biography "Radical-in-Chief," "was to turn the wrath of America's middle class against large corporations."

To some, it may be a stretch to see the hand of the Obama political machine in what is claimed to be a grass-roots effort. But the facts on the ground point to it.

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For one thing, the organizers of these protests are the same ones who got Obama elected in 2008.

Last Aug. 11, former Obama "green czar" and community organizer Van Jones sent out an email to supporters calling for a new plan to "Rebuild the Dream." It called for infrastructure jobs to "rebuild our crumbling bridges" — exactly the line Obama presented in subsequent speeches.

In the same email, Jones — a self-described communist — called for jailing big bankers and instituting a "tiny fee" to siphon billions from bank transactions "to spend on Main Street job-creation," which are also things Obama favors.

Jones sent his series of screeds using MoveOn.org's server and database. MoveOn.org was the earliest high-visibility support network for Obama during his election in 2008 and is now heavily involved in the Occupy Wall Street actions. Coincidence?

"Wall Street has long been the home of the biggest threat to American democracy," Jones wrote Sunday. "So, this Wednesday we're joining with MoveOn, and labor and community groups in New York for a massive march down to the Occupy Wall Street encampment."

Now we have the president himself saying he feels "sympathy" for the aims of the Wall Street protestors, while the rest of Obama's political machine — Big Labor — is marching to join in. It's no coincidence that Occupy Wall Street's first demand is a sop to Big Labor: ending all free trade.

Now, socialist billionaire George Soros has offered support for the protestors. All of these players — Jones, MoveOn, Big Labor and Soros — were critical to Obama's victory in 2008.

As the mob seeks to hammer into the public's mind that Wall Street is the enemy, it's not hard to see the political value to Obama: deflecting attention from the economic failures of this presidency.

To use political pawns in this way is nothing but a cynical effort to boost this president's political fortunes. To those of us who work for a living, the unkempt shock troops blocking those bridges may look useless. In fact, they amount to Obama's principal political base.