RADICAL IDEAS

GETTING TO KNOW OBAMA

I knew Saul Alinsky, and – to paraphrase Senator Bentson – Obama is a Saul Alinsky. He spoke at UCLA back in the early fifties and afterward six of us had coffee with him at the cafe across the street from the movie theater in Westwood. One of us, I've forgotten who, asked Alinsky what he could do to make America a better country. The author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals said there were only three things; vote, organize, and peacefully assemble to petition the government. That was how to make radical change.

Alinsky is most famous for his work, called the Back of the Yards movement, to improve the terrible conditions under which Blacks were forced to work at Chicago's infamous stock yards. But the trip that brought him to UCLA was supposed to take him to Oakland where he would try to help the growing Black population. The idea that he might be successful so frightened the city that the Council voted to ban him from entering the city – for life.

Obama, like Alinsky, suffered from prejudice. He because of his color, Alinsky because he was a Jew at a time when Antisemitism was more common than a cold, and far more deadly. Obama believes, as Alinsky did, that the people truly have the power, but often must wrestle it from the clenched fist of corporations and entrenched politicians. In his State of the Union speech, Obama called on Americans to wrestle control from Big Oil, corrupt banks, the filthy rich, and from a paralyzed Senate and the House divided against itself, and against America.

The morning-after blogs, paid pundits,”liberal” whiners, and rabble rousing Republicans all found little but fault with President Obama's State of the Union speech, but Saul Alinsky would be one damned proud man as he listened to the radical call to action.