Saul Alinsky Should be the Tea Party Darling!

Newt Gingrich is now constantly using the name Saul Alinsky to describe what we'll get if President Obama is re-elected. Media pundits are saying that most people don't know what he means by that. Some in the media say that the Russian name is meant to get those ignorant of Alinsky to think of Obama as very far left and radical, without even understanding who Alinsky was.

Gingrich's stump speech includes this about Obama, “If you look at his background he is really a lot more Saul Alinsky and radicalism than he is with traditional American models.”

So, who is this Saul Alinsky character anyway?

It might surprise many, including Gingrich, that Alinsky was vehemently opposed to welfare handouts to the poor. In fact he said, in an interview with William F. Buckley Jr. on his show Firing Line, “... the Poverty Program was a prize piece of political pornography. “ He was talking about the War on Poverty. My take on those comments is that Alinsky actually thought that welfare handouts were a counterproductive force for the poor community and were instituted so that politicians could act like they were doing something about poverty.

In that same interview with Buckley, Alinsky said, “I find myself very much in agreement with the thinking of the early revolutionary leaders. I'm thinking of men like Madison, Jay, Hamilton et cetera, who I think were extraordinarily politically sophisticated and very well read and very thoughtful in terms of implications of their actions.”

He went on to describe how the founding fathers were very aware that the situation would change over time and that society would need to adjust. “Whatever future there was, the future of an open society, it rested in the fact of having as many people involved as citizens being able to act as citizens, able to have power.”

Alinsky's community organizing was based on getting people to participate in democracy and the political process. “I'm using political strictly in the Greek sense here, whereby through getting together, through having a convention, through having an election of officers, agreement on policies, and so forth, they can turn to other sectors of society and say: here are our representatives; these are the men for you to deal with in the democratic give and take and decision making, et cetera. Without this, which I think is a primary element in the democratic mix, the whole democratic society begins to founder.”

So what in all of this could the Tea Party and Newt Gingrich have a problem? Is it that when these principles are denied people, when their voting rights are not honored, when their voices are not heard, that they show up at city hall in Chicago and shut down the city government until they are heard? Is that Gingrich's problem with Alinsky? Perhaps the people could show up at the US Capitol lawn, or the tea ships in Boston harbor to demonstrate. See, we are right back to the Tea Party.

I went to a learned friend to try and understand how Newt Gingrich could benefit from comparing someone to Alinsky. Alan Abramowitz, Political Science Professor at Emory University, a Stanford PhD in Poli Sci wrote to me “I think Republicans like to use people like Alinsky as punching bags because it goes over well with their conservative base, even when it doesn't really make sense. Very few of them know anything about Alinsky but it's easy to pigeon-hole him as a left-wing rabble-rouser. The words 'community organizer' are enough to set these people off, as we saw when Palin used them to go after Obama.”

But perhaps we are being too easy on Gingrich here, perhaps we are not giving him enough credit. Yes, it could be that the Russian name, Alinsky, is enough to attract the most ignorant voters to support Gingrich. There could be more to it though, as Alinsky's powerless, whom he organized, on the most part were poor and even more so that they were minorities, people of color. Perhaps it is not the radicalism of Alinsky's methods that Gingrich is using for political gain, but rather subliminal racism to attract those who, otherwise, totally agree with and emulate the democratic theories espoused by the son of Jewish Russian immigrants, Saul Alinsky.