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Obama's community organizing days
Byron York, National ReviewA very fair, and very detailed, account of what Obama actually did on the South Side of Chicago. By all accounts, he came in with the best of intentions and did accomplish some tangible good for the people in the Altgeld housing project. I would encourage you to click through and read it all. I'm going to jump ahead to the key point: We look to formative experiences to help us understand presidential candidates. Visit an aircraft carrier in wartime and youll learn something about John McCain. Pilots fly off the deck, and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they dont. One day, McCain didnt, and began the time as a prisoner of war that both revealed his character and launched his political career. No matter what he has done since, the U.S. Navy is the culture that made McCain, with his heavy emphasis on duty, honor, and country. Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him? The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a Camp Obama program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obamas opponents admit is a very impressive operation. But Obamas time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for. Certainly no one should live in an apartment contaminated by asbestos, but Obama did not seem to question, or at least question very strongly, the notion that the people he wanted to organize should be living in Altgeld at all. The place was, after all, one of the nations capitals of dysfunction. . . . No doubt Obama would agree that that is a bad thing, but when a real attempt to break through that culture of dysfunction the landmark 1996 welfare-reform bill, now widely accepted as one of the most successful domestic-policy initiatives in a generation came up, Obama vowed to use all the resources at his disposal to undo it. I made sure our new welfare system didnt punish people by kicking them off the rolls, he said in 1999. Two years earlier, he had declared: We want to make sure that there is health care, child care, job training, and transportation vouchers everything that is needed to ensure that those who need it will have support. Obama applied his considerable organizational skills to perpetuating the old, failed way of doing things. Posted by: Mike 2008-09-08 |
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