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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Obama's community organizing days |
| 2008-09-08 |
| Byron York, National Review A 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 you’ll learn something about John McCain. Pilots fly off the deck, and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t. One day, McCain didn’t, 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 Obama’s opponents admit is a very impressive operation. But Obama’s 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 nation’s 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 didn’t 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 |
| #4 Just in case you think this article is biased, here's last week's New Republic: But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him "to make major changes in poverty or discrimination." To do that, he said, "you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials." In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. Personally, he might end up like his father; politically, he would fail to improve the lot of those he was trying to help. And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school. Kellman, who was already thinking of leaving organizing himself, found no reason to argue with him. "Organizing," Kellman tells me, as we sit in a Chicago restaurant down the street from the Catholic church where he now works as a lay minister, "is always a lost cause." Obama, circa late 1987, might or might not have put it quite that strongly. But he had clearly developed serious doubts about the career he was pursuing. ... Indeed, during his three years in South Chicago, Obama was constantly having to scale back his objectives as one project after another faltered. First, he got community members to demand a job center that would provide job referrals, but there were few jobs to distribute. Then, he tried to create what he called a "second-level consumer economy" in Roseland consisting of shops, restaurants, and theaters. This, too, went nowhere. At that point, Kellman advised Obama to move elsewhere. "Stay here, and you are bound to fail," he told him. Creation Myth |
| Posted by: KBK 2008-09-08 21:53 |
| #3 Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change like winning the Cold War and defeating the Soviet Union without ever firing a shot? Or like securing the release of the Iran hostages? How about getting this country's economy back on its feet after the four years of Jimmuh Carter malaise? Or reestablishing our country's pride and sense of purpose after the hopped up, divisive years of Vietnam and Watergate? That kind of change? Sorry. That's about as far as I could get with this article. That and wondering why these poor, oppressed people can't seem to get off their butts and do anything at all for themselves. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2008-09-08 18:05 |
| #2 Do read it all, but carefully note the ending: When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land. And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done. |
| Posted by: Sherry 2008-09-08 12:53 |
| #1 Harold Washington was mayor in 1985. I'm from greater Chicagoland...... So why did Altgeld need Obama? |
| Posted by: anonymous2u 2008-09-08 10:47 |