62 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographymore likely the emphasis at City College. “You needed somebody — and here was where Barack
was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen
Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on
the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently
radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.”’ (Janny Scott,
“Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” New York Times,
October 30, 2007) Obama failed then, and he is failing again this time in his quest to market elitist
issues among those with urgent economic needs.
GAMALIEL FOUNDATION, CHICAGO: ALINSKYITE COUNTERINSURGENCY
Obama embarked on what he says, even now, was the hardest work of his life: the three and a
half years of community organizing in the impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago’s far South
Side. His job: to work with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based effort that aimed
to organize low-income residents to improve local conditions. ... his friend Valerie Jarrett, former
chairman of the Chicago Stock Exchange, told me. Obama himself described the years in Chicago
to me as the time when he “finally and fully grew up.” (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008)
Obama loves to boast that he served for some years as a community organizer. The problem for
most people is that they have very little concrete notion what this might mean. This needs a few
words of explanation. The Developing Communities Project was an operation of the Gamaliel
Foundation, the temple of the organizing methods associated with Saul Alinsky, who had been
preaching community organizing since the World War II era. The Gamaliel Foundation was also a
satellite of the Ford Foundation, the flagship US foundation devoted to preventing the emergence of
any social-political challenge to the dominance of Wall Street financiers over the crumbling US
society. Money for Obama also came from the Woods Fund, a foundation created by the reactionary
Woods family, who owned coal mines that provided the coal for Commonwealth Edison, where the
dominant figure was Thomas Ayers, the father of Obama’s terrorist friend, foundation operative Bill
Ayers.
The best term for Saul Alinsky was that he was a counter-insurgent, quite independent of his
personal understanding of the matter. Alinsky’s community organizing specified that people ought
to be organized locally and on the basis of the lowest common denominator, generally some petty
local grievance, although sometimes based on poverty, but only if it were understood as a purely
local issue. Alinsky was obsessed with everything that was fragmented, parochial, localistic,
balkanized, sub-divided neighborhood by neighborhood, precinct by precinct, block by block. In his
dream world, one local group of Hungarian steelworkers would fight to get a sewer fixed. A few
hundred yards away, a black community group would fight the city government to get a public
library. Nearby a group of women would be demanding a daycare facility. A men’s club would
struggle to clean up the public park. None of these groups would be in any contact with any others.
They would not act politically, would not support candidates; they would only exert pressure on
corporations, governments, and so forth.
Each of these tiny groups would be fragmented and impotent and helpless in a real emergency,
like a depression, a war, or a police state. Above all, they would never be able to advance an
alternative to Wall Street domination, which was so far beyond the local purview that it never came
up – and yet, this was always the heart of the matter. It was more likely that a black local group
would fight a white one, with unemployed or parents fighting the teachers’ union, or some other
futile clash. Sometimes Alinsky’s methods won some trifling local concession, but often the yield