On Obama, Clinton and Saul Alinsky, the legendary Chicago organizer McCain campaign is demonizing

Chicago Sun Times ^ | 10/17/2008 | Lynn Sweet

[markomalley]

WASHINGTON--Most of you, I bet, may be curious about the increased number of references lately from McCain campaign and surrogates about one Saul Alinsky as they try to make Barack Obama a risky presidential pick because of his associations.

I just heard Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) tell Andrea Mitchell on her MSNBC show that "Obama started out with Saul Alinsky." Not true, if Bond was being literal. Alinsky, born in Chicago … died on June 12, 1972 in Carmel, Calif., when Obama was 20.

Obama followed in the footsteps of Alinsky, the legendary Chicago community organizer whose techniques and teachings influenced generations of community and labor organizers, including the group hiring a young Obama to work on Chicago's South Side.

Alinsky's techniques were more tactical than radical. Alinsky--whose "Reville for Radicals" was the training manual for generations of organizers, also influenced a young Hillary Rodham Clinton who was growing up in Park Ridge at the time Alinsky was the director of the Industrial Arts Foundation in Chicago. While at Wellesley, Clinton wrote her senior thesis on the "Alinsky Model" of organizing.

[markomalley]

Nice summary (surprising source)

[originalbuckeye]

Admitting Obama followed in the steps of Alinsky? She’s going to lose her free speech rights! No Lib is supposed to speak about the Chosen One in connection with anything controversial.

[rahbert]

how is it that this communist gets to retire to Carmel??
what was he living off of?

[IronJack]

the legendary Chicago community organizer

Yeah, he's an "organizer" in the same way Joe Hill was. Or Joe Stalin for that matter.

[Republicus2001]

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical ...known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer. - Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. ix, Random House, New York, 1971

[syriacus]

Alinsky, born in Chicago … died on June 12, 1972 in Carmel, Calif., when Obama was 20.

Obama was 10 or 11 in 1972.

[Skywalk]

People like to quote that as some kind of evidence of his Alinsky’s leanings but I actually take it more in the Miltonian anti-hero sense of Lucifer and, at most, as revealing ALinksy’s preference for overturning the establishment, no matter the cost.