Oh pleeeeze, sir!
In three words, this is the driving force behind Barack Obama’s
vision for America. A vision epitomized by the famous words written
by Charles Dickens for the young Oliver Twist of 19th century
England. “Please, sir, I want some more.”
As America is beginning to learn, the young prince of Chicago
began his career as what is euphemistically called a “community
organizer.” One has to have grown up in the 1960s, I suppose, to
know what this is. For those who missed out, a community organizer
is someone who spends their time begging from the government. The
motives, at least in theory, are always pure. Mrs. Jones needs
heat, Joe Smith needs a job, Sally Bell needs milk for her
baby.
The problem, of course, is that after decades of practical
experience it is now obvious to most Americans that the guiding
light behind community organizing is some variant of socialism —
which is to say a philosophy that effectively guarantees a lifetime
of poverty and dependence, always at the mercy of a government that
by the very nature of big bureaucracies can be arrogantly uncaring
if not deceitful, slow as molasses, frequently incompetent and, in
the end, completely lacking in an ability to help people escape the
grinding poverty in which they find themselves.
Barack Obama made his first mark in Chicago by choosing to be a
community organizer, inspired by left-wing theoretician Saul
Alinsky, the so-called “father” of community organizing. As a
United States Senator he has, according to the non-partisan
National Journal, emerged as one of the Senate’s most
liberal Senators. This is another way of saying that Obama supports
all those programs that keep community organizers busy with places
to go begging, insuring from the top that all those on the bottom
are effectively kept in a closed loop of poverty. Unable to break
out, poorly educated by government-owned, union-run local schools,
housed in government-owned, crime-infested public housing,
dependent for everything from food to heat to a job, the cycle
rewards dependency. Dependency on government, and in turn
dependency on community organizers like Barack Obama once was and
on politicians like Barack Obama now is.
THE BEST PLACE to take a look at this cycle in terms of Obama is to
read his writings and the glowing accounts in liberal journals that
have been written about him by enamored journalists. They provide
an X-ray of the way Obama sees what American life should be — a
life that effectively consists of a society of beggars. Here are
but four selections.
* From Ryan Lizza in the New Republic: “Obama’s work
focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight the
city for things like job banks and asbestos removal.”
* From David Moberg in the Nation: “Often by
confronting officials with insistent citizens — rather than
exploiting personal connections, as traditional black Democrats
proposed — Obama and DCP protected community interests regarding
landfills and helped win employment training services, playgrounds,
after-school programs, school reforms and other public
amenities.”
* From David Moberg in the Nation: “One day a resident
at Altgeld Gardens, a geographically isolated public housing
project surrounded by waste sites, brought a notice about planned
removal of asbestos from the project manager’s office. Obama
organized the community to find out if there was asbestos in their
apartments. They persisted as officials lied and delayed, then took
a bus — with far fewer people than Obama had anticipated — to
challenge authorities downtown. Ultimately, the city was forced to
test all the apartments and eventually begin cleaning them up.”
* From Barack Obama in “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in
the Inner City” first published in the August/ September 1988
Illinois Issues (published by then-Sangamon State
University, which is now the University of Illinois at
Springfield):
“This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent
groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues,
hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies
and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole
range of issues - jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle
is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and
corporations more responsive to community needs.”
Listen to what is being said here.
* “…fight the city for things like job banks and asbestos
removal…”
* “Often by confronting officials…”
* “They persisted as officials lied and delayed, then took a bus
— with far fewer people than Obama had anticipated — to challenge
authorities downtown. Ultimately, the city was forced…”
This is the language of a society of beggars. The need to “fight
the city” or “confront officials” or persist “as officials lied and
delayed” or “challenge authorities” is pre-eminently the language
of human beings made to depend on government. To beg from it as
Oliver Twist was made to beg. “Please, sir, I want some more.” It
may have once had a certain allure in the 1960s — forty years ago
and even longer before that — but the idea of creating big
government programs and then creating “community organizers” whose
sole purpose is to make citizens more effective beggars of those
government programs has long since been discredited by the results
— or lack thereof .
YET THIS IS PRECISELY the vision that Obama wishes to extend across
all of America. And the question that becomes relevant for Obama’s
vision is a version of the question Ronald Reagan once asked
Americans about the presidency of Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off
now than you were four years ago?” Is the South Side of Chicago
better off today because Barack Obama and his fellow community
organizers accepted the status quo of big government? Is the
community where Obama “organized” better off today than it was when
he arrived? Has he done anything with his philosophy that has
lifted the people of the South Side of Chicago out of poverty, and
has the philosophy itself worked anywhere else in America?
One need go no further than the Nation magazine’s same
loving profile of Obama to learn this:
“Despite some meaningful victories, the work of Obama — and
hundreds of other organizers — did not transform the South Side or
restore lost industries.”
In other words, the Nation answers the Reagan question
in a word: No.
This is important when understanding that Obama’s vision of
America is to make of America one big South Side of Chicago. A
nation where he raises taxes (“Please sir, may I keep some more of
my money that I worked for?”), bureaucratizes health care (“Please,
sir, will you pay for my medicine?”), and tells automobile
manufacturers how to make energy-efficient cars (“Please sir, may I
make my car my way?”).
All of this is, of course, the same old, same old. It is nothing
more — or less — than the old socialist stew which has failed
everywhere from the South Side of Chicago to the Ninth Ward of New
Orleans to the North Side of Moscow. There is nothing new about any
of this except the messenger. And the messenger, according to the
impeccably left-wing pages of the Nation, has already
served up this stew in Chicago and — surprise, surprise — failed.
He has been utterly unable to do in his own public service what he
once advocated for others in Alinskian terms, which is to say
“challenging people to scrape away habit.” The habit of setting up
big unionized bureaucracies and then targeting them with organized
begging campaigns is apparently impossible for Obama to scrape
away.
The kerfuffle over Obama’s tendency to plagiarize words from
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is perhaps more revealing than
the simple plagiarism itself. What it displays at its heart is an
unoriginal cast of mind, as well as something more damning. An
unwillingness to accept hard truths simply because it is unpopular
in his circle to do so. While Obama was big on organizing to
challenge local officials, he was not in the least inclined to
challenge his fellow liberals with the subversive idea (to
liberals) that it is big government itself that has exacerbated if
not produced the problems on Chicago’s South Side.
If he is unwilling to take a hard look at his surroundings on
the South Side of Chicago, if he is unable to understand the
failure that resulted in the conditions of the South Side in the
first place, and why, then his lovely repetitions of the eloquent
phrases of others notwithstanding, there either just isn’t much
there there when it comes to Obama’s intellectual creativity — or
he fears leading real change because of what his liberal friends
might say.
Absent a commitment to real change, his aspiration to be the
“community organizer-in-chief” for America means one thing, and one
thing only. Barack Obama, his sights set firmly on a left-wing past
that did not work, is determined to organize us into 300 million
Oliver Twists.
Which is to say, to make of us all a society of beggars.
