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(IBD) As the president launches his re-election bid by striking a more centrist tone, the partisan press is helping him whitewash his radical past. Teamwork or not, it'll be hard to bleach.
Exhibit A is CNN's Soledad O'Brien. Earlier this week, she hosted a segment that tried to de-link Obama from Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. The late Alinsky is the father of community organizing and the author of the far-left bible "Rules for Radicals."
O'Brien opened her piece by scolding GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich for warning Obama "will represent Saul Alinsky (and) European socialism" in a second term. "President Obama has never said that he was influenced by Alinsky," O'Brien insisted.
Of course he hasn't. He's not stupid enough to publicly link himself to a socialist. But the record is clear that he was in fact influenced by Alinsky, if only CNN's "journalists" would do their homework. Allow us to do it for them:
• Obama first learned Alinsky's rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel's website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)
• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois," in which he lamented organizers' "lack of power" in implementing change.
• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.
• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.
• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.
• Obama also taught Alinsky's "Power Analysis" methods at the University of Chicago.
• During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at "Camp Obama," a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.
• Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky's vision of a new "vanguard" of coat-and-tie radicals who "work inside the system" to change the system.
• After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama's legislative agenda using "Rules for Radicals."
• Obama's favorite rule is No. 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it." You see that in his attacks on "fat cat bankers," "greedy health insurers" and "millionaires and billionaires." He also readily applies Alinsky's fifth rule of "ridiculing" the opposition.
"Obama learned his lesson well," said David Alinsky, son of the late socialist. "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing."
Bizarrely, O'Brien was more than willing to connect Alinsky with the Tea Party, without citing a shred of real evidence to back up the silly claim. The CNN anchor closed her segment by saying she would pin Gingrich down on his supposedly misleading claims. "We will be sure to ask the former speaker the next time we get a chance to talk to him about that," she said.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just ask Obama? You know, "Mr. President, have you ever read Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'"? Or "Have your ever trained at organizations founded by Alinsky?"
Is she really this clueless? Or is she covering for Obama? Either way, it does not reflect well on a journalist of her stature and influence.
It's plain CNN plans to gloss over the president's radical past in this campaign, just like it did in 2008.
