Obama took the road less traveled
There is a defining moment in everyone’s life, even if unknown to that person. In Robert Frost’s signature poem he wistfully concludes, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
I would argue that President Obama’s defining moment was when he opted for “the less traveled” career as a community organizer in the streets of Chicago as a 23 year old. (Before Harvard Law School.) You’d have to admit this was a strange career choice for an American kid. But it was a perfect fit for his nascent ideology, given the philosophy of his leftist mentors as he was growing up.
For example, in “Dreams from my Father,” Obama lamented that in the months leading up to graduation from Columbia he couldn’t get a job interview with any organization “with a progressive agenda,” so he took a job as a copyeditor for a small newsletter company. (In “Dreams” he refers to it as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.”)
Now get this: He goes on to say, “Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office…” What on earth would prompt a young American college grad with no life’s experiences to use a metaphor of the U.S. being the enemy?
Chicagoan Saul Alinsky, originator of the term “community organizer,” is credited by his biographer, Sanford Horwitt, as influencing Obama to follow in his footsteps. Described by Horwitt as a communist fellow traveler, Alinsky’s passion can best be understood by his belief that “in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play… The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.”
President Obama’s intimate relationship with the now discredited neo-Marxist ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) can be summed up in Obama’s own words: “ACORN will shape my agenda.”
Agenda meaning what? Radical agenda? A roadmap for life?
The President had an influential role as leadership trainer for this largest radical group in the country. Toni Foulkes, Chicago member of ACORN’s national board explained that when Obama won his U.S. Senate seat, “Obama started building the base years before…ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side. Since then we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year…By the time he ran for Senate we were old friends.”
An ACORN training session on “power” would , of necessity, be a dissection of Alinsky’s seminal work, “Rules for Radicals” which is a dissertation on power politics – some key power words in the book being “change,” “enemy,” “masses,” “means,” “pressure,” and “organizer.”
The telling 13th rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” It seems that Alinsky’s fingerprints are all over the President’s tactics and rhetoric – and they have worked. Divisive politics generate hate which has recently become the engine of Democratic politics.
This is basic stuff for a community organizer, and Obama excels because he can perform as a sophisticated motivational speaker before two diverse audiences; either as an intellectual teleprompted, lofty rhetorician, or as a street organizer schooled by Alinsky to “never go outside the experience of your people,” and use “tactics that your people enjoy.”
If achieving the presidency of the United States is a noteworthy achievement – and it surely is – then President Obama chose the right path, the “one that made all the difference” – that of a community organizer – a valuable teaching experience which shaped his objectives for his presidency.
But there is another critical part to this analysis: The enigma behind such an achievement by a man with no resume of any substance. This road leads to the entrenched media. Lockstep liberal and having a unique distaste for facts, they have yet to introduce the real Barack Obama to the public.
It could have.
Proof of this is ‘Amateur,’ a blockbuster book about Obama written by veteran mainstream media journalist Edward Klein which vaulted to the top of the New York Times best seller list.
Hello! You’d never know this if you only followed the dominant media. Not a word. No interviews on NBC, CBS, ABC or CNN. To the NY times’ credit, they just solidified the integrity of their best-seller list – maybe because Klein had been editor on the NY Times Magazine, former editor of Newsweek and a contributor to Vanity Fair and Parade. His resume trumped their ideological beliefs.
‘Amateur’ has been described as a reporter’s book, being buttressed by 200 interviews, many from Obama insiders who know him best, revealing him as one editor says, “a callow, thin skinned, arrogant president, with messianic dreams of grandeur supported by a cast of true believers, all of them united by leftist policies…”
His personal physician believes “he doesn’t have the sense of humanity I expected.” Reverend Jeremiah Wright is on audiotape saying an Obama friend sent an email offering $150,000 for his silence; that Obama knew a lot about Islam, but little about Christianity; and that it was “hard to tell” if Obama converted to Christianity; but if he did, Wright told him he “wouldn’t have to renounce his Islamic background.”
Klein believes the current state of affairs is not the fault of Republicans, but Obama, who has been “more divisive – more partisan than any president we’ve seen in modern history.”
The facts have been out there. Two hundred sources! The truth was “A Road not taken” by the established media. Michelle Obama and this writer are in total agreement about how the President sees himself: “His work as a community organizer was really a defining moment in his life – not just his career. It helped him decide how he would impact the world.”
Words mean something. Here’s a person who has defined his life’s work by the training and influences he had as a 23 year old. Who were these people who shaped young Obama as a future president, and his dreams of grandeur as a world leader?
John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.
