Polarizer In Chief
09/14/2010 06:49 PM ET
The Presidency: If any doubts remain that President Obama isn't the "post-partisan" uniter as advertised, witness his oddly personal attack on House Minority Leader John Boehner last week.
Acting more like a hired gun, the president stormed into Boehner's Ohio district to single out the Republican leader for rebuke, disparaging him as a country club elitist who cares only about "millionaires."
He called Boehner out no fewer than 10 times during a speech to Democrat supporters, an extraordinary display of political trench warfare for a sitting president — especially one who's not even up for re-election.
Boehner, on the other hand, is up for re-election — to an 11th term. And his return to Congress amid an expected GOP landslide would put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's gavel in his hands.
Thus Boehner represents a major threat to Obama's agenda for radical change — and must be frozen as a target, personalized, ridiculed and polarized, according to the radical Alinsky playbook Obama is following.
"A few weeks ago, the Republican leader of the House came here to Cleveland and offered his party's answer to our economic challenges. Now, it would be one thing if he had admitted his party's mistakes during the eight years that they were in power, if they had gone off for a while and meditated, and come back and offered a credible new approach to solving our country's problems," Obama said.
"But that's not what happened," he added. "There were no new policies from Mr. Boehner. There were no new ideas. There was just the same philosophy that we had already tried during the decade that they were in power — the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place: Cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations."
Here, Obama applies two of the late Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals:" "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it," and "Ridicule the opposition." "Mr. Boehner," the target, should have gone off and "meditated" on his and his party's "mistakes," Obama snipes, instead of criticizing his own policies.
Alinsky, who despised American capitalism, also advised community organizers like Obama to co-opt the middle class in their revolution to bring about "economic justice." If they could get the middle class, along with the poor, to envy the rich, they could control the largest voting bloc and seize all the power they'd need.
"Rub raw the resentments of the people," Alinsky espoused. And few do that better than Obama.
"I believe we ought to make the tax cuts for the middle class permanent, (but) the Republican leader of the House doesn't want to stop there," Obama said. "Make no mistake: He and his party believe we should also give a permanent tax cut to the wealthiest 2% of Americans."
"So let me be clear to Mr. Boehner and everybody else: We should not hold middle-class tax cuts hostage any longer," he went on. "They're asking us to settle for a status quo of stagnant growth and a shrinking middle class."
Obama then mischaracterized the across-the-board Bush tax cuts as "tax cuts for the wealthy" (Bush cut taxes on everyone who paid them) and argued "we can't afford the $700 billion price tag" that might be the effect of making them permanent.
Of course that estimate is over 10 years and pales compared with the $3 trillion that extending the Bush cuts for everyone but the "rich" would cost.
It also should be noted that $700 billion over 10 years is dwarfed by what Obama blew on his $862 billion nonstimulating stimulus in a single year. Moreover, his figure is based on static revenue scoring that erroneously assumes upper-income tax cuts won't expand the tax base.
There was more class warfare with Obama casting his failed stimulus plan as a choice between creating construction jobs and supporting the working class or giving breaks to the wealthy. With such dogma, the "post-partisan candidate" showed his true colors.
Obama is a demagogue, perhaps the most radical to occupy the Oval Office, as we warned during the 2008 campaign. We pointed out, for example, how Obama rallied Nevada supporters to attack GOP opponent John McCain and his supporters: "I want you to argue with them and get in their face," he said, in a naked attempt to "fan hostilities," something else Alinsky advised from his bag of agitation tricks.
This is the moral compass Obama operates by.
Slowly it's dawning even on some of the academics and media types who exalted him as the next messiah. The Washington Post recently quoted a bunch of academics hypothesizing why the president is "far more polarizing than many recognized."
"During the campaign, candidate Obama talked about the need to put the partisan divisions of the past behind," the Post said. "His victory fostered discussion about whether the country had turned a corner after years of bitter partisanship."
"Such notions appear badly off the mark at this point in his presidency," the article concludes, citing analysis by the American Political Science Association.
Apparently, it's not just independent voters expressing regrets about buying into Obama's "hope and change." His mocking tone, divide-and-conquer tactics and polarizing agenda are not what many bargained for.
CEOs who assumed he was a moderate and supported his campaign are now turned off by the barrage of anti-business barbs. Obama seems at constant war with Wall Street "fat cats," "greedy lenders" and corporate "polluters."
He is following almost to the letter the blueprint for socialist revolution drafted by his hero Alinsky, the father of community organizing. We reported his intense training at Industrial Areas Foundation and other Alinsky stations of the cross. This information was out there, but the media elite never pressed Obama on any of it.
Tragically for the nation, McCain never made an issue of his radical past, either. Instead, he legitimized it, as he did at the Columbia University debate, when he said: "I respect community organizers, and Sen. Obama's record there is outstanding."
Now we are stuck with a president who seems to be against everything ordinary Americans stand for, forcing major legislation down their throats whether they like it or not. From the medical overhaul to the Ground Zero mosque, his positions are wildly unpopular. We will pick up these concerns next Wednesday, when our weekly series continues.
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