Another Alinskyite emerges from Obama's past
Disguised man in 'Dreams from My Father' may be 1st link to Ayers
by Aaron Klein
Monday, June 04, 2012
wnd.com
In her New York Times column this past weekend, Maureen Dowd quotes Barack Obama’s boss at his 1980s community organizing job in Chicago, one Jerry Kellman.
Dowd, however, failed to note that in his book, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama disguised Kellman’s name by using a so-called composite character, a fictional “Marty Kaufman,” to depict his former boss.
Perhaps Kellman’s name may have been masked because, it turns out, he is an Alinskyite who may have served as the link that introduced Obama to Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers.
The title of Dowd’s column, “Dreaming of a Superhero,” channeled the namesake of Obama’s book.
In the column, Dowd quotes Kellman’s observation of Obama: “He was not unwilling to take risks, but was just this strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death and then take a dramatic risk at the end. He was reluctant to do confrontation, to push the other side because it might blow up – and it might. But one thing Alinsky did understand was that within reason, once something blows up, to a certain degree it doesn’t hurt, it helps.”
Kellman gave those remarks to David Maraniss, author of the new biography, “Barack Obama: The Story.”
Kellman was the chief of the Developing Communities Project, or DCP, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago’s South Side. He brought in Obama in 1985 to serve as the DCP’s director and a lead organizer. It was Obama’s first job in Chicago.
In Obama’s own autobiography, he relates his first job in Chicago as a community organizer and claims the name of his boss at DCP was “Marty Kaufman.” Kaufman doesn’t exist. The DCP chief at the time was Kellman, who was reportedly trained by Saul Alinsky himself.
The DCP, with Obama as director, received two grants. One grant was for $40,000 in 1985 and another for $33,000 in 1986 from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a group that promoted Alinsky-style organizations.
While Obama was at the DCP, in 1988, he was brought in to the coalition of a project associated with Ayers and founded by Ayers’ father.
The Weatherman terrorist earlier resurfaced after going underground amid multiple criminal charges related to his extremist activities. The charges were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct.
In 1988, in response to a Chicago summit that documented the poor quality of education in the city, Chicago United, a group founded by Ayers’ father, the late Thomas Ayers, formed a community advocacy coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABC. Thomas Ayers was the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison.
When he created his ABC coalition in June 1988, Thomas Ayers included Obama in the coalition as the DCP’s organizer. It was Obama’s role in the DCP, it seems, that provided him with the opportunity to join ABC.
The contact for the ABC coalition, on which Obama served, was none other than William Ayers himself, who at the time was at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ayers started attending the ABC coalition’s monthly meetings, held, according to ABC documents reviewed by WND, over breakfasts of eggs, sausages, rolls, fruit and coffee in a conference room on the 57th floor of Chicago’s First National Bank downtown headquarters. |
