Obama: What, Me Socialist?

Obama: What, Me Socialist?

on Wed, 20 Nov 2013

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama made light of accusations that he is a socialist. "You've got to meet real socialists," he joked in an appearance at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council. "You'll have a sense of what a socialist is." Obama's attempt to distinguish his own polished, market-savvy façade from more obvious, outspoken socialism may have fooled some in the room. It would not have fooled Saul Alinsky.

In Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, the primer for radical socialists on the American left for several decades, the master community organizer advised activists to tone down their rhetoric and work within the political system where possible. "What is the alternative to working 'inside' the system?" he asked. "A mess of rhetorical garbage about 'Burn the system down!'...Lenin was a pragmatist," he noted.

Following Alinsky's advice, community organizers began to accede to the norms and expectations of their surroundings, quietly exploiting and expanding a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, suggesting small steps toward radical change until people were ready for more drastic measures. That is the entire strategic design of Obamacare, which the left saw as a pseudo-private way-station to socialized medicine.

The difference between Barack Obama and the overt socialists on the American fringe is that Obama is a political success who has managed to obtain vast political power through campaign after campaign of pretensions and lies. Unfortunately for him, socialist ideas in wrapped in the rhetoric of freedom are no more realistic than the pipe dreams he thought he had left behind in the pews of Jeremiah Wright's church.