As the DNC and the White House desperately attempt to marginalize and bully the majority of Americans who oppose the government takeover of healthcare, they’re increasingly relying on their media allies to paint the widespread, genuine opposition as “manufactured” outrage voiced by “mobs” of “angry radicals.”
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to conclude this knee-jerk demonization may represent an acute case of projection. Today’s Democratic party is led by a man who spent much of his adult life specializing in the art of public agitation. Acting as a top organizer for radical groups like ACORN, Barack Obama devoted years to prodding underprivileged Chicagoans to channel their political anger by orchestrating activist mob scenes–designed to coerce businesses and elected officials.
In March 2007, the left-leaning New Republic printed a lengthy profile of Obama, entitled “The Agitator.” The entire piece is worth reading, but several excerpts stand out:
…After Obama arrived [in Chicago], he sat down for a cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a fellow organizer named Mike Kruglik. Obama’s work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight the city for things like job banks and asbestos removal. His teachers were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago-trained social scientist. At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation”– making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”
…[Organizer] Kruglik remembers this episode as an example of why, in ten years of training organizers, Obama was the best student he ever had. He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation…he could be aggressive and confrontational.
…Obama had already been applying Alinsky’s core concepts–rigorous analysis of an opponent’s strengths, a hardheaded understanding of self-interest as a fundamental organizing principle, a knack for agitating people to act, and a streetwise sense of when a raw show of power is necessary…
Last year, Stanley Kurtz (famed “right-wing hatchet man/smear merchant”) authored a revealing column on Obama’s extensive ties to Madeline Talbott, ringleader of some of the most effective/destructive left-wing mob campaigns ever waged:
One key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott – an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies. Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” – organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.
…And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama. When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.
In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.
More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.
Now that ordinary Americans are rising up to voice their concerns before Congress tries to ram through a complex and risky healthcare overhaul, the party run by our Organizer-in-Chief has resorted to slandering those citizens and dismissing the authenticity of their worries.
Obama knows what manufactured outrage looks like. After all, he spent years as a skilled outrage manufacturer. Today’s frustration, however, is organic, real, and growing. Therefore, from Obama’s perspective, it’s extraordinarily threatening and must be stopped at all costs.