Camp Alinsky Obama

Hallo Mutter, hallo Vater
Alles gehen zu, Lager Alinsky Obama

The lead on an October 3, 2008, Investor’s Business Daily editorial reads “Voters coast-to-coast are receiving e-mails from the Obama campaign encouraging them to sign up to learn pre-election agitation tactics at “Camp Obama.” Red kerchiefs, anyone?”

The unsolicited pitch goes like this: “Camp Obama attendees will receive real world organizing experience that will have a direct impact on this election. Graduates of Camp Obama will go on to become Deputy Field Organizers who will lead this campaign to victory in crucial battleground states around the country.”

The letter continues, “By participating in Camp Obama you’ll get the kind of experience that Barack got as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he learned that real change happens from the bottom up.”

While the letter neglects to identify the source of that “experience,” a slide on a camp blog linked to the Obama Web site offers a clue. Underneath a “Welcome to Camp Obama” banner, a trainer at Obama headquarters in Chicago is seen speaking next to a wipe board with the words “Saul Alinsky” (right) scrawled across it.

The IBD editorial continues that another slide depicts “a camp trainer identified as Mike Kruglik”:¹

Kruglik happens to be the Alinsky disciple who first taught Obama hardball organizing tactics on the South Side. He was Obama’s boss in the ’80s. Kruglik now works for the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, which trains and deploys radicals across the country.

David Freddoso, in his book The Case Against Barack Obama, “declared Obama ‘the undisputed master of agitation’.”

IBD writes “Obama calls his Alinskyite experience ‘the best education I ever had’,” adding

Now he’s passing it on to his groupies. He recently told supporters in Nevada, a state that will be hotly contested, to sharpen their elbows in the final lap of the race. Confront Republicans, he said, and “get in their faces.”

“Be absolutely ruthless,” adds Camp Obama director Jocelyn Woodards,² who leads the intensive two-day training course for campers in Chicago.

In the Alinsky model, organizing is code for agitating. For revolution. He had no patience for liberals who merely talked of change.

Supplementing ACORN

The IBD editorial continues:

Dirty street fighting is at the heart of Obama’s organizing. While he stands above the fray, his minions at ACORN are threatening, intimidating, confronting and even committing voter fraud. This is Alinsky’s end-justifies-means morality in action. Whatever it takes to win the revolution.

Obama needs more agitators, so he’s set up these camps to train them.

ACORN has the minority communities covered, while the camps are churning out mostly coed organizers. The Chicago program has already trained some 2,000 agitators to go back to their college campuses and reproduce more Obama clones.

No campaign has been successful at mobilizing students to vote en masse. But Obama hired the founder of MTV’s Rock the Vote to organize students and train them to use Alinsky tactics on campuses in battleground states.

They have been training these students since the primaries. They in turn are registering fellow students in droves to vote, while creating massive phone banks to help get out the vote on Election Day. Meanwhile, ACORN is registering thousands of minorities to vote in key states.

Camp Obama, successfully creating “community activists” since January 2006

Actually, IBD is incorrect in saying “They have been training these students since the primaries.”

The reality is that Obama has been training these student campus activists since January 2006 — funded by Obama’s Hopefund PAC — which also, by the way, contributed generously in 2006 and 2007 to a number of Congressional candidates (many of which are superdelegates) and Democratic state committees (whose states voted in the early primaries).

As of June 30, 2005, after six months in operation, Hopefund Inc. “receipts totaled $851,674 with Obama traveling the nation to headline events and collect checks,” Lynn Sweet reported October 27, 2005, in the Chicago Sun-Times.

In January 2006, “Obama’s Hopefund will bankroll a ’school’ to train first-time campaign workers and place them in campaigns across the country,” Sweet wrote, with the “recruiting focus of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ program [to] be young African Americans and Latinos” and the “aim of the week-long campaign school … to ‘create this whole class of young, talented staffers who can work their way up in the Democratic Party.’”

“Obama’s Hopefund is ‘not the beginning of some run for higher office. That is not what this is’,” Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told Sweet.

However, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote November 2, 2005, that Obama was “polishing his credentials for a potential national run down the line.”

Hopefund was to “partner with EMILY’s List, which has significant experience in staff training, to get the campaign school off the ground,” Cillizza wrote.

Camp Obama 2007

Lynn Sweet wrote May 3, 2007, at the Chicago Sun-Times:

Camp Obama is a training program — run by campaign professionals — being launched by the campaign. People who do well in the four-day training will be put in the pipeline for internships and paid jobs. Training topics will include canvassing, phone banking and recruiting volunteers.

David Schaper wrote June 13, 2007, for NPR, that “four-day training sessions, with about 50 volunteers in each weekly session” were “already under way in Chicago”. Volunteers, who were mostly “young adults and college students”, only had to pay for transportation and lodging.

Hans Riemer,³ the Obama campaign’s national youth vote director, said

We are training them, teaching them how to be effective, showing them what their role is in our strategy to win the election … We’re taking people from raw enthusiasm to capable organizers.

In the September 4, 2007, Chicago Sun-Times, Abdon M. Pallasch reported that Camp Obama director Jocelyn Woodards, “an Obama campaign staffer who used to work for the Democratic National Committee,” told campers:

The next tip is to be absolutely ruthless, … We want you to be determined, ambitious, take a risk. … It’s not enough for you to be a supporter of Barack. You have to go out and build an organization that will deliver votes for Barack Obama. … We want you to stop thinking about Barack Obama and be Barack Obama.

Pallasch added:

“Listening, listening, listening. Listening is the No. 1 tool,” she says. They hold a mock Iowa caucus in which campers learn to try to lure other candidates’ supporters to Obama during re-alignment periods.

Whether they are going on to Iowa or other early primary states or back to their home states or neighborhoods, they need to start pinpointing community leaders and clergy, and start building an actual organization, Woodards tells them.

Allison Riggio wrote October 3, 2007, in the Chicago Journal that Woodards said “Camp Obama is for beginners, or “Campaigning 101″:

Campers learn grassroots campaign tactics during their training, similar to the campaigning Sen. Obama did in the 1980s when he first came to Chicago as an organizer. He worked to improve meager living conditions with a local community group, and Camp Obama attendants learn similar techniques to advance the senator’s campaign on a local level. The camp was originally geared toward college students to help the campaign team recruit summer interns, but volunteers showed strong enough interest to extend the camp and open up to volunteers of all ages, Woodards said.

“We decided to keep the training going and to combine the elements of community organizing with the basics of political campaigns,” she said. “Barack’s own background as a community organizer makes it extremely conducive to combine these two.” …

Camp Obama attendees are encouraged to join the My.BarackObama.com community in order to stay in touch after the two-day session is over. The groups can communicate via the Internet to discuss ideas and strategies that are being implemented in their various communities across the country.

Activist Intimidation 101?

Cinie at Cinie’s World wrote September 18, 2008:

Many a Barack Obama supporter is likely to face rejection on a grand scale, not to mention increased potential for a good, old-fashioned beatdown, if they do what Obama tells them to do. At a TelePrompTed rally in Elko, Nevada yesterday [video below], the good senator ended his scripted remarks by encouraging people to “get in the faces” of their neighbors and friends and make his case for him.

Jay Nordlinger at NRO asked

Oh, come on, when have they not been in our faces? In classrooms, at the movies, in bookstores, on television shows . . . I have been to after-concert parties, which are supposed to center on music and whatnot. And, while you’re virtually at the threshold — before you have your coat off — they are on you about Bush, the Downing Street Memo, arsenic in the water . . .

I don’t think you have to worry: They’ve got the get-in-their-faces thing pretty well down. The Left suffers from a lot. Shyness, restraint, or decorum — no.

The GOP’s Audacity Watch commented

That isn’t “change.” That isn’t leadership. By calling on supporters to try and intimidate their Independent and Republican neighbors, that is definitely not in the spirit of bipartisanship and political healing. In fact, it is just another example of Obama’s “Chicago-style” political training. It is another example of Obama’s inexperience, desperation and lack of maturity. Instead of vigorous discussion — or, better yet, a series of town hall debates with John McCain — Obama encourages this kind of juvenile, confrontational behavior. It is just one more reason why Barack Obama is not ready to lead this country.

Also be sure to read RBO’s September 1, 2008, article The ever-calculating Barack Obama. Alinsky’s bamboozler, okie-doker, flim-flam man, as well as the RBO classic Time to crack Obama’s ACORN.

See next page for Notes and Article links

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