Started as a comment to BooMan’s fp story – President Obama conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.
Barack is not a politician first and foremost.
He’s a community activist exploring the
viability of politics to make change.– Michelle Obama, 2005
Barack Obama wrote this article for Illinois Issues in 1988, while he was a community organizer in Chicago. It later became part of a book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City by Barack Obama
Power Analysis
Relationships built on self interest
Corps – Banks – Utilities – Xxxx
$$ –> mayor –> citizen
« click for more info
Barack Obama teaches power analysisJonathan Chait calls this The Obama Method and uses a foreign policy situation as an example.
Consider how Obama explained his approach toward Iran during a recent interview with Newsweek:
“Now, will it work? We don’t know. And I assure you, I’m not naive about the difficulties of a process like this. If it doesn’t work, the fact that we have tried will strengthen our position in mobilizing the international community, and Iran will have isolated itself, as opposed to a perception that it seeks to advance that somehow it’s being victimized by a U.S. government that doesn’t respect Iran’s sovereignty.”
This is a perfect summation of Obama’s strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries’ constituents as well as third parties.
Obama: From power analyser to prime minister of America | BBC News |
My favourite photograph of Barack Obama is the one his conservative critics always bring out when they are trying to demonstrate that he has links to radical movements. He is standing at a blackboard sometime during his period as a community organiser in Chicago, doing a “power analysis”.
Under the heading “Relationships built on self interest” he is drawing lines from the word “corp” to “banks” to “utilities” – and a fourth word, slightly obscured, that we’ll come back to.
Out of the word “corp” – for corporations – he extrudes a line to a dollar sign, and thence to the word “mayor” and below that “citizen”. This is the method of power analysis taught by Chicago social activist Saul Alinsky.
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In the UK, the Alinsky doctrine is practised by the growingly influential Citizens Organising Foundation (COF) [now called Citizens UK], which runs London Citizens and has campaigned successfully for a living wage for cleaners in London, unsuccessfully for an “earned amnesty” for illegal migrants, and is now trying to cap interest rates at 10%.I once asked Neil Jameson, who runs the COF, what Mr Obama was actually doing in that photograph. Neil was trained by the same people who trained the US president, all those years ago.
Power analysis, he told me, involves three questions: Who can stop us? Who can help us? Who has the money? Once you understand the self-interest of these groups, you can use it to try and either persuade or force them to do what you want them to do.
If we read the Obama presidency according to these questions, much of the last year becomes intelligible – though that does not change whether it becomes acceptable, either to that large minority of Americans that voted Republican, or to the disgruntled Democrat grassroots who wanted Mr Obama to go further.
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Who can stop him? He knows that – First, the Republicans in Congress. Second the conservative grassroots who are mobilising in large numbers against every initiative. Third major corporations, such as the big Pharma and healthcare lobbies. Fourth, high finance.That’s virtually the same list of forces who, by 1937, were able to force FDR away from the more radical aspects of the New Deal and it is a list that goes a long way to explaining why Mr Obama’s presidency looks nothing like FDR’s.
Much of Mr Obama’s first year has been spent trying to negotiate a power-relationship with the groups I’ve listed, just as in East London or Birmingham, Alinsky-ite organisers spend much of their time trying to persuade, cajole and pressure the people who fit the answer “who can stop us?”.
On health care reform, faced with the potential opposition of Republicans, centrist Democrats, big Pharma and conservative sections of the public, Mr Obama compromised.
On Afghanistan, though his instinct was clearly to draw down involvement, he has gone with the “surge, build and drawdown” strategy that worked in Iraq (and which he opposed).
Above all with the banks he has kept much of the same team that ran the finance system in the run-up to the crash; and stuck with the Bush/Paulson essential plan – a risk-free bailout for Wall Street that left the CEOs in position and never touched the capital of shareholders.
Much of this has outraged that set of people who you would list as answer to the question: “who is with us?” That is because, for now, there is no danger that they will not be with him.
Odd Couple? U.S. Catholic Bishops and Community Organizers
In article a photo of Bishop Bernard J. Sheil of Chicago and community organizing founder Saul Alinsky in the 1940s.
Alinsky’s tactics were often unorthodox. In Rules for Radicals he wrote,
[t]he job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.'” According to Alinsky, “the hysterical instant reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer’s] credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation.”
Alinsky therefore became an intimate of many important clerics, including the eminent theologian Jacques Maritain, and Alinsky’s example certainly played a role in the emergence of a populist brand of Catholic social activism in the postwar years.
In my opinion, reminded by the words of Michelle Obama, Barack Obama is still the community organizer and doing what he knows best: following the Alinsky Method. It will be interesting how close president Barack Obama and the present pope Francis are aligned on social issues and global warming. The divergence will be in the implementation of military force across the globe, drone killings and the covert might of the US in forcing regime change. Of course, pope Francis has some differences on the wealth and unbridled power of capitalism.
