Newt Gingrich thinks it was a mistake for Sarah Palin and Rudy Guiliani to mock Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer because it made Obama’s radicalism seem trivial and “Obama is not a trivial person.”
“Obama is the most serious radical threat to traditional America ever to occupy the White House.” It would have been better if Republican leaders “had gotten up and said, here is what [Obama] was teaching, and they had taken the audience through the five principles of [radical organizer Saul] Alinsky.” Such a discussion “would have sobered the country. It wasn’t a funny thing. It was a profound insight into how radical Obama is.”
There are a couple of things to unpack in here. First is obviously an examination of what Gingrich really means by “traditional America.” The term calls to mind Sarah Palin’s racially-loaded “real Americans” line, but Gingrich is speaking in the context of Saul Alinsky’s teaching. It’s hard to separate Alinsky for race-issues because the heart of his work was advocacy for the needs of those living in black ghettoes, but Gingrich could be more concerned about Alinsky’s philosophy and methods than his work on the behalf of African-Americans.
Whatever Gingrich truly means, his seemingly insane comments about the president are consistent with the nationwide movement of Republican governors and legislators to disenfranchise as many people in our ghettoes as possible. This is being done by new laws that require state-issued photo identification cards at polling stations. These laws obviously make it impossible to vote if you don’t have a driver’s license, passport, or ID card, and the highest concentration of such people are young blacks and latinos in our inner cities who do not drive or travel abroad and have no need for a state-issued ID card.
Nearly everyone I employed during my time at ACORN lacked a state-issued photo ID. Many of them had a photo ID, but they were usually issued by a high school or technical school. One of my biggest problems in hiring people was getting the required documentation, including a Social Security card. This is just how our inner cities are, and if you think poor urban people should have the same right to vote that you enjoy, you should oppose these photo ID laws vigorously.
There was nothing radical about ACORN when I worked there. We were focused on getting poor urban blacks registered to vote so that their voices would be heard and, hopefully, politicians would be elected that would be sympathetic to their needs and concerns. The Republicans went after and destroyed ACORN because they did not like how successful they were in getting out the urban minority vote. It’s all part of their larger voter suppression effort, first made famous in Florida during the 2000 elections.
Because Saul Alinsky worked to give voice to the dispossessed, the Republicans see him as a fearsome and radical person. Alinsky certainly embraced the “radical” label, but I don’t think he was any more radical than Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. In other words, unless you think we should go back to Jim Crow it’s probably time to reassess Alinsky’s radicalism. On racial issues, at least, the country has accepted his wisdom. Except, increasingly, that seems to no longer be true. The Republicans are now pursuing a Jim Crow-lite voter suppression strategy. That used to be mainstream. But in 2012, I think it’s radical.
So, really, it’s not the president or Alinsky who are radical threats to traditional America. It’s Gingrich and the Republicans who are trying to overturn forty-five years of civil and voting rights. Newt can spout off as much as he likes, but I know what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.
