'Ruthless' for Obama

[darrels joy]

'Ruthless' for Obama

WEST LOOP | Intensive course gets volunteers fired up, turns them into activists


September 4, 2007


BY ABDON M. PALLASCH Political Reporter/apallasch@suntimes.com

"The next tip is to be absolutely ruthless," Jocelyn Woodards tells the campers. "We want you to be determined, ambitious, take a risk."

No toasted marshmallows here. This is the second day of Camp Obama, a two-day (sometimes four-day) intensive training course in becoming an activist to help get Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) elected president.

"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," Woodards tells the 40 campers -- most in their 20s -- from around the country gathered at the campaign's national headquarters in the West Loop.

Jocelyn Woodards, director of Camp Obama, trains Barack Obama supporters Sunday to campaign for the Illinois senator.
(Keith Hale/Sun-Times)


Obama is not like other candidates, and part of this training is learning to mimic the methods he used before he was an elected official -- back when he was a community organizer in Chicago following the textbook of legendary agitator Saul Alinsky.

Saul Alinsky wanted results
Rivals of Obama know that while he may at times appear to channel Martin Luther King Jr., his methods sometimes give evidence of his allegiance to Alinsky, who shunned starry-eyed idealists and recommended purging do-gooders from organizations. Alinsky wanted results. And his methods often forced the hands of elected officials.

It's not enough to want to help others, Woodards says. These campers need to focus on people's self-interests. What do they want? How can Obama help them?

"We want you to stop thinking about Barack Obama and be Barack Obama," she says.

"What do you want?" Woodards asks Katie Murphy, 30, of Bartlett. Since her son was born with a heart defect 10 months ago, Murphy has had to stay home to give him constant care and fight with the insurance company about what expenses are and are not covered. Murphy wants a better national health-care plan.

"I want my brother to come back from Baghdad," says Kris Kolky, 26, of Michigan, who just finished law school.

There are campers from Maine and California, African immigrants and a woman from Kentucky who was considering leaving the country as her job went non-union and her pay dropped from $12 to $10 an hour. They have paid their way to Chicago because they think Obama can be an agent of change.

Woodards, an Obama campaign staffer who used to work for the Democratic National Committee, tells the campers to break up into groups of two and spend 20 minutes at a time just listening to each other.

"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.

Building alliances
Just about all the candidates' campaigns do some version of this volunteer training but others don't have the candidates' own backgrounds to draw on in mapping out the training regimen. Alinsky had been dead for a decade when Obama came to organize in Chicago in the '80s, but his disciples were here ready to train him as Woodards is ready to train the volunteers.
"The first thing I did when I came back to Arizona was to join a volunteer group called Arizonans for Obama," said Alice Cho, a graduate of a camp held here two weeks ago. She has been going to every informal Democratic gathering she can in her up-to-now very Republican state, passing out Obama buttons and trying to build relationships and a structure that will last beyond this election.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/540781,CST-NWS-camp04.article

Lord Community Organizer

San Fran., Cali.

STL, Mo.

NY, NY

Burbank, Cali.

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.

Such potential new voters don’t show up in the national polls of “likely voters,” which show a relatively tight race, because they’ve never voted and don’t show on past rolls.

If they turn out at the polls on Nov. 4, it could translate into a landslide for Obama.

If he can garner better than 50% of the popular vote, he can claim a mandate for his radical agenda.

What’s more, all these first-time minority and student voters wouldn’t vote for just Obama. They’d also more than likely vote down-ballot for other Democrats, padding their majorities in Congress.

If Democrats score supermajorities, filibuster-proofing the Senate, Obama could get most of his agenda rammed through in the first 100 days, surely in the first two years, before Americans could get a chance to check Democrat power in the midterm election of 2010.

How much damage could they do? Well, look at how much damage the Clintonistas did. We’re now seeing the financial fruits of their social experiment to apply affirmative action to the lending business. Obama plans to conduct a far more radical social experiment.

Few during this long campaign have wanted to talk about Obama’s days as a community organizer or his ties to radicals, because they didn’t want to raise the S word. Well, guess what? The avoidance has given him license to apply his organizing skills on a mass scale.

It made the difference in the primaries when he beat the Clinton machine, and it may now make the difference in the general election.

Not calling attention to Alinsky and the other socialists behind the Obama movement has even allowed creation of camps to indoctrinate American youth.

If John McCain hopes to win, he’ll have to act as ruthlessly as Obama’s campers.

He can start by exposing for voters the socialist underpinnings of community organizing.

Pat: One more thing … ALL of this “organizing” wasn’t free or cheap. It cost incredible amounts of money over a long stretch of time.
Were this a republican the MSM et al would be ALL OVER this shit. ALL OVER it.

No, Gov. Sarah Palin says a prayer inside her church for the success and protection of our troops in war, and the video is released as some damning testimony to her ‘fanatic’ influences. Charlie Gibson feels the NEED to cross examine her as if she were some lunatic holy roller.

Obama camp

Cambodian genocide

Power territory & rice

Pat: Last note here as a sidebar … I want you to remember. Dick Durbin compared OUR troops to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge … I want you to NEVER forget that … because I won’t.
http://patdollard.com/2008/10/the-hussein-khmer-rouge-ruthless-for-obama-with-videos/