Community Organizer For The World

Byron York, on the mysterious international philosophy of Barack Obama:

Obama the organizer spent most of his time teaching community members how to put pressure on the city government, or on various wealthy corporations, to give them money. Obama’s organizers could be confrontational, or they could be conciliatory — Obama favored the latter — but the whole idea was to make powerful people feel guilty, or embarrassed, or annoyed enough to give them things.

Obama, born in 1961, felt that he missed the great days of the civil rights movement. Becoming an organizer was the next-best thing he could find. But his successes were small; he wanted to redistribute wealth and resources on a large scale, and he could only accomplish so much by protesting outside the housing project management office. That was the reason he ultimately left organizing to go to law school and run for public office.

That’s not to say that Obama left no legacy as an organizer. The colleagues I talked with all remembered him fondly. Several said he inspired them to improve their lives. But these were all people who shared his goals. They wanted to believe in him and in their shared enterprise.

Does Mahmoud Ahmedinejad fit into that category? The Taliban? Kim Jong-il?

Now that Obama is the president of the United States, he is the power figure, not the supplicant or the protester. Certainly a president still needs to convince foreign leaders to give him what he wants, but when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world, Obama isn’t the underdog. His years on the South Side are little help.

Unfortunately, they’re all he has.

28 thoughts on “Community Organizer For The World”

  1. “Obama the organizer spent most of his time teaching community members how to put pressure on the city government, or on various wealthy corporations, to give them money.”

    What a noble profession and what a noble fellow! A regular Spartacus.

    No, wait; Spartacus was PRO-liberty.

  2. Anybody who’s read Tom Wolfe’s scathing Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers knows exactly what a community organizer does and what he/she is…

  3. I think that’s actually an unfair criticism of Obama — Jim, if you read this, I hope you sat down first.

    Being a successful community organizer does, indeed, mean that your goal is to make the powerful feel guilty, afraid, or whatever. But the means of getting that done involve organizing people and getting them to pay persistent attention to a task, and coordinate, when you have almost no incentive to offer other than your persuasion that this is ultimately in their best interests. You can’t pay them, you can’t promise them (much) loot or power. You really have to be an unusually persuasive leader, and good at getting fractious people to coordinate action and agree on at least limited common goals.

    I would actually see this as one of the few positives on Obama’s resume. At one point, he could organize people with dissimilar agendas using nothing more than the power of persuasion. That’s a very useful skill in a leader. It’s true the President can dispose of awesome power, in principle, but you get far more done if you can persuade and trade, and use of those skills marks our best leaders more than mere intransigence or boldness.

    Really, it’s Obama’s time at law school and on the university faculty and in the Illinois and US legislature that I think detract from his resume. Those are the places where logrolling, cynicism, being PC, pleasing arbitrary authority, and elitist snobbery were fostered. Had he really been just a “community organizer” instead of a constitutional law lecturer and academic/legislative bullshit artist, I’d have more respect for him, and more hope for his term as President.

  4. I’d wager that powers of persuasion are more relevant to community organizer attempting to foster support from the bottom up than to an executive implementing policy from the top down. A community organizer can get by with the know how to tie loose ends of string together to keep loosely bound factions from drifting too far from a limited goal. A president needs to know how to knit a whole sweater.

  5. Yes, but Josh, you’re mistaking the President for the CEO of America. He’s not. Aside from national security issues abroad, where he tends to have a relatively unfettered hand in setting policy — one reason Presidents tend to love foreign policy — he has very limited power to impose an agenda domestically. It’s not like he’s the CEO appointed by the board, and he can run things as he sees fit, with the board having the ultimate overseeing authority in the form of the ability to fire him or keep him.

    The only way the President can really get stuff done domestically is to persuade co-equal power centers — at least, they view themselves as co-equal, very jealously so — in Congress to go along. Obama may want and intend all he wants to “reform health care” and get “climate change” policy in place, but he is utterly helpless without Congressional action.

    And as we are seeing, Congress is very jealous of its prerogatives. They are not going to simply meekly pass what the President wants. They never do. They have their own agenda. Or, I should say, agendas, since really there are multiple power centers within Congress, ranging from the Speaker and Majority Leader, the majority caucuses (e.g. the “Blue Dogs” right now, the “Reagan Democrats” in the 80s, et cetera), and the minority, particularly in the Senate.

    No President has been successful without being able to cajole, browbeat, and horse trade with Congress to get what he wants. Different Presidents have tried different strategies, of course. Reagan famously appealed “over Congress’s head” by using his immense personal popularity with the voters. Reagan had huge coattails; you could get elected by merely saying “I stand with the President” and lose your seat by voting against him. Other Presidents, with shorter coattails, relied on artul compromise or persuasion.

    Obama has no coattails that I can see, and I doubt he ever will. So the only way he could get things done is by clever persuasion and management of Congress.

    But, interestingly, he has completely failed to do just that. Really, I’m stunned by the lack of competence he has exhibited in managing Congress. He’s been by turns imperious and disinterested, with terrible results. Ask yourself this: on his signature legislation, health care reform, on his particular passion, universal coverage and a public option, with majorities of his own party in Congress not seen since Lyndon Johnson, can he even get what he wants? It doesn’t look that way. It looks like the only thing he’s going to get from Congress is his name on the deal. “Obama’s health care reform.” But it doesn’t look like he will have effectively written a single word: it will all be a Pelosi Reid Baucus Rangel et cetera production, all the old-guard liberal farts first elected in 1974 and recalling fondly the days of Jimmy Carter and turning down the thermostat.

    Really, Obama has raised the concept of affirmative action tokenism to the Presidential level. He is turning out to be our first modern President who might as well be a ceremonial King, for all the practical governing he’s able to do.

    Make no mistake. It’s not Obama’s leftist agenda that’s running the nation right now. His agenda merely does not stand in the way of what actually is running the nation, which is the leftist agenda of aging 1970s-era boomer Congressional committee chairs. It’s Senators Dodd, Rangel, Schumer and company, Representative Barney Frank, those folks, their vision which is in the driver’s seat. If it were possible to keep Congress as it is but magically replace Obama with, say, John McCain (the “maverick” who is equally inept at management and persuasion), I am not sure much would change.

    By contrast, if as I expect Republicans enjoy a blowout next year and take command of the House and severly damage the donks in the Senate, I expect Obama to be pretty much neutered. (Which, interestingly, I think increases his chance for re-election. He’ll be re-elected more or less on a sympathy/guilt vote and because the voters aren’t ready to turn all three branches over to the GOP. Which means real Presidential leadership needs to wait for President Sarah Palin in 2012.)

  6. Ask yourself this: on his signature legislation, health care reform, on his particular passion, universal coverage and a public option, with majorities of his own party in Congress not seen since Lyndon Johnson, can he even get what he wants? It doesn’t look that way. It looks like the only thing he’s going to get from Congress is his name on the deal. “Obama’s health care reform.” But it doesn’t look like he will have effectively written a single word:

    What exactly do you think Obama wants? I don’t think he much cares who writes the health reform law, as long as it has the elements that he’s been pushing for the last three years (universal coverage, no discrimination for pre-existing conditions, deficit neutrality, etc.), and all of the bills on Capitol Hill have those elements. The fact that he let Congress take the lead in writing the bills (with plenty of behind-the-scenes cajoling — it’s no accident that Baucus’s former chief of staff was picked to be one of Rahm Emmanuel’s deputies) is one reason this effort has gotten further than the Clintons’ did in 1993.

    If health reform passes, and that’s looking fairly likely, future presidents will be studying and trying to duplicate Obama’s legislative strategy.

  7. Jim, whatever you’re smoking is powerful stuff. College students all over the world would love to get their hands on it!

    What exactly do you think Obama wants?

    Not only don’t I know, leading Democrats on the Hill don’t know, either. It’s one of his major incompetences: he has turned holding his cards close into a fetish for oracular inscrutability that undermines his ability to influence the debate. Nobody actually knows what Obama wants, at least in terms of practical detail (not gassy generalities — we’re all in favor of justice, good weather, motherhood and appie pie). Nobody knows what’s most important, where he’ll compromise. It’s a big guessing game. It’s like the old days when Kremlinologists used to ponder the arrangement of dignitaries at May Day parades in Red Square to infer who was in and who was out in the Politburo. Look! Comrade Publc Opzhun is now standing to the left of Comrade Trigger. This must mean…

    As for your elements: not even the Democrats claim any bill has “universal coverage” unless you want to get all Clintonesque about the definition of “universal.” “Deficit neutrality,” especially in view of the doctor fix debacle, is a complete joke. $500 billion cut from Medicare purely through reduction of “waste” and “fraud”? No rationing, no driving doctors (further) out of Medicare through absurd reimbursement rates?

    Ah ha ha ha. Good one! Why not propose $500 billion from selling advertising rights on Ares rockets? Or from the magic money tree Tim Geithner keeps in his office? Just about as plausible.

    But you’re right about the “pre-existing conditions” silliness. Problem is, this isn’t particularly Obama’s hobby horse. It’s a Democratic hobby horse, bought and paid for by their constituents.

    it’s no accident that Baucus’s former chief of staff was picked to be one of Rahm Emmanuel’s deputies

    See? You’re sounding like a Kremlinologist tea-leaf-reader already. Comrade Flunky was invited to Comrade Fnord’s dacha after — not before! — the traditional New Year’s vodka party and was then also served an inferior brand of slivovitz. Big events, gospodin!

    The rest of us can maybe be forgiven for imagining naively that the way we’d know what Comrade Obama wanted was if, maybe, he made some very clear and strong public statements about it. Like, on the television. Or in a press conference. Maybe he could put it on his web site or tweet it. Not like he lacks for a podium, y’know.

    is one reason this effort has gotten further than the Clintons’ did in 1993.

    I think the only reason this effort has gotten further than the Clintons is that the Clintons were better politicians. They actually intended to keep power for themselves (and did so), so they recognized the debacle in time to pull out of the power dive early. By contrast, Team Obama are starry eyed fools who are planning on carrying on their game of chicken with the brick wall of electoral reality right up until the lights go out. Banzai! Don’t worry about that wall! We’ll pass right through it once we reach 85 and the Flux Capacitor kicks in!

    future presidents will be studying and trying to duplicate Obama’s legislative strategy.

    I have very little doubt that future Presidents will be studying Obama’s legislative strategy. You can learn a lot from an autopsy.

  8. There might some value to copying how Obama got elected (though in my view, it involves getting a weak opponent which isn’t something you have a lot of control over). But Jim, you’re just wrong about anyone wanting to copy Obama’s legislative strategy. Not unless they want to commit political suicide.

    Here’s what I’ve been able to glean about Obama’s legislative efforts. First, he’s attempted to move quickly on a host of desired programs. Second, he has failed to get most of his big ticket items passed despite controlling both houses of Congress. But please, Jim, tell us more about this successful legislative strategy that is going to be copied for ages. Let me guess, he’ll lull the opposition into a false sense of security, then when Republicans control Congress and the Presidency, he’ll strike!

  9. The rest of us can maybe be forgiven for imagining naively that the way we’d know what Comrade Obama wanted was if, maybe, he made some very clear and strong public statements about it. Like, on the television. Or in a press conference. Maybe he could put it on his web site or tweet it. Not like he lacks for a podium, y’know.

    He’s done all of those things. For example.

  10. Second, he has failed to get most of his big ticket items passed despite controlling both houses of Congress.

    He’s gotten ARRA through, and a big defense appropriation that killed the previously unkillable F-22. Health reform looks likely. What big ticket item has he tried, and failed, to pass?

    Remember that Democrats have been trying to pass health care reform since Truman. Truman failed. LBJ, with bigger majorities than Obama can dream of, had to back off to only covering seniors. Carter failed. Clinton failed, then retreated to covering children. Even if Obama passes nothing else, if he passes health care reform his legacy in the area of legislative domestic policy will be assured.

  11. Remember that Democrats have been trying to pass health care reform since Truman.

    And yet you all keep pounding sand down the rat holes of health care ignoring the infuriating sighs of the rest of the nation, “uh oh, here they go again”.

    And this hogwash that the bills in congress are deficit neutral is pure and utter B.S. Nancy Pelosi says someone in the CBO says that it is deficit neutral. She also says that someone in the CIA lied to her. Me thinks she listens to intently to the voices in her head.

  12. And this hogwash that the bills in congress are deficit neutral is pure and utter B.S. Nancy Pelosi says someone in the CBO says that it is deficit neutral.

    You don’t have to take Pelosi’s word for it — just ask the CBO.

  13. He’s gotten ARRA through, and a big defense appropriation that killed the previously unkillable F-22.

    You’re right about that. But…er…are you seriously suggesting those are legislative accomplishments? The kind of thing Democrats in close elections next year are going to put in their election ads? Vote for me! I voted for the Stimulus! Tee hee.

    I suspect the F-22 will be another B-1, too. A millstone to hang around the Democrat’s neck when some random military weakness — doesn’t even have to be related to air superiority — embarasses the United States. So, this, too, is an “accomplishment” only in a very short-sighted payback way.

    Health reform looks likely.

    I would say the probabilty of it passing is inversely proportional to the degree to which it deserves the title of “reform.” It certainly will pass if it does essentially nothing but shovel money out to Democrat-donor interest groups, like ARRA. But the more it actually screws with things, the less likely it is to pass, and I’d say the chances of anything at all resembling nationalized health care are between approximately zip and nought.

    What big ticket item has he tried, and failed, to pass?

    Cap ‘n’ trade, card-check, “comprehensive” immigration reform, reform of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ closing Gitmo, for starters.

    Coming up next: Obama (or rather Pelosi and Reid) realize that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire next year — in an election year — hoo boy! Was that Bush a genius or what? — is certain suicide, so ha ha some other election promises will need to reach their sell-by date, or perhaps some new strategy reviews need to be ordered up, with recommendations due in December of 2010.

    But I personally hope not. I would love to see Democrats ram through cap ‘n’ trade and nationalized health care, to take effect immediately, kill even more defense acquisitions, and raise taxes through the roof on “the rich.”

    That way decent men can reconstruct a reasonable American republican political party from the tiny radioactive shards of the modern Democratic Party that remain after the voters take their revenge next year. I realize the Democratic Party is going to commit suicide for sure, I just wish it would do so faster, so we can get back to a real choice between responsible adult parties, and stop having to choose between fascism-lite (it wears a stylish pantsuit instead of jackboots and shiny black leather) and the Grand Ol’ Pork party. Yidge.

  14. You don’t have to take Pelosi’s word for it — just ask the CBO.

    The problem being that the CBO has to score the bill accepting at face value any promises the Democrats make in it, no matter how bald-faced the lie or laughably improbable the assertion.

    It’s like if, when I went for a mortgage loan, the bank had to accept at face value any assertion I happened to make about my future income and expenses. Sure, they’d double check my math, but they have no choice but to believe me when I say I will get a 500% raise next year and cut my food bills to $1 a week, and will be able to easily afford a really enormous mortgage loan payment.

  15. The problem being that the CBO has to score the bill accepting at face value any promises the Democrats make in it, no matter how bald-faced the lie or laughably improbable the assertion.

    You clearly have no idea how the CBO works. If it was that easy to get the CBO to score a bill the way its authors want, both parties would do it, and every bill would be projected to reduce the deficit. Reality is very different.

  16. every bill would be projected to reduce the deficit.

    Christ, and so they mostly are, dude, when it actually matters a lot. Let me just quote from the CBO itself in re their track record of accurate predictions:

    How accurate are CBO’s budget projections?

    By statute, CBO’s baseline projections must estimate the future paths of federal spending and revenues under current law and policies. The baseline is therefore not intended to be a prediction of future budgetary outcomes; instead, it is meant to serve as a neutral benchmark that lawmakers can use to measure the effects of proposed changes to spending and taxes. So for that reason and others, actual budgetary outcomes are almost certain to differ from CBO’s baseline projections.

    I love that delicate hold-yer-nose “and others” reference to Congressional book-cooking.

    We have a very similar dog ‘n’ pony show in California. The Legislative Analyst is required to estimate the costs of every initiative that appears on the ballot — and you never saw such a bunch of semi-partisan astrological pull it out of your arse bullshit. It’s a joke. So, except for areas of non-dispute, is the CBO. Were it otherwise, the size of the Federal deficit would not so often be a genuine surprise requiring some emergency quack surgery or other.

    Reality is very different.

    I do not think that word means what you think it means.

  17. Obama’s “brilliant” political strategy was summarized decades ago by H. L. Mencken, discussing FDR: “promising to turn A loose in B’s cornfield.”

  18. He’s gotten ARRA through, and a big defense appropriation that killed the previously unkillable F-22. Health reform looks likely. What big ticket item has he tried, and failed, to pass?

    Single payer universal health care, carbon cap and trade, that volunteer service BS, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever he thought he was going to be doing with all that free time after the above stuff got passed (travel, I guess).

  19. Yes, for the sake of brevity I make somewhat superlative statements. However, I ultimately agree with you Carl in that we end up at the same place just in 2 different paths. I understand the constraints of limited powers and how that places unique challenges to the Executive of the United States. However, Obama has not shown to me his so called brilliance in any regard other than his ability to inspire people to waste their vote on him. As the OP article stated of all the community organizing he did he only really can take created for 2 projects. I would even be willing to wager that he wasn’t even the brainchild behind those projects. He’s just a cheerleader. Give him some pom poms and a teleprompter flashing ‘GO TEAM!’ And watch him get us FIRED UP!

  20. Single payer universal health care, carbon cap and trade, that volunteer service BS, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan

    He also hasn’t managed to defund the Gitmo prison. He never tried to get rid of DADT, he just campaigned that he would end it, so I don’t think it can be counted.

  21. You clearly have no idea how the CBO works. If it was that easy to get the CBO to score a bill the way its authors want, both parties would do it, and every bill would be projected to reduce the deficit. Reality is very different.

    Sorry, Jim. You clearly have no idea how the CBO works. Both parties do it. Prior to 2006, the CBO was the GOP’s little plaything. Now, it belongs to the Democrats. So the prediction that health “reform” results in a massive increase of spending while somehow resulting in a reduction of the federal deficit is typical of the fantasies that the CBO has weaved for both parties over the decades.

  22. Unless he’s just steadfastly pushing the party line, Jim’s trust of the State. if sincere, is sort of childlike. If he were a character on the new series “V,” he’d be welcoming the alien overlords with open arms and a bared butt. “You paranoid fools! Our alien overlords promise us hope and change! What’s wrong with that?”

  23. Mr. Pham, even on domestic issues, Mr. Obama is the “CEO of America”; it’s in foreign issues where he’s not like a CEO. Every CEO must also report the the Board of Directors (even often in private companies), principally its Chairman, and investors. He is often given a mission by the Board and expected to execute it; that’s why he’s called the “Executive” officer. Even when the “vision” isn’t handed down, that’s often why there’s a separate position of “President” (also hired by the Board, not the CEO).

    It’s also very common for directives to not make it past the Vice-Presidents in the same way that much of Mr. Bush’s agenda didn’t make it deeper into the bureaucracy then the cabinet members. In order to have orders carried out, you have to make sure your orders do not contradict the internal structures and procedures that are in place to aid in lower-level employees decision-making. What Mr. Obama’s experience doesn’t give him is an understanding of how the procedures of the bureaucracy may counteract his own orders. Managing a hierarchy, like the bureaucracy, and managing the relationship with an oversight group, like Congress, are not the same skills as being a community organizer.

  24. Single payer universal health care, carbon cap and trade, that volunteer service BS, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan,

    He never tried to pass single payer health care, and universal health care is likely to pass. Cap and trade hasn’t failed, it’s still working its way through committees. Obama signed a national service bill in April. Withdrawal from Iraq is going according to schedule (and isn’t a legislative initiative in any case).

    I’m not saying that Obama is going to get all of his major legislative initiatives through Congress, but he hasn’t been turned back so far, in part because he’s avoided proposing things that can’t possibly be passed (e.g. a $1.5T stimulus).

  25. Prior to 2006, the CBO was the GOP’s little plaything.

    Nonetheless it scored the Bush tax cuts as increasing the deficit by hundreds of billions; it did not accept the GOP argument that tax rate cuts pay for themselves.

    The CBO scoring process no doubt has flaws, but we don’t have any better alternatives that are accepted by both parties.

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