...read the fascinating article written by Byron York a couple of months ago, now available on NRO's home page.
Read the whole thing, but not this quote--because the key to understanding Obama's work as an organizer is to understand the ideas, the principles, it helped imbue in him:
"...Obama’s time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for. Certainly no one should live in an apartment contaminated by asbestos, but Obama did not seem to question, or at least question very strongly, the notion that the people he wanted to organize should be living in Altgeld at all. The place was, after all, one of the nation’s capitals of dysfunction. “Every ten years I would work on the census,” Yvonne Lloyd told me. “I always had Altgeld. When you look at those forms from the census, you had three or four generations in one apartment — the grandmother, the mother, the daughter, and then her baby. It was supposed to be a stepping stone, but you’ve got people that are never going to leave.” No doubt Obama would agree that that is a bad thing, but when a real attempt to break through that culture of dysfunction — the landmark 1996 welfare-reform bill, now widely accepted as one of the most successful domestic-policy initiatives in a generation — came up, Obama vowed to use all the resources at his disposal to undo it. “I made sure our new welfare system didn’t punish people by kicking them off the rolls,” he said in 1999. Two years earlier, he had declared: “We want to make sure that there is health care, child care, job training, and transportation vouchers — everything that is needed to ensure that those who need it will have support.” Obama applied his considerable organizational skills to perpetuating the old, failed way of doing things....When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land. And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done."
Conclusion? Barack Obama is too conventionally liberal in his thinking.
