http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5667
by Gregory A. Hession, J.D.
Saul Alinsky, who died 36 years ago and is only dimly known today, has had a major impact on the 2008 presidential election from the grave. He is a radical who matters, whose theories of political organizing are the lifeblood of the Obama campaign, as well as influencing the political career of the temporarily vanquished Hillary Clinton.
Saul http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4470, it was said, looked like an accountant, but talked like a stevedore. William F. Buckley, Jr. grudgingly stated that he was “twice formidable, and close to being an organizational genius.”
Saul http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4986 was an avowed radical, yet his definition of “radical” was not what most people would expect. He dressed and acted “square” with his nerdy glasses and short hair. He mostly worked with traditional church groups, not wild-eyed hippies or radicals, whom he disdained as ineffective. (“They couldn’t organize a luncheon,” he said.) He criticized both conservatives and liberals, but liberals were the ones mostly drawn to him, although in his view, a liberal was a person “who puts his foot down firmly on thin air.”
Organizing for power was Alinsky’s political end, not political party influence. When he asked his new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with “selfless bromides about wanting to help others,” according to Ryan Lizza writing in The New Republic. Alinsky would then “scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: ‘You want to organize for power!'”In his seminal 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky said: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the ‘Haves’ on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the ‘Have-Nots’ on how to take it away.” In his other book, Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky described his philosophy as “a free man working for an open society.”
At the core, his message was that a radical is a person who loves people with his head and heart, and who want to redress the inequities of power that the powerless endure. He has been characterized as part of a small group that comprises the “non-socialist left.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/24-elections/468-saul-alinsky-a-radical-who-matters