The Nation: Obama's Community Roots

[BeyondGeography]

<In 1985, freshly graduated from Columbia University and working for a New York business consultant, Barack Obama decided to become a community organizer. Though he liked the idea, he didn't understand what the job involved, and his inquiries turned up few opportunities.>

<...Obama worked as an organizer at a time when Harold Washington's election as mayor stirred his hopes and dreams, as well as those of blacks and progressives in the city. Interviews with people who worked with him during that time elicited few complaints--virtually everyone described him in glowing terms, including dedicated, hard-working, dependable, intelligent, inspiring, a good listener, confident but self-effacing. They expressed admiration for him as an organizer who trained strong community leaders while keeping himself in the background and as a strategist who could turn general problems into specific, winnable issues. Loretta Augustine-Herron, a member of the DCP board that hired him, remembers him as someone who always followed the high road. "You've got to do it right," she recalls him insisting. "Be open with the issues. Include the community instead of going behind the community's back--and he would include people we didn't like sometimes. You've got to bring people together. If you exclude people, you're only weakening yourself. If you meet behind doors and make decisions for them, they'll never take ownership of the issue."

Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing, as translated through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of several networks of faith-based organizing. Often by confronting officials with insistent citizens--rather than exploiting personal connections, as traditional black Democrats proposed--Obama and DCP protected community interests regarding landfills and helped win employment training services, playgrounds, after-school programs, school reforms and other public amenities.>

<...A recent Los Angeles Times report contended that Obama overstated his own importance, ignoring others who were working on environmental issues; but in the book he's extremely modest about his role and accomplishments, much as he was as an organizer when he refused fellow organizers' suggestions that he embellish the group's achievements. "There was no campaign without Barack," Kellman says. "He was there to get people to organize when they wouldn't organize at all." Hazel Johnson, a longtime Altgeld Gardens environmental activist, says, "Yeah, he's a good organizer. I've got to give it to him.">

<...Obama's politics of transcendent unity, which has appealed to many voters, has its roots in his work as a "bridge builder," in the words of the Rev. Anthony Van Zanten, overcoming the gulf within DCP between Catholic and Protestant churches. But this vision of harmony also reflects Obama's distaste for conflict. "Personality-wise, Barack did not like direct confrontation," Kellman says. "He was a very nice young man, very polite. It was a stretch for him to do Alinsky techniques. He was more comfortable in dialogue with people. But challenging power was not an issue for him. Lack of civility was.">

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070416/moberg

[Radical Activist]

1. Hillary Clinton was offered a job by Alinsky out of college

and turned it down so she could work in the system. Their personalities reflect their approach to politics and that can be seen from their early days.

[Hekate]

2. Kick this. I like Obama's bridge-building ways.

:kick:

Hekate