Saul Alinsky: Always attack
The piece in the American Thinker by Kyle-Anne Shiver on the strangest political controversy of the year makes it seem not so strange after all. Shiver makes reference to Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals. They include some brilliant observations. Here are some excerpts of those rules:
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment…
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose…Once you identify a potent adversary, seize every word, every event — no matter how trivial — and turn it around to your advantage. Make a big deal of it. Keep doing it. Over and over again. Eventually, you will wear down your opponent and win. And the bloodless revolution succeeds.
The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Shiver says: “Hillary Clinton has been the perfectly patient disciple of Alinsky’s since she wrote her thesis about him her senior year at Wellesley in 1969. If her admiration of Alinsky had died with her thesis, no one would care. But it didn’t. He remained a close confidant until his death (The Shadow Party, p. 56) and his tactical fingerprints are all over her projection of the false “Centrist” image she is manipulating to garner political power…she is following the Alinsky model, which admonishes revolutionaries to milk their white, middle-class backgrounds and appearances to achieve the political power necessary to carry out the socialist revolution.”
It’s quite an accusation, but is probably more applicable to Senator Obama.