Obama Calls for Collectivist Action

Visionary Obama, head elevated 15 degrees to the left.

Obama claims that one of his qualifications for the Presidency is his experience as a community organizer. Just what does a community organizer do for a living?

They are collectivists. They offer the down-trodden a redefinition and a new communism of defined entitlement and left wing ideology that takes from those that have and redistribute to those that do not.

Here is what they say they do:

The Roles and Responsibilities of Community Organizers
from The Community organizing Tool Box

Organizers challenge people to act on behalf of their common interests. Organizers empower people to act by developing shared relationships, understandings, and tasks which enable them to gain new resources, new understanding of their interests, and new capacity to use these resources on behalf of their interests. Organizers work through "dialogues" in relationships, understanding and action carried out as campaigns. They identify, recruit and develop leadership, they build community among that leadership, they build power out of that community.

Organizers develop new relationships out of old ones - sometimes by linking one person to another and sometimes by linking whole networks of people together.

Organizers deepen understanding by creating opportunities for people to deliberate with one another about their circumstances, to reinterpret these circumstances in ways that open up new possibilities for action, and to develop strategies and tactics that make creative use of the resources and opportunities that their circumstances afford. Organizers motivate people to act by creating experiences to challenge those feelings which inhibit action, such as fear, apathy, self-doubt, inertia and isolation with those feelings that support action such as anger, hope, self-worth, urgency and a sense of community. ...

Organizers work through campaigns. Campaigns are very highly energized, intensely focused, concentrated streams of activity with specific goals and deadlines. People are recruited, battles fought and organizations built through campaigns. Campaigns polarize by bringing out conflicts ordinarily submerged in a way contrary to the interests of the organizing constituency. One critical dilemma is how to depolarize in order to negotiate resolution of these conflicts. Another dilemma is how to balance the work of campaigns with the ongoing work of organizational survival.

Organizers build community by developing leadership. They focus on identifying leaders and enhancing their skills, values and commitments. They also focus on building strong communities: communities through which people can gain new understanding of their interests as well as power to act on them. Organizers work at constructing communities which are bounded yet inclusive, communal yet diverse, soladaristic yet tolerant. They work at developing a relationship between community and leadership based on mutual responsibility and accountability.

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Obama urges Wesleyan grads to enter public service

May 25, 2:15 PM (ET)

By CHRISTOPHER WILLS

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. (AP) - Filling in for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and tying himself to the family's legacy, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama urged college graduates Sunday to "make us believe again" by dedicating themselves to public service.

"We may disagree as Americans on certain issues and positions, but I believe we can be unified in service to a greater good. I intend to make it a cause of my presidency, and I believe with all my heart that this generation is ready and eager and up to the challenge," Obama told Wesleyan University's Class of 2008.

The Illinois senator peppered his speech with references to the Kennedy legacy: John F. Kennedy urging Americans to ask what they can do for their country, the Peace Corps and Robert Kennedy talking about people creating "ripples of hope."

He devoted special attention and praise to Edward M. Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator who had planned to deliver the graduation address but backed out last week after he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

Obama, who leads in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he and Kennedy had talked last week about Obama delivering the speech. Kennedy has endorsed Obama in the nominating contest against fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and has campaigned for him.

Obama said Kennedy has helped provide health care to children, given parents leave time to spend with new babies, raised the minimum wage and let people keep health insurance when changing jobs "and I have a feeling that Ted Kennedy is not done just yet."

Kennedy's stepdaughter, Caroline Raclin, is a member of Wesleyan's Class of 2008. Her mother, Kennedy's wife, Vicki, attended the ceremony.

Obama, with a presidential campaign appealing to youth and emphasizing change, often evokes comparisons to the Kennedys, particularly Robert Kennedy and his 1968 bid for the White House.

Clad in a black academic robe, Obama received an honorary doctorate. Some of the graduates had stencils of Obama's face and the word "hope" - a theme of his campaign - on their mortarboards.

Only briefly did Obama veer into campaign territory, rattling off a list of education changes he promised to make as president. The rest of the 25-minute speech urged students to focus on more than "the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy."

"At a time of war, we need you to work for peace," Obama said. "At a time of inequality, we need you to work for opportunity. At a time of so much cynicism and so much doubt, we need you to make us believe again. That's your task, Class of 2008."

No Wine Before its Time.

The white working class has a clear picture of the real world experience of race in America. The white working class lives near, works near, and goes to school, (or avoids going to school) with the black community. It is no coincidence that white voters in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho and North Dakota have different racial views than those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, who have an up close and personal experience with the daily reality of black and white relations in America. 

The disparaged white middle class knows who are the day-to-day victims and victimizers in black on white crime. A white voter is 100 times more likely to suffer from crime by a black than the reverse. 

A nice speech may impress white liberals but Obama trying to explain the one-sided black experience in America is going to lose the votes of those who make US Presidents.


March 19, 2008
The Real Agenda of Black Liberation Theology
By Jeffrey Schmidt American Thinker

Now, suddenly, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is misunderstood. Suddenly, so-called black liberation theology is misunderstood.

Wright's successor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Reverend Otis Moss III, won't bow to the wishes of "they" to shut up. It begs the question: "Who are they?" The larger white cultural? Or liberals and Democrats who see all this unfavorable publicity hurting the election chances of Barak Obama?

The sad truth is that neither the Reverend Wright nor black liberation theology is being misunderstood. Both, thanks to the candidacy of Barack Obama, are being exposed. God, in fact, works in mysterious ways. And unless it's the aforementioned liberals and Democrats who are trying to hush up Wright, Moss and others of their ilk, sensible Americans want to hear more, for knowledge is power, the power to combat hate.

And make no mistake, what Americans are hearing, they don't like. In the Rasmussen poll, 73% of voters find Wright's comments to be racially divisive. That's a broad cross section of voters, including 58% of black voters.

In an article in the Washington Post, unnamed ministers commented that black liberation theology "encourages a preacher to speak forcefully against the institutions of oppression..."

And what might these institutions be? They are not specified. But it is safe to say that they are not the welfare state or the Democratic Party. Given that black liberation theology is a product of the dreary leftist politics of the twentieth century, the very vehicles employed by the left to advance statism certainly can't be the culprits.

For the left, black liberation theology makes for close to a perfect faith. It is a political creed larded with religion. It serves not to reconcile and unite blacks with the larger cultural, but to keep them separate. Here, again, The Washington Post reports that "He [Wright] translated the Bible into lessons about...the misguided pursuit of ‘middle-classness.'"

Not very Martin Luther King-ish. Further, all the kooky talk about the government infecting blacks with HIV is a fine example of how the left will promote a lie to nurture alienation and grievance. To listen to Wright -- more an apostle of the left than the Christian church -- the model for blacks is alienation, deep resentment, separation and grievance. All of which leads to militancy. Militancy is important. It's the sword dangled over the head of society. Either fork over more tax dollars, government services and patronage or else. And unlike the Reverend Moss and his kindred, I'll specify the "else." Civil unrest. Disruptions in cities. Riot in the streets.

Keeping blacks who fall into the orbit of a Reverend Wright at a near-boil is a card used by leftist agitators to serve their ends: they want bigger and more pervasive government -- and they want badly to run it.

If any further proof is needed that black liberation theology has nothing to do with the vision of Martin Luther King -- with reconciliation, brotherhood and universality -- the words of James H. Cone, on faculty at New York's Union Theological Seminary, may persuade. Cone, not incidentally, originated the movement known as black liberation theology. He said to The Washington Post:

"The Christian faith has been interpreted largely by those who enslaved black people, and by the people who segregated them."

No mention of the Civil War involving the sacrifices of tens of thousands of lives; no abolition or civil rights movements. No Abraham Lincoln. No Harriet Beecher Stowe. No white civil rights workers who risked and, in some instances, lost their lives crusading in the south to end segregation. And since the civil rights movement, society hasn't opened up; blacks have no better access to jobs and housing; no greater opportunities. The federal government, led by a white liberal, Lyndon Johnson, did not pour billions of dollars into welfare programs and education targeted at inner cities in an attempt to right old wrongs. And still does so. A black man, Barak Obama, on the threshold of winning his party's nomination for president, has in no way done so with the help of white voters in communities across the land.

In the closed world of Cone, Wright and Moss, Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor are alive and well. Black victimhood is the doing of white society, not the doing of angry black leaders and leftists, who see advantage and profit in keeping too many people in black communities captive.

Barack Obama knows all this, as a seventeen year congregant at Wright's church, and as a liberal community activist prior to his election to the Illinois Senate. That he feigns innocence, or that he professes forbearance for some of Wright's words because of the goodness others, is not the line one expects from a post-racial politician. It is what is expected from a man whose career is steeped in racial politics, a politics that does great harm to the very people it purports to serve.