By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I listened to Geraldo Rivera’s New York City talk show the morning after President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Rivera’s reaction was the same as that of many commentators, but in more colorful language. He couldn’t get over how this “skinny, confident dude” was so “in your face” toward the Republicans in the Congress and the majority of the country who elected them in last fall’s elections. Rivera informed his audience that he likes a president who “doesn’t back down” when the going gets tough, who “had guts enough” to push for his proposals even though he knew there was not a chance that the Republican majority in Congress would enact them into law.
Of course, it makes a difference that Rivera approves of the president’s policies, especially the big tax, big spending wealth redistribution efforts the president championed in the speech. If you didn’t know better, you would think Obama had just been elected in a landslide and was on a mission to displace entrenched interests in Congress acting to thwart the popular will.
Rivera went on to compare Obama to Bill Clinton who “compromised” his beliefs after the first midterm election he faced led to a Republican majority in Congress. It was at that time, you will remember, when Clinton spoke openly of how the “era of big government” was over. Clinton was acting to reflect the voice of the electorate; Obama stood defiantly against it. That is what Geraldo Rivera and many of the president’s supporters admired. It seemed irrelevant to them that Obama would put so much time and effort into speaking in impassioned tones about an agenda that was going nowhere.
There was a general consensus about Obama’s motives among the commentators in the media. Everyone seemed to agree that he was trying to set up the next presidential election in favor of the Democratic candidate, although there was some difference of opinion about whether Obama favored Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren. The logic was that the voters would favor the big spending programs that Obama championed, rather than Republican plans that favor the “rich,” especially when they were packaged in populist sound bites: Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s quip about how the Republicans “can oppose tuition assistance for community college students in favor of tax breaks for trust fund babies, if they want to” is a case in point.
Other commentators talked about how Obama was seeking to shore up his legacy as a progressive president who championed social justice, confident that history was going to move his way; that his refusal to compromise indicates that he is an ideologue, more interested in advancing the left’s favorite causes than “getting things done” as president.
My take on the question is similar, but with a different angle. I don’t think it is only his legacy that Obama was attempting to shore up. I think he was putting in place the agenda for his post-presidency career.
What will that career be? I don’t know for sure, of course, but I think it safe to say that Obama will not want to retire to private life in the manner of Jimmy Carter or George Bush, or spend his time making speeches and influence-peddling for big dollars like Bill Clinton. Obama will still be a young man after he leaves office. He will want to remain in the limelight, to be a mover and a shaker, to advance the left-wing agenda to which he has been devoted since a teenager.
It is easy to picture him running for the Senate, or using his contacts to secure an important position with the United Nations or a trade union organization; or perhaps a high-profile position in the media. He may even envision himself melding Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s organizations into a single civil rights pressure group with a new level of respectability — and clout.
But, whatever role he chooses, he will revert to the community organizer tactics he learned from Saul Alinsky’s writings to mobilize support for his objectives. The left-wing policies he announced as his agenda in the State of the Union speech can be seen as the groundwork for that effort.
Think back to the “Alinsky Method” that Alinsky outlined in his book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” It is the method Obama employed in his days as a community organizer. He would instruct local groups in Chicago to “get in the face” of landlords, employers, government bureaucrats, officials at the local Board of Elections, and people of influence. That meant demonstrate, picket, and conduct sit-down strikes to disrupt the comfort level of those with an “unfair” share of power and wealth; to bend them to the will of the community.
Obama will be doing the same thing in his post-presidency career, but on a larger stage. He is not going to disappear from our lives. He will become a national, even international, community organizer, directing his energies not at a local landlord or board of elections examiner, but at corporate decision makers, media executives, union leaders, governors, and mayors. His goal will not be easier access to welfare payments, food stamps, and rent subsidies, but to enact state and federal tax policies designed to redistribute wealth, gain control over corporate hiring and environmental regulations, and put an end to the local control over education that permits the disparities between successful suburban school districts and failing inner-city schools.
His State of the Union speech may have been ridiculed on Fox News and on conservative websites, but the people who will be the foot soldiers for Obama’s post-presidency activism saw it as a call for action. It gave them — minorities, the poor, academic elites, the disheartened young who have given up all hopes for meaningful employment — the talking points that they will use to rally support for the cause.
Will it work? Time will tell. The point just now is that Obama aspires to making it work. It strikes me that we are witnessing the early stages of what he hopes will be a mass movement, with Obama at the lead, pushing for socialized medicine, income and rent subsidies, an expanded food stamp program, infrastructure projects that will hire the currently unemployed, employment quotas for businesses — all paid for through high taxes on “undeserving” elites.
People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have tried to play this role for decades now, but have always come up short. They put Middle America on edge, coming across as radicals and hucksters. Obama’s public life has been based on his ability to push for the same goals as Jackson and Sharpton without alienating the great majority of mainstream voters, to come across as “polished,” “nice,” a “solid citizen.” There is no reason to doubt that he is acting upon his confidence that he can do that again once he leaves the White House.
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