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Posted
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 12:01 PM
| By
Melinda Henneberger
Until he walked into a manhole with his remarks about bitter bumpkins, the genius of the Obama campaign was in throwing away the playbook. He regularly violated the time-honored wisdom of Rules #1 (Treat voters like idiots at all times.) and #2 (When all else fails, almost any diversion will do: "Look, it's an immigrant; run for your lives!'') Instead—not always, but often enough to make him at least a potential Real Deal—Obama went with what he'd learned as a community organizer: Real change cannot be imposed, or come from some think tank; it can only happen from the inside out and come from the bottom up. Which is radical, of course. And not something he got from David Axelrod.
I'm in California this week, and yesterday was talking about Obama's woes (is there any other subject?) with my friend Robert Tobin, who runs transitional housing programs for (formerly) homeless people in Sacramento. He says the reason they have so many success stories—ex-cons and addicts turned homeowners with stable jobs—is that the "participants''—not recipients—are treated like and then become responsible people who make hiring and firing decisions, enforce the rules, and hold down jobs while they work on whatever landed them on the street in the first place. And from one Alinsky-inspired Chicago boy to another, here's Robert's way-out-there thought for Obama:
He shouldn't go by the playbook he threw away, or resort to whining "Hillary and John McCain are even worse.'' What if he was just honest and said that we're all a product of this society of -isms, a society that needs to be changed. We all have unconscious biases, and they won't go away by magic; we've all got to do better, myself included. I've inadvertently, and yes, regrettably, stumbled onto a teachable moment here (and Alinksy says that's the moment of opportunity). So let's not waste it; let's learn from my mistake.
I told you it was radical. A conversation on class, anyone?
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