Barack Obama and the first two Rules For Radicals

From NRO, May 14th of 2009:

Barack Obama never met Saul Alinsky, but the radical organizer’s thought helps explain a great deal about how the president operates.

Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was 11 years old. But three of Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first “community organizers.” Ryan Lizza wrote a 6,500-word piece on Alinsky’s influence on Obama for The New Republic, noting, “On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.

In a letter to the Boston Globe, Alinsky’s son wrote that “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. . . . Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

I've read Rules For Radicals twice in the last year. It's a brilliant book on how to take control of an organzation. It explains a lot of what we saw during the Messianic Takeover.

But what happens when the Alinskyite structure starts to crumble? What happens when The Rules For Radicals are succesful, and an Alinsky acolyte becomes President Of The United States, but doesn't have a clue how to do anything but take power?

From Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, this is Power Tactics Rule #1

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

This is from the New York Post, a newspaper that no longer believes that Obama has very much:

We the people of the United States owe Scott Brown's supporters a huge debt of gratitude. They didn't merely elect a senator. They ripped the façade off the Obama presidency.
Just as Dorothy and Toto exposed the ordinary man behind the curtain in "The Wizard of Oz," the voters in Massachusetts revealed that, in this White House, there is no there there.
It's all smoke and mirrors, bells and whistles, held together with glib talk, Chicago politics and an audacious sense of entitlement.

At the center is a young and talented celebrity whose worldview, we now know, is an incoherent jumble of poses and big-government instincts. His self-aggrandizing ambition exceeds his ability by so much that he is making a mess of everything he touches.
He never advances a practical idea. Every proposal overreaches and comes wrapped in ideology and a claim of moral superiority. He doesn't listen to anybody who doesn't agree with him.

If that's not scary enough, do you know what comes next? Mr. Alinsky has a warning for us.

Here's Rule For Radicals #2 - Never go outside the experience of your people.

Whoops. I think we're there. God help us all.