Bill Moyers: Newt's Strange Obsession with Saul Alinsky

BILL MOYERS: Time, now, for a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn’t kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of followers whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich’s behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.

Here’s how you slander someone who can’t answer from the grave:

NEWT GINGRICH: If you believe as we do in the Declaration of Independence and you think that’s a better source than Saul Alinsky, welcome to the team […] The president believes in a kind of Saul Alinsky radicalism which would lead to a secular European socialist model […] If you have a Reagan conservative versus a Saul Alinsky radical, it’s a pretty easy debate.

BILL MOYERS: So clever, so insidious. The same tactic Newt Gingrich invoked with those radioactive words he used in the GOPAC memos to demonize his opponents. The crowd knows nothing about the target except that they are supposed to hate him.

And why not? There’s the strange foreign name. Obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What’s a socialist? Don’t know. But Obama’s one, isn't he? Barack-Hussein-Obama-slash-Saul-Alinsky. Bingo! Two peas in a pod -- a sinister, subversive pod at that.

Just who was Alinsky? Born in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, people put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a hand-hold on the first rung of the ladder.

He became a protégé of the labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing onto the streets, first in his home town, then across the country. He was one gutsy guy.

SAUL ALINSKY: The first rule of change is controversy. You can’t get away from it for the simple reason: all issues are controversial. Change means movement, movement means friction, friction means heat, and heat means controversy.

BILL MOYERS: Alinsky, one journalist said, looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of a local alderman who was allowing the garbage to go uncollected. Or immobilizing City Hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice. Saul Alinsky was a self-professed radical -- just look at the titles of two of his books. But he wasn’t a socialist or communist. He worked with them on behalf of social justice, just as he worked alongside the Catholic Archdiocese in Chicago. It was conscience they had in common, not ideology.

Barack Obama was just a kid in Hawaii when Alinsky died - something you would expect a good historian to know. The two never met, although when Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer, some of his grassroots work with the poor was with an Alinsky-affiliated organization. But that’s how it goes in the fight for basic human rights, and Alinsky’s influence crops up all across the spectrum, even in the Tea Party. Get this: the one-time Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks organization helps bankroll the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to Tea Party leaders. Watch out, brother, you could be next on Newt’s list. Although curiously, in his fight against wealthy Mitt Romney, Gingrich himself has stolen a page from Alinsky's populist playbook.