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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times: Historian Newt Gingrich needs a lesson about Saul Alinsky
Good column, quoting Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/10175065-452/historian-newt-gingrich-needs-a-lesson-about-saul-alinsky.html
On CNN Sunday, Gingrich said, One of the reasons I think people in South Carolina voted for me was the belief that I could debate Obama head-to-head, that I could convey conservative values and that I could in an articulate way explain what American exceptionalism was all about and why the values that he believes in, the Saul Alinsky radicalism that is at the heart of Obama, are a disaster.
Horwitt, who obtained Alinskys FBI files when he researched his book, said Alinsky was emphatically not a Marxist, he was not a Communist ever. He was a true American populist. And here is a bit of an irony. I think that Newt right now, some of Newts strongest appeal is his populism.
-snip-
. . . Alinsky had no interest in replacing the basic system in this country, political or economic. What he loved about this country is you had the freedom to change a lot of the rules, meaning that you could get a seat at the table for low-income people or even middle-class people, Horwitt said.
In Chicago, Alinskys flamboyant tactics fighting slumlords and bad schools drew attention. But he operated with important support, even as he battled with the first Mayor Daley. Horwitt points out that Alinsky started his Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 with a $10,000 grant from Marshall Field III and was backed by two Chicago cardinals Samuel Stritch and Albert Meyer.
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Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times: Historian Newt Gingrich needs a lesson about Saul Alinsky (Original Post)
highplainsdem
Jan 2012
OP
EC
(12,287 posts)1. Wasn't Cardinal
Stritch very right wing?
Loudmxr
(1,405 posts)2. Because saying Alinsky, in the words of a past poster means..
JEW!!
Alinsky=Jew = communist= a nice brisket
No wait
Alinsky = communist= Jew= some lox on a bagel with a schmear
I will get this conservative equivalence things down some day.
It does make my brain hurt.
Raine
(30,540 posts)3. That crossed my mind too
they never leave off race baiting.
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)4. Newt will get by with this crap with lots of people because they have chosen
to remain ignorant of history. They respond to the dogwhistle--no, wolf whistle--that Newt is blowing right now. He's hitting all the notes for peoples deemed unworthy by the true elites and those they dupe.
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)5. K & R