Obama’s mentor, Alinsky

By Ted Belman

Did you know that Obama’s “bible”, Rules for Radicals was originally titled by its author Saul Alinsky as Rules for Revolution.

This is one of the tidbits I gained from reading The New Criterion’s “Organized” Crime by Andrew C McCarthy. He opens with,

It is a matter of no small amusement for the journalist and agitator Nicholas von Hoffman that his beloved mentor, Saul Alinsky, learned the craft of “organizing” at the feet of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. This was nearly eighty years before the self-proclaimed radical became a household name, having posthumously inspired an up-and-coming organizer who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Alinsky’s entrée to the Al Capone gang (which, tellingly, he called a “public utility”) was neither his ruthlessness nor his penchant for rabble-rousing, though a surfeit of both qualities surely impressed his friend Frank (“the Enforcer”) Nitti. It was, instead, his academic credentials.

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