SECTION ONE
In October 1984, in the midst of his ultimately unsuccessful re-election battle against Democratic challenger Paul Simon, Illinois Republican senator Charles Percy was cornered and forced to hide in a ladies’ restroom by about a hundred protesters from a group called UNO (United Neighborhood Organization) of Chicago. By trapping Percy in the women’s bathroom, UNO of Chicago successfully disrupted his live appearance on a black radio station, thereby punishing him for his refusal to appear at an UNO forum (which Percy believed had been stacked against him through UNO’s collaboration with Simon). Since UNO’s largely Mexican membership included a substantial group of “undocumented” workers, there is every likelihood that a large number of illegal aliens were among that crowd running hardball Alinskyite tactics on a U.S. senator.
In those days, UNO’s organizers used to gather at a bar after confrontations like this to laugh about how they’d humiliated one or another public official. There must have been heavy toasting that night.1
What has this to do with Barack Obama? Quite a lot, actually. Obama’s account of his Chicago community organizing days in Dreams from My Father leaves out a great deal. While any autobiography is bound to be selective, Obama appears to have gone out of his way in Dreams to minimize and disguise his involvement with some particularly controversial groups. Above all, Obama has worked to conceal his close ties to UNO of Chicago, a kind of Mexican-American counterpart to the highly confrontational community group ACORN. Recovering Obama’s hidden ties to Chicago UNO opens up a new way of looking at his experience as a community organizer. The UNO connection also helps make sense of the ties between Obama and Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, and the world of left-leaning foundations that stands behind modern community organizing. Finally, an understanding of Obama’s work with UNO helps to puncture the carefully cultivated image of a young organizer averse to Saul Alinsky’s most confrontational tactics. In this chapter, then, I reconstruct and reconsider Obama’s three initial years of community organizing in Chicago (from June of 1985 to May/June of 1988), focusing particularly on what he has chosen not to tell us about this formative period of his political life.
Obama worked closely with UNO of Chicago. In fact, Obama’s own organization, the Developing Communities Project (DCP) might best be thought of as an extension of UNO’s network beyond Chicago’s Mexican-American neighborhoods and into the black community. Greg Galluzzo, one of Obama’s early organizing mentors, founded the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago, along with his wife, Mary Gonzales, in 1980.2 Galluzzo is known today as the head of the Gamaliel Foundation, an influential network of neighborhood organizations to which Obama has long been tied. What’s been forgotten—and what Obama has hidden in his memoir, Dreams from My Father—is that the Gamaliel Foundation network grew out of the controversial and confrontational group, UNO of Chicago.
Obama was first hired in 1985 by an organizer named Jerry Kellman. Galluzzo had brought Kellman into UNO of Chicago in 1982, and three years later, in 1985, the two were attempting to extend their network’s reach beyond the Mexican-American sections of Chicago. With Galluzzo’s support, Kellman’s plan was to organize neighborhoods filled with recently laid-off steel workers, in South Chicago, nearby suburbs, and sections of northwestern Indiana around Gary. Obama was hired to handle the black neighborhoods of South Chicago, and Kellman brought in an old organizing buddy from Texas, Mike Kruglik, to help with the project. Thus, Kellman and Kruglik became Obama’s first organizing mentors. About a year into Obama’s time in Chicago, Galluzzo and Kellman decided that the most efficient way to handle their new territory was to divide it up into three distinct segments. Kellman would take Gary, Kruglik the suburbs, and Obama South Chicago. At that point, with Kellman out in Gary, Galluzzo took over the job of supervising Obama, consulting with him on a weekly basis.3
Obama obscures all this in Dreams by creating a single composite organizing mentor named “Marty Kaufman.” Significantly, with the exception of family and a few public figures, Obama has changed the names of most of the characters in Dreams.4 This alleged protection of privacy raises the obvious question of why. Why, for example, is Frank Marshall Davis referred to only as “Frank”? Davis died in 1987, some years before Dreams was composed, so it couldn’t have been a question of his privacy. Davis was also a public figure. In failing to supply Frank’s full name was Obama protecting himself from Davis’s communist past? By contrast, Jeremiah Wright’s real name is used in Dreams. Yet it’s not clear that Wright was more of a public figure at the time than Obama’s organizing mentors. So why disguise their identities?
Obama has either left Galluzzo out of Dreams altogether or combined Galluzzo’s character with Jerry Kellman under the name Marty Kaufman.5 Obama biographer David Remnick says that “for the most part” Jerry Kellman is “Marty.”6 Obama acknowledges creating composite characters in his introduction to Dreams, and in 2004 that procedure raised eyebrows among some in the press.7 By disguising the characters in Dreams, Obama made it impossible for reporters to interview or trace the background of figures from his past.
Today, few remember that Greg Galluzzo was once the head of the most aggressive and controversial community organization in Chicago. UNO broke its connection with Galluzzo and Gonzales in 1988, and since that time, the organization’s tactics and worldview have mellowed considerably.8 When Obama published Dreams in 1995, however, some in Chicago might have recalled Galluzzo’s early history with UNO. Having it known back then that Greg Galluzzo was your organizing mentor would have been a bit like calling yourself a protégé of ACORN founder Wade Rathke today. This may explain why Obama omitted Galluzzo’s role, or folded him into the character of “Marty Kaufman.” Even with an alias, it would have been tough to introduce a character based on Galluzzo without mentioning his background as head of a predominantly Mexican-American community organization, and that would have been traceable to UNO.
Only if you already know what to look for can you find fleeting indications in Dreams of Obama’s ties to UNO. While running off a litany of groups that “Marty” had worked with, Obama includes “Mexicans in Chicago.”9 Obama also notes that, in the final months before law school, “We held a series of joint meetings with Mexicans in the Southeast Side to craft a common environmental strategy for the region.”10 As with his treatment of the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference, this sort of opaque mention allows Obama to claim that he did write about UNO, when in fact he disguised it.
A 2008 Newsday piece on Obama’s organizing days helps to penetrate the mystery. This article tracks down some of Obama’s old organizing colleagues by way of exploring charges that, contrary to his claims of working to bridge different ethnic groups, Obama organized exclusively with blacks.11 To defend Obama, an organizer named Phil Mullins explained that Obama held “‘weekly brainstorming sessions’ with his Latino counterparts and worked closely with them on several important projects.” Newsday also quotes Galluzzo’s wife and UNO co-founder, Mary Gonzales, explaining that Obama was an important part of UNO’s plans “to connect neighborhoods.” Gonzales and Mullins were the second and third ranking officials, respectively, in UNO during much of Obama’s time in Chicago.12 We also learn from a 2008 interview with Kellman that Obama “would hold or attend meetings with other organizers and activists” at a McDonald’s in the Pullman neighborhood “two or more times a week.”13 Pullman lies between Obama’s DCP territory in Roseland and UNO’s Southeast Chicago branch.
In short, Obama appears to have held joint strategy sessions weekly (or more often) with UNO organizers. As we’ll see, he acted jointly with UNO as well. Obama’s original organizing mentor, Jerry Kellman, worked for Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales at UNO in the years immediately preceding his hiring of Obama. UNO’s co-founder, Galluzzo, was Obama’s organizing mentor during at least some of the “direct action” ventures detailed in Dreams from My Father, and Obama’s Developing Communities Project might fairly be thought of as an extension of the UNO network into the black community. Understanding UNO opens up a critically important window on Obama’s hidden world. After seeing what’s inside, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama has been deliberately trying to block our gaze.
By 1980, when UNO was founded, Chicago’s Hispanic community was divided into distinct and sometimes antagonistic groups. Mexicans were not only different from Puerto Ricans, but were sharply divided among themselves. The older group was made up of highly assimilated second- and third-generation middle-class Mexican-Americans. These ethnic Mexicans were often war veterans and very patriotic. Their saw their own success as proof that America’s system worked. These Mexican-Americans believed that immigrants should quickly master English and looked askance at bilingual education.14
In contrast, the larger number of unassimilated recent immigrants lived in large barrios with little or no command of English and only the most limited contact with American culture. UNO of Chicago largely appealed to these recent immigrants. In effect, UNO was an alliance between left-leaning, multiculturalist, often white, organizers, on one hand, and a new generation of assimilation-resistant immigrants, on the other. Many UNO members spoke only Spanish, so English-speaking UNO organizers and visiting politicians frequently required translators even to communicate with the membership.15
About 90 percent of UNO’s constituency in the eighties was Mexican-American, and a sizeable percentage of those were illegal immigrants. UNO of Chicago’s Pilsen branch, for example, was in a neighborhood where half the population was “undocumented.” This was reflected in UNO’s membership.16 In fact, since UNO’s tactics and goals tended to put off middle-class Mexican-Americans, it’s possible that some branches of UNO were majority illegal.
Holding a vision of universal human rights that trumped American citizenship, UNO’s leftist organizers had no problem with the group’s illegal-heavy membership—even though UNO often demanded substantial expenditures of taxpayer dollars.17 Nor did UNO’s organizers have illusions about their membership being representative, even of Chicago’s Mexican-American community. Privately, UNO’s leaders saw themselves as speaking for perhaps 5 to 8 percent of neighborhood residents.18 Yet UNO’s coffers quickly overflowed with grants from Chicago’s progressive foundations, eager to support an Alinsky-style organization of Hispanics.19 So through UNO, a small, radical, well-funded, yet unrepresentative group led by “progressive” and often white organizers, quite possibly with a higher proportion of illegal residents than the surrounding Mexican-American community, quickly accumulated substantial political power in Chicago. For a time, UNO sponsored voter registration drives, the results of which it touted to politicians in a bid to impress them with the organization’s leverage. When UNO leaders discovered that the sheer number of illegals in their membership was limiting registration results, however, the voter drives were quietly discontinued.20 Much of UNO’s energy went into pressuring public officials to relax their enforcement of immigration laws.21
After its formation by Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales in 1980, one of UNO’s first actions was the push for a new elementary school in a Mexican neighborhood. The battle featured a series of confrontational meetings at the state capital and in Chicago. In classic Alinsky fashion, UNO singled out a Latino school-board member who seemed resistant to their plans and besieged his home. The Chicago school board’s Hispanic president later decried UNO’s unduly “threatening” tactics, but the board surrendered anyway.22
UNO wanted more. The organization quickly demanded that the new school be named “Niños Heroes” (Heroic Children), after six teens honored by Mexicans for sacrificing their lives in battle against the United States in 1847. This demand outraged Chicago’s long-time Mexican-American residents, many of whom were American veterans. These patriotic Mexican-Americans peppered the school board and city education officials with letters and phone calls opposing the proposed school name, “even calling UNO members a bunch of un-American and crazy radicals.” Yet this could not overcome UNO’s persistent pressure tactics. In the end, the board conceded to UNO and the school was named Niños Heroes.23
UNO’s pressure tactics were effective. Following Alinsky’s injunction to “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” UNO settled on then-mayor Jane Byrne’s Hispanic health commissioner, Dr. Hugo Muriel, as an “enemy of the community,” in an effort to force the construction of a high-quality (but also highly expensive) free health clinic in a Mexican neighborhood. As noted by Wilfredo Cruz, on whose sympathetic study of UNO I am drawing here, singling out a named “enemy” for attack enabled UNO to keep the issue “uncomplicated,” and helped stir the membership to anger and action. Hundreds of protesters descended on Dr. Muriel, not only at his office, but also at his home. Ultimately, the city funded the clinic.24
In its early years, UNO regularly escalated its attacks on resistant public officials by pursuing them to their homes, or elsewhere. That’s how Senator Percy got trapped in the ladies’ restroom. UNO’s demands frequently involved the construction of multi-million-dollar facilities. Yet when officials tried to explain their budgetary constraints at UNO’s public forums, they were met with well-rehearsed choruses of boos.25 While UNO remained technically non-partisan, it did subtly cooperate with a few sympathetic public officials.26 Percy was probably right to fear that an appearance alongside Simon at a UNO election forum was a set-up to generate bad publicity. Harold Washington was a strong ally of UNO, and the rest of Chicago’s politicians knew enough to stay away from UNO’s public forums when they were pitted against Washington.27
While Illinois Republican governor James Thompson managed to remain noncommittal in the face of an angry crowd at an UNO public forum, soon after the event he agreed to withdraw his veto on the release of $24 million in state construction funds.28 UNO victories like this had fiscal consequences. In significant part because of expenditures on facilities demanded by UNO for Chicago City Colleges, Chicago’s property tax rate went up in 1986.29 Today Illinois is in fiscal crisis, in part because governors and state legislators have proved unwilling to say no to well-organized Alinskyite pressure groups like UNO. In this case, of course, many—perhaps even most—of those booing the governor and demanding millions of dollars in state spending were in the country illegally.
UNO depended for its success on an alliance with local Catholic churches. This was a continuation and development of Alinsky’s own church-based organizing techniques. In fact, UNO had a branch in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, where many of the Eastern European Catholic churches originally organized by Alinsky were now populated by Mexicans.30 Jerry Kellman, Obama’s first organizing mentor, was brought into UNO by Greg Galluzzo in 1982 because of his expertise in Alinskyite church-based organizing. So understanding how UNO interacted with local churches yields revealing insights into Obama’s experiences, as recounted in Dreams.
To say the least, UNO worked closely with churches, training parish priests and influential congregants in Alinskyite tactics, while putting tremendous efforts into church recruitment. It can be argued that UNO’s goal was literally to take over local Catholic congregations from within, transforming them into “progressive” political shock troops in the process. That judgment may seem strong, but many UNO-affiliated priests and congregations came to believe that it was true. UNO organizers consciously made use of their local Catholic alliances to deflect criticism of their troubling tactics.31 Church alliances were also the secret of UNO’s ability to rapidly mobilize large numbers of constituents for meetings with politicians.32
UNO would literally spend years trying to build up allied churches—even at the short-term expense of its own organizing—all in the hope of gaining de facto control of a church over time.33 With unions weaker than in Alinsky’s day, churches were the most important pre-existing source of organized constituents, and UNO moved to colonize that source.
A mass exodus of white ethnics to the suburbs had left many Chicago Catholic congregations vulnerable to this strategy. Anglo priests faced smaller congregations of relatively impoverished Mexicans, and cultural barriers to further recruitment.34 Nor could these churches afford to perform their usual charitable services for the community.35 UNO promised to solve the financial and membership problems of these priests, in return for Alinskyite training and cooperation in UNO’s campaigns. Now, instead of traditional Christian charity, there would be leftist politics.36
By no means was this solely a UNO-created strategy. Ever since Alinsky’s day, there had been a small group of socialist-leaning Catholic clergy who eagerly cooperated with community organizers. In the 1980s, Monsignor John J. Egan, once Alinsky’s close ally, was in many ways the dean of Chicago community organizers. Egan’s solution to the problems of Chicago’s increasingly impoverished urban churches, with their declining population of priests and nuns, was to infuse them with lay organizers on the Alinsky model.37 UNO was an important part of that plan. But Egan’s affection for leftist politics and Alinskyite tactics was not shared by the Church’s hierarchy. While Obama often affirms his Catholic connection by expressing admiration for Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop (eventually Cardinal) Bernardin was noticeably absent at UNO events, as were most other influential Chicago Catholic clergy.38
While UNO at first succeeded in drawing local priests into alliance, many members of the clergy and congregations backed out when they learned the extent of political commitment UNO was expecting. UNO even made exploratory efforts at organizing congregants to seize control of church affairs away from parish priests. This backfired, however, and UNO quickly abandoned the strategy. As it became increasingly apparent that UNO was attempting to take effective control of Catholic churches in Mexican neighborhoods, congregations pulled away and UNO’s entire church-based strategy was put into question.39 In response, UNO moved toward school-based organizing as an alternative.40 As we’ll see, school reform became the theme of the latter part of Obama’s organizing days.
Knowing what UNO was all about provides a new perspective on Obama’s own organizing efforts. Consider one of the best-known scenes in Dreams from My Father, where Obama tries to convince a group of black ministers to join forces with his Developing Communities Project. Things look promising until someone Obama calls “Reverend Smalls” crashes the scene with a bigoted attack on the “white money … Catholic churches and Jewish organizers” behind Obama’s group.41 The reader is outraged by Smalls’s bigotry and crushed for Obama, who has sacrificed everything to find his identity and affirm his values by organizing in a poor black community. So it’s easy to overlook the fact that Smalls also rejects the idea of an alliance with Alinskyite organizers because they’re “not interested in us… . All they want to do is take over. It’s all a political thing, and that’s not what this group [of ministers] here is about.”42 Once you know what UNO was up to, it’s easy to see that Smalls was right to worry about a political takeover.
By producing a beautifully crafted personal memoir, rather than a straightforward political account, Obama manages to divert us from much that is troubling in his organizing ventures. Readers root for Obama to succeed because his tales of community organizing are wrapped around the story of his personal and family struggles. Also, by putting informed and sensible concerns about community organizing into the mouth of a bigot, Obama deflects attention from very real problems with his radical mentors and allies. Yet it wasn’t just Reverend Smalls who refused an alliance with Obama’s group. Many other ministers were standoffish as well. So a story that arguably ought to have been about hard-left organizers colonizing churches to swell their controversial protest campaigns, instead turns into a tale of Obama boldly standing against a bigot. In Dreams, questions of race, religion, and family tragedy often serve to obscure hard-left political scheming.
SECTION TWO
The Harold Washington Archives and Collections (HWAC), housed in the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, contain documents that shed considerable light on Barack Obama’s three-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago. Some of these previously unexplored documents are letters from Obama and his Developing Communities Project (DCP) to Mayor Washington, or his staff. The Harold Washington Archives also contain quite a few documents reporting on interactions between the mayor’s office and UNO of Chicago.
By combining an analysis of these HWAC documents with contemporaneous news reports and other published literature, it is possible to move beyond the account of Obama’s organizing days presented in Dreams. Using this archival evidence, along with what we’ve learned about UNO of Chicago, I’ll first reconsider the core organizing experiences Obama recounts in Dreams: the fight for a job training center and the asbestos protests. Following this, I’ll reconstruct some important events that Obama has chosen to downplay or disguise: aggressive actions undertaken in conjunction with UNO of Chicago, an abortive effort to put together a youth counseling network, and Obama’s participation in the city-wide battle over school reform.
In Dreams, Obama gets his first big organizing breakthrough when he discovers that the closest city job-training center run by MET (Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training) is a forty-five-minute drive away from his Roseland neighborhood—in the ward of Harold Washington’s arch-enemy, Chicago machine boss and alderman Edward Vrdolyak. With so many unemployed young people, Roseland obviously needs a job center of its own. So Obama and the members of his Developing Communities Project invite MET director Cynthia Alvarez to a public meeting at the Altgeld Gardens housing project. Pressed by Obama’s group to place a MET center in Roseland, Alvarez agrees to establish one within six months.43 After that, Obama works closely with Rafiq al-Shabazz, a black-nationalist Muslim organizer, to complete a series of “sticky” negotiations with Alvarez.44
At last, the center is created and Harold Washington himself comes to cut the ribbon, awing Obama’s star-struck followers, and marking Obama’s first major organizing success. At the ceremony, the mayor is met, not only by Rafiq, Obama, and various followers, but also by a local state senator and alderman. Most surprising of all, Reverend Smalls, who had once dismissed Obama’s group (with its white, Catholic, and Jewish ties), makes an appearance as well. On hearing of Washington’s visit, Smalls phoned Obama, who then graciously helped make a place for Smalls at the ribbon cutting.45 So in Dreams, the story of the MET intake center is a happy tale—the first real proof that Obama knows how to organize and unify, and a small but significant sign that community organizing works.
Harold Washington’s briefing notes for this event show him scheduled to arrive at the Roseland Community Development Corporation, to be greeted by its director, Salim Al Narriden (already tentatively identified as Rafiq by the Los Angeles Times under the spelling Salim Al Nurridin).46 He is also to be met by “Barac Obama” [sic] and two members of Obama’s Developing Communities Project, Dan Lee and Loretta Augustine-Herron, who are already known to be the characters Will and Angela from Dreams.47 Washington is to be joined by Alderman Perry Hutchinson and State Senator Emil Jones (who became Obama’s mentor and sponsor years later when Obama entered the Illinois State Senate). Also present is Reverend Davis of St. John Church (Reverend Smalls?). In addition, the mayor is to be greeted by MET head Maria Cerda (Cynthia Alvarez?).48
The most interesting thing about the mayor’s briefing notes for the ribbon cutting may be what they tell us about the prize itself. The center Obama acquired for his neighborhood was funded in significant part by the federal Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA).49 While national politicians of both parties have pushed JTPA and similar employment training programs for decades, there is a remarkable amount of agreement among policy experts on both the left and the right that JTPA never worked. Conservative and liberal experts alike dismiss JTPA as an expensive charade that makes politicians appear to be doing something to cure unemployment, when in fact the program achieves next to nothing.50 In fact, the least successful parts of JTPA were the sections designed to find jobs for disadvantaged young people—exactly what Obama wanted to accomplish.51
In Dreams, Obama works to get Roseland a cut of the same government largess enjoyed by Alderman Vrdolyak’s ward, taking it for granted that the MET center will actually do some good. The mayor’s archived briefing notes tell us that at the ribbon cutting Mayor Washington makes the same point, congratulating DCP for nudging his administration into getting Roseland its “fair share” of funding. But what if we’re actually talking about a fair share of useless government pork? What if Obama’s efforts have less to do with breaking the grip of a racist Chicago machine than extending a wasteful government spoils system even further than it already runs? Even left-leaning policy wonks note that JTPA programs serve primarily as local patronage money, especially for urban Democratic politicians.52 When the major studies revealing JTPA’s failure were issued, legislators simply ignored the findings and renewed the spending anyway.53 The advantages of divvying up job-training money were simply too great to resist, whether the spending actually worked or not.
This is all the more striking when we recall that Obama’s introduction to his colleagues in Dreams came at a rally to celebrate the opening of a five-hundred-thousand-dollar computerized job placement program that Marty Kaufman had funded through the Illinois state legislature.54 By Obama’s own account, that job bank was a failure. Months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work through the program, the computer system was chaotic, and the people who ran it “seemed more concerned with next year’s funding cycle” than with fixing the problems.55 It looks like Obama’s own solution to Roseland’s employment problem was just another expensive taxpayer-funded fiasco. David Remnick’s sympathetic biography of Obama appears to confirm this. Remnick reports that, according to a minister who worked closely with Obama, the MET center closed after three years, with little evidence that it had actually secured employment for trainees in the meantime.56
On the other hand, these government handouts were good for something. For years, liberal interest groups and community organizations had used federal job-training money to fund their own highly politicized work. This sort of abuse of federal jobs money was particularly egregious in JTPA’s predecessor program, the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA).57 Probably the most notorious example of CETA abuse was money that went to an avowedly Marxist-Leninist community organizer for the “job” of “keeping an eye on city, county, and state governments and their jiving of the masses.”58
This politicized use of federal jobs-training money was supposed to have been eliminated by JTPA, which de-funded “public service employment” and restricted spending to “public/private partnerships” instead. In theory, local businesses would highlight occupations where jobs were available, and the unemployed would be trained for these positions. In practice, it didn’t work. The real employment problem wasn’t lack of specific skills training, but young applicants with poor reading, writing, and math abilities, along with unreliable job attendance and poor punctuality.59 Nor was politicization entirely eliminated, since sympathetic local officials could always cut community organizers into JTPA’s “public/private partnerships.”60 So with the right sort of political pull, community organizers could continue raiding federal job-training money to fund their own hyper-political activities.
Mayor Washington’s briefing notes indicate that Chicago’s JTPA public/private partnership did have participation from “community based organizations.”61 This may make sense of Obama’s long and “sticky” negotiations with the city over the MET center. What exactly was he negotiating? We can only speculate, but one possibility is that those negotiations turned around how much access Obama’s DCP and Rafiq’s Roseland Community Development Corporation would have to JTPA money. In other words, even if the MET intake center did little or nothing to secure good jobs for South Chicago’s unemployed youth, it probably gave both Mayor Washington and Obama’s organization what they needed anyway. Obama got a visible victory, and very possibly organizational access to federal money, while Harold Washington got the gratitude of Roseland’s voters. From the standpoint of its original purpose, the federal money involved may well have been wasted. But those same federal dollars were the lifeblood of local politicians and community organizers. All of which brings us to the problem of Rafiq.
Rafiq is the militant black nationalist community organizer Obama partners with to bring the MET center to Roseland. Rafiq is also the exception that proves the rule. He was too directly involved in Obama’s MET story to ignore. Alias or not, the real “Rafiq” might someday be identified as Obama’s partner in the MET project, at which point it could become clear that Obama had worked in close collaboration with a black nationalist community organizer who apparently favored conspiracy theories and anti-white rhetoric. If even Obama’s own DCP followers were put off by Rafiq’s wild talk, what would the general public think?
So while Obama has typically chosen to hide his radical ties, in this case he would need to take a different approach. He would have to distance himself from Rafiq’s ideology, while minimizing the extent to which his alliance with Rafiq provided concrete support for this militant’s efforts.
Obama spends a great deal of time in Dreams doing both of these things.62 I don’t mean to suggest that Obama’s reflections on Rafiq’s black nationalist ideology are insincere. On the contrary, I think they’re penetrating and deeply felt. But I am suggesting that Dreams’ passages on Rafiq were intended not only to convey Obama’s well-considered views on race, but also to protect him from the revelation of an explosively radical connection.
What does Obama actually say about the sort of anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Semitic militance symbolized for him by Rafiq? Rafiq’s extremism clearly makes Obama uncomfortable. Yet Obama also suggests that a militant black nationalist stance might be acceptable—if it actually delivered a better life for blacks. The problem, says Obama, is that it doesn’t. The separatist self-help preached by militant black nationalists still has to play out within the free enterprise system, which Obama argues cannot be so easily circumvented. The real solution, Obama hints, after showing the inescapability of capitalism’s constraints, is to “change the rules of power.”63 This is a typical Alinskyite euphemism for phasing out capitalism and ushering socialism in.
When you think about it, Obama is also tacitly revealing here how he understands his work with people like Jeremiah Wright. By his own testimony, Obama is willing to put up with a considerable amount of angry, conspiratorial, and anti-American talk, so long as he thinks it’s part and parcel of an effective plan of political action. He may not buy every far-out thing that his organizer-buddies say, but he shares with them a fundamentally socialist perspective on American society.
Rafiq’s views were sufficiently wild, and sufficiently traceable, that Obama had to try to separate himself publicly. Yet Obama obviously provided considerable assistance to Rafiq’s radical efforts. Obama tries to minimize this by saying that he really didn’t want to know the gruesome details of Rafiq’s financial interest in the MET center plan.64 But when Harold Washington began his ribbon cutting at Rafiq’s headquarters, the mayor was obviously providing considerable legitimation for Rafiq’s program. Obama was responsible for that.
Was Obama really as ignorant of what Rafiq stood to gain out of their joint venture as he portrays himself? Probably not. During the long and sticky MET negotiation process, Obama would likely have needed to be aware of Rafiq’s stake. In fact, Obama was probably using Rafiq’s Roseland Community Development Corporation to flesh out a JTPA public/private partnership program that the two of them could jointly control. However “ineffective” Obama might have considered Rafiq’s militant strategy and over-the-top rhetoric, he was very likely helping to fund and sustain Rafiq’s radicalism with taxpayer dollars. Interestingly, a 2007 Los Angeles Times piece knocking Obama for denying credit to his fellow organizers ends with a pro-Obama quotation from Salim Al Nurridin, who we now know was the model for Rafiq.65 You can see how Al Nurridin might have ignored Obama’s criticisms in Dreams and remembered instead that Obama had shown him the money.
Having said all that, a different interpretation of the Rafiq episode is possible. That’s because, in the May 2008 Los Angeles Times article where Rafiq’s identity was revealed, Salim Al Nurridin denied that he had ever held the black nationalist views Obama attributes to Rafiq in Dreams.66 The truth of this matter is tough to determine with certainty. Al Nurridin is now a part of Chicago’s respectable left-activist circles, and these are not environs in which you want to be known for championing racial separation, much less anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. So it’s possible that Al Nurridin simply thought it best to deny his earlier views. On the other hand, Rafiq may be another one of Obama’s composite characters. It’s possible, in other words, that Obama poured some of his other dealings with black nationalists into the character of Rafiq. We may even be dealing with both of these things—a bit of self-protective revisionism by Al Nurridin, as well as some character compression by Obama. Given the potential for embarrassment on all sides, these questions may never be entirely resolved. In any case, however much Al Nurridin himself was or wasn’t included in “Rafiq,” Obama’s reflections on this character likely served the purpose of distancing him from potentially troubling associations, while providing us with a window into his thinking on the black nationalism issue.
The famous asbestos battle in Dreams begins when Altgeld Gardens resident Sadie Evans discovers a public notice from the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) soliciting bids to remove asbestos from the project’s management office. Obama’s group worries that Altgeld’s apartments also contain dangerous asbestos. When Sadie and Obama question Altgeld’s manager, Mr. Anderson, he (falsely) tells them that the apartments have been tested and are asbestos free. When Anderson fails to provide proof of such testing, Obama alerts the media and heads downtown with Sadie and other DCP members to confront the Director of CHA. They get the runaround until the media arrive, at which time the director’s assistant, Ms. Broadnax, comes out to meet them. DCP members then negotiate a promise from CHA to test for asbestos, and an agreement that the director will attend a DCP-controlled meeting at Altgeld Gardens.
When the day of the meeting arrives, TV crews and seven hundred Altgeld residents show up. The meeting, however, ends in fiasco. The director arrives late, to a restive crowd, and DCP leaders appear unwilling to hand him the microphone when he tries to speak. Unable even to answer questions from angry residents, the director walks out, followed by a furious crowd, which menacingly surrounds his car before he manages to speed away. As a matter of publicity, the meeting is a success. The media cover the imbroglio, and asbestos removal begins. Yet Obama is mortified by the unruly and uncivil mess the meeting became. To his chagrin, after the fiasco, DCP was criticized by some for its methods and motives.67
The Harold Washington Archives and Collections contain a number of documents that shed light on these events. We have the text of a Mailgram from Obama’s group to CHA director Zirl Smith, copied with a separate cover letter to Mayor Washington.68 We also find city documents on the asbestos issue, including a long internal report recounting events, and transcripts of local news coverage.69 According to these documents, Obama and DCP met first with Altgeld manager Walter Williams (Mr. Anderson?), and downtown encountered the CHA director’s executive assistant, Ms. Gaylene Domer (Ms. Broadnax?), on May 9, 1986. The Mailgram is signed by Mrs. Kallie Smith (Sadie?), Ms. Cynthia Helt, Mrs. Loretta Augustine, and Mr. Henry Smith.70
The news reports on the meeting where CHA director Zirl Smith was chased to his car are interesting, but the most important untold part of the asbestos story lies elsewhere. Obama’s account of his own tactics is misleading and incomplete. In Dreams, he portrays himself as a proponent of civil dialogue, appalled by the way the big meeting spun out of control. The truth is more complicated. Using his accustomed method of “non-disclosure disclosure,” Obama hides his actual tactics from the reader, while saying just enough to allow him to deny that he was hiding anything at all.
As Obama tells it in Dreams, the key to the collapse of the asbestos forum was a broken microphone system. With only a single working microphone left, Obama instructed meeting leaders to hold the mike up to Smith when it was his turn to speak, but not let go of it. The fear was that if Smith got hold of the microphone, he might talk forever, avoiding pointed questions and taking effective control of the meeting away from DCP. When DCP leader “Linda” insisted on a yes-or-no answer from Smith, he said he’d prefer to answer in his own fashion and reached for the mike. Linda refused to hand over the microphone, and Smith walked out, with Altgeld’s furious residents chasing behind. Obama says he tried to head all this off by motioning to Linda to ignore his earlier advice and hand Smith the microphone, but he was too far to the rear of the room to be seen.71
This account sugar-coats and disguises the actual tactics taught by Greg Galluzzo and his fellow organizers at UNO of Chicago. The broken microphone system may have contributed to the confusion that night, but the real cause of the fiasco was an organizing technique designed from the start to polarize—and even to “fail.” Galluzzo’s meeting techniques are meant to box political “targets” into yes-or-no responses to demands, thereby creating win-win situations for the group. If the target says yes, the group gets what it wants. If the target says no, outrage at uncooperative officials increases membership and energizes the group. Consider the following description of Galluzzo’s techniques by a sympathetic scholar, Rutgers professor of political science Heidi Swarts:
Meetings or actions with authorities demonstrate power by … overturning deferential norms of interaction, insisting that authorities meet them on their turf, and by strictly controlling the agenda and how many minutes an official is allowed to speak. The opponent is polarized by the pinner, the member designated to pin down the official to yes-or-no answers. Activists are trained to push for yes-or-no commitments, knowing that politicians will avoid them if at all possible. Organizations hold rehearsals, and pinners practice their job. Getting a “no” answer is seen as preferable to “mush” because it will expose the authority as an opponent in the eyes of hundreds or thousands of people. Tight control of the proceedings helps avoid being manipulated by officials, although it can impart an artificial, staged quality to the proceedings.72
According to Swarts, this technique is a gentler version of same polarizing Alinskyite techniques practiced by ACORN. The somewhat toned-down aggression of Galluzzo’s “pinning” method is specially designed for “congregation-based” community organizing, since religious congregants typically object to ACORN’s aggressive civil disobedience. However, as Swarts notes, church members are often put off by even these toned-down polarizing tactics.73
While Obama does mention attempts by DCP leaders to push both Cynthia Alvarez and the CHA director into yes-or-no answers, he makes this look more like natural conversation than the highly coached and intentionally polarizing technique it in fact is.74 Moreover, as news accounts reveal, when Zirl Smith was unable to take the mike, he was also being drowned out by shouts of “No, No” from the crowd.75 We know from UNO that angry chants and collective boos are also coached and rehearsed by Galluzzo-trained organizers. Zirl Smith hadn’t completed asbestos testing at Altgeld Gardens and hadn’t yet determined where the cash-strapped CHA was going to find the money to pay for a cleanup. A civil meeting would have allowed him to present his side of the story. But Galluzzo’s techniques aren’t meant to be civil. They are consciously designed either to win—or to fail and enrage. Some of Obama’s supporters began to drift away after the angry meeting, suspicious of his methods and motives. As in the case of Reverend Smalls, Obama in his book puts these (quite reasonable) concerns into the mouth of an unsympathetic character, “Mrs. Reece,” who has a penchant for making unpleasant, racially tinged remarks.76 Once again, Obama uses the race issue to screen out legitimate concerns about his Alinskyite tactics.
As we saw in Chapter Two, Obama was likely drawn into community organizing in the hope of using it as a springboard to politics. As Obama tells us in Dreams, after the MET ribbon-cutting triumph, his fantasy was to take “the leadership [of DCP] downtown to sit down with Harold and discuss the fate of the city.” This was not an unrealistic fantasy, since UNO of Chicago co-founders Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales were often in conference with the mayor over UNO’s various projects.77 But to get inside the mayor’s office required a delicate balance between pressuring his administration and acting as an ally.78 The collapse of the meeting with Zirl Smith threatened to turn Obama into an unfriendly troublemaker in the eyes of Harold Washington’s administration, and that would have undermined Obama’s personal ambitions. That is why, in his memoirs, Obama distorts it.
Here is another area in which Reverend Smalls was right, however bigoted he may have been about other matters. Smalls explained to Obama that he didn’t want to work with DCP because, with Harold Washington in office and black churches already well-connected to the mayor, it was counterproductive to embarrass the administration with public protests.79 By trapping Zirl Smith in a typical Galluzzo-style confrontation, Obama was playing with fire—potentially alienating the very administration he idolized. The microphone problem may have pushed the situation to an extreme, but the organizing technique itself was designed to cause trouble. Also, UNO of Chicago had more scope to pressure the mayor because Latinos were a swing constituency. Harold Washington could pretty much depend on support from African-Americans, whereas Hispanics were split between Washington and the machine. That means Obama had to be particularly careful about alienating city hall. Ultimately, Harold Washington didn’t really need Obama to keep the black vote, although he did need UNO to win Hispanics. These political constraints may have had a significant impact on Obama’s work.
In any case, Obama’s account of the asbestos fiasco, and of his organizing generally, disguises his willingness to use polarizing Alinskyite tactics. He clearly approves of these polarizing tactics, because in the nineties he knowingly funneled foundation money to the organizers who used them. The reason Obama has to disguise the truth about his tactics is that he embodies community organizing’s “inside” strategy. Obama has always aspired to be the kind of organizer who works through the electoral system. His job is to use the government to get hardball Alinskyite organizers the laws and money they want, while also providing an appealingly sanitized picture of organizing itself to the public. Obama is the classic organizing good cop. That means he has to obscure his bad-cop roots.
During the 2008 campaign, press accounts of Obama’s early organizing days incorrectly and consistently portrayed him as rejecting Alinskyite hardball. “Mr. Obama shunned Mr. Alinsky’s strategy of using confrontation tactics like pressuring public officials and business leaders by picketing their homes,” said the New York Times.80 Obama’s ubiquitously quoted organizing mentor, Jerry Kellman, said: “Barack was willing to challenge power, but he was very reticent to use any personal confrontation.”81 Obama’s friend and U.S. Senate colleague from Illinois, Richard J. Durban, told the Washington Post: “If you read Alinsky’s teaching, there are times he’s confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack.”82 The Associated Press said that despite working with Alinskyite colleagues, Obama “didn’t adopt hard-nose tactics.”83 There were also interviews with DCP leader Loretta Augustine-Herron in which she quoted Obama telling followers to be “polite” and “take the high road.”84
To the contrary, as we have seen, Obama was closely tied to UNO of Chicago, which specialized in just such aggressive tactics. In fact, Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.
We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.85
Especially in 1988, when the landfill demonstration took place, UNO was a staff-dominated group.86 Despite its supposedly democratic structure, with members and their elected leaders making all decisions, UNO was in fact controlled by a small group of paid organizers. Since Obama was meeting weekly with UNO’s organizers to plan actions, he was effectively part of the leadership of one of Chicago’s most notoriously radical and aggressive community organizations. Obama carefully disguises this in Dreams.
Chicago’s landfill battle in the eighties was literally and figuratively a mess. The city’s South Side had been a dump since the turn of the century, long before the Altgeld Gardens housing development was placed there. The wetlands in this area, with their thick natural clay underlayer, were ideal for landfill. As the city grew, the dumping-grounds expanded, endangering nearby residents. Yet every other location in the city and state resisted becoming the next waste disposal site. Southeast Chicago itself was split on the issue, since dumping polluted the neighborhood, yet also provided the area with desperately needed jobs.87 No one wants a dump in his backyard, but the city’s landfill needs just kept growing. The difference, according to the Chicago Tribune, was that, whereas most Illinois anti-landfill activists used “patience and reason,” UNO of Chicago’s anti-dumping leader, Mary Ellen Montes, favored civil disobedience and tactics that went “to extremes.”88
Montes led the landfill demonstration Obama helped to plan. The object was to scuttle a deal in which Waste Management Corporation “would spend millions of dollars on community development projects, including job training, scholarships, housing, health care and day care,” in return for neighborhood agreement to expanded landfills.89 Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP protesters marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protesters, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while Montes told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.”90 After that, the protesters filed out. But of course, the message of intimidation had been sent. Ironically, years later, in 2006, when it was no longer associated with co-founders Galluzzo and Gonzales, UNO of Chicago accepted just such a deal from Waste Management.91
Thus, widespread claims during the 2008 campaign that Obama shunned Alinskyite confrontation tactics were wrong. These false claims were abetted by a biased press corps, reluctant to investigate Obama’s past, and by his organizing mentors, intent on protecting their protégé’s image. Ultimately, however, the sanitized account of this future president’s organizing career originated with Obama himself. The only hint in Dreams of the break-in is the prettied-up passage where Obama speaks of holding “a series of joint meetings with Mexicans in the Southeast Side to craft a common environmental strategy for the region.”92 As we’ll see, the true story of Obama’s early organizing days is completely consistent with his efforts to channel foundation funding to his confrontational Alinskyite colleagues in the nineties.
SECTION THREE
In Dreams, Obama explains that in the spring of 1987, alarmed by the deepening alienation and gang violence of local teens, he drew up a proposal for a youth counseling network.93 The idea was to provide at-risk teenagers with mentoring and tutorial services, while also drawing parents into a longer-term battle for school reform. Obama reports that he had trouble selling parts of this plan to his membership.94 The churches on which DCP depended were filled with teachers, principals, and school superintendents, whereas Obama’s reformist allies wanted to transfer power over schools away from teachers’ unions, handing it instead to community organizations like UNO, ACORN, and DCP. Resistance to this project from his own members angered Obama. So rather than drop the school reform idea, he went out and drummed up support from others—especially an Afro-centric educator Obama calls “Asante Moran,” who helped draw up DCP’s youth counseling proposal.95
The Harold Washington Archives and Collections contain this proposal, which accompanies letters from Obama to the mayor’s office asking for support.96 We also have internal Washington administration comments on Obama’s proposal.97 These documents do a great deal more than reveal the content of Obama’s youth counseling program. They also shed considerable light on his emerging political network, including Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and John Ayers (colleague and brother of that famously unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers).
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger, the two incendiary preachers who burst onto the national scene during Obama’s 2008 campaign, are both on Obama’s youth counseling advisory committee. That means Obama had connected with both at least a year before he left Chicago for law school. Quite possibly, Obama turned to both men to counter the reluctance of priests and ministers in Roseland to join in the battle for school reform. School reform was based on the idea of handing control over the education system to local “school councils” that leftist community organizers hoped to control. The schools battle split Chicago between the liberal, middle-class, and heavily minority teachers’ unions, on the one hand, and the still more left-leaning community organizations that hoped to gain power, on the other. Since Wright and Pfleger were at the far left end of the political spectrum, they would have favored the reformist forces.
We see, then, that Obama’s relationship with Wright and Pfleger was political from the start. There’s nothing surprising about this, given his UNO mentors’ strategy of building their political power on a series of religious alliances. In fact, if you’re an Alinskyite community organizer and you’re not thinking of ministers as political allies, you’re doing something wrong. So the notion that Obama was drawn to Wright simply to join up with a respectable local church isn’t convincing. On the contrary, Obama’s plan called for the mayor to confer with him and his advisory board. So Obama looked to Wright and Pfleger to help him in meetings with the mayor.
John Ayers was yet another key player in the city-wide movement for school reform. Through his affiliation with the Commercial Club of Chicago, Ayers represented the business community’s interest in the schools. No doubt John’s father, Commonwealth Edison CEO and chair Tom Ayers, helped supply his son with credentials in Chicago’s business community. Yet business ties notwithstanding, John Ayers was linked to the network of socialist activists that centered on the Midwest Academy. John’s brother Bill wouldn’t arrive in Chicago until the following fall. Yet already, by spring of 1987, Obama had made contact with Bill Ayers’s brother.
Obama’s links to Bill Ayers’s future colleagues don’t end there. The advisory board of Obama’s youth counseling network also included Anne Hallett, who would someday join with Bill Ayers to create an education foundation headed by Obama. Another school reform leader, Fred Hess, was on Obama’s board. So a year before the time in 1988 when Bill Ayers emerged as the leader of Chicago’s school-reform forces, Obama was bound to this network.
How did Obama manage to place what amounts to nearly the entire upper echelon of the Chicago school reform movement on the advisory board of his tiny community organization’s proposed counseling network—at a time when the movement itself had only barely taken shape? The most likely answer is Ken Rolling, a key figure in Chicago’s socialist politics. Rolling, a former high official of the Midwest Academy, was in charge of Obama’s foundation funding. Rolling was also orchestrating the school-reform movement from behind—less out of a concern for education than in an effort to build the power and membership of Chicago’s Alinskyite groups.98 Rolling could easily have linked Obama to the leaders of Chicago’s school-reform movement.
In the end, Obama’s grander plans for his youth counseling network fell apart. Apparently, Harold Washington never agreed to meet with Obama and his youth counseling advisory board, or to keynote a DCP rally.99 A letter from the DCP to Mayor Washington also contains a cryptic hand-written notation from a mayoral aide that seems to indicate Obama was “upset” to learn that his proposal had been rejected or delayed.100 (The note is too vague to conclude this with certainty.)
If Harold Washington had decided to back the proposal, it would have been a major coup for Obama. As creator of the prototype for a city-wide program funded by millions of state dollars, Obama would have been in charge of a small fiefdom and could have built connections (and a political future) all over town. With Wright, Pfleger, and Ayers in tow, Obama would also have enjoyed periodic meetings with the mayor, just like his UNO mentors. Obama’s proposal appears to have been put on hold toward the very end of June 1987. We know that Obama told Jerry Kellman of his decision to leave organizing for law school in late October of that year.101 The failure of Harold Washington to accept Obama’s youth counseling proposal may have checked Obama’s immediate political ambitions, thereby pushing him out of organizing and into law school.
Before leaving for Harvard, however, Obama would join UNO for some classic Alinskyite hardball. We know that in early February of 1988, Obama planned and participated in a confrontational UNO break-in. Around this same time, Obama’s DCP combined with UNO for a number of joint actions. UNO co-founder, Mary Gonzales, explained that during this period, “We were trying very hard to connect neighborhoods and he [Obama] was part of that.”102 One of these joint UNO-DCP actions took place on February 18, 1988, and involved school reform. Although Obama cannot be placed at this action with certainty, the chances of his having been there are high. After all, Obama had participated in the joint UNO-DCP landfill protest just days before. With his DCP followers going into yet another confrontational action, Obama would surely have wanted to help.
The Chicago Tribune of February 19, 1988, reports on a Chicago Board of Education meeting forced into hasty adjournment by a joint UNO-DCP demonstration: “Leaders of the Neighborhood Schoolhouse Coalition refused to present their reform proposal after William Farrow, chairman of the board’s Education Summit Committee, would not allow all their supporters into the already packed, 120-seat board chambers.”103 Deacon Daniel Lee (presumably Will from Dreams) laid out the ultimatum. Although the Education Summit Commit- tee tried to persuade the UNO-DCP protesters to present their plan, they refused to do so without the seventy-five additional supporters angrily chanting in the lobby because they couldn’t fit into the hearing room.
This is a typical Alinskyite gambit, favored not only by UNO organizers, but by Obama’s allies at ACORN and the Midwest Academy as well.104 Demonstrators demand to be heard collectively at a packed public meeting, knowing full well that they will not all be able to fit. The resulting polarization when the request is denied generates anger against supposedly repressive authorities, thus intimidating political “targets” while simultaneously ginning up the energy of the group (although at the price of alienating moderate observers). Since Obama was likely present at this school-reform demonstration, along with the landfill break-in (and quite possibly additional unreported joint actions with UNO), his account of his tactics in Dreams begins to look like a sugary fairy tale.
Another by-product of this disruptive strategy is media attention. After the schools meeting was canceled, coalition leaders presented their plan to supporters and the press outside the chamber. The UNO-DCP proposal called for $500 million in new school funding. Powerful Illinois state senator Arthur Berman promised during the 1988 reform debate that any major new money for the schools would mean an increase in state taxes.105 The reformers never got their money—or their tax increase.
By March of 1988, just a few weeks after the joint UNO-DCP demonstration, a wide-ranging group of school-reform activists began meeting regularly. Initially this was under the leadership of Peter Martinez, an experienced Alinskyite organizer who also worked closely with UNO.106 This signaled that UNO had assumed a central role in what was soon to become the most powerful city-wide group pushing for school reform: the ABCs Coalition (Alliance for Better Chicago Schools). Along with UNO, of course, Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP) was very much a part of the ABCs Coalition. We also know that Obama himself remained immersed in the school- reform crusade until he left for Harvard, since he led a busload of school-reform activists to Illinois’ capital of Springfield when the movement turned to lobbying in the late spring of 1988.107
At some point in late 1987, Bill Ayers joined the Chicago school-reform battle. Ayers was then in his first year as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Of course, given his brother John’s established role in this battle, Bill would have had an “in” to the school-reform coalition from the moment of his arrival in the city.
According to a 1990 article in the Chicago Reader, Ayers was asked to run ABCs Coalition meetings within a few weeks of the time he started to attend.108 With the initial moderator, Martinez, closely tied to UNO, Ayers may have been perceived as a neutral figure, conveniently unattached to any existing faction.109 With Obama deeply immersed in the ABCs coalition, and with Ayers chairing its meetings, the chances that they would have met in 1988 are high. UNO was the leading power within the school-reform coalition, and Obama’s DCP was UNO’s closest ally. So it’s unlikely that someone leading the coalition’s strategy sessions could have safely ignored Obama. During the 2008 campaign, bloggers pointed to the likelihood of an early Obama-Ayers connection via their work in the 1988 Chicago school-reform battle.110 What we now know about Obama’s ties to UNO only strengthens the point.
SECTION FOUR
One last name on the advisory board of Obama’s proposed youth counseling program requires attention: Dr. John L. McKnight, of the Center for Urban Affairs Policy Research at Northwestern University. The McKnight connection opens another revealing window onto Obama’s ideology. Toward the end of his organizing stint, Obama approached McKnight for a recommendation to Harvard Law School. McKnight had helped to train Obama.111 At the conclusion of his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama tells of asking McKnight for a recommendation (without using McKnight’s name).112
McKnight is an expert in both health policy and community organizing. His most influential essay on organizing was published jointly with his Northwestern colleague, John (“Jody”) Kretzmann (another Obama associate) in 1984, a year before Obama arrived in Chicago. It’s called “Community Organizing in the Eighties: Toward a Post-Alinsky Agenda.”113 With Obama receiving training from McKnight in the mid-eighties, he would surely have been influenced by this piece. In fact, a report in Sasha Abramsky’s recent book, Inside Obama’s Brain, confirms that Obama studied McKnight’s work.114
In their article, McKnight and Kretzmann note that decisions affecting local economies are increasingly made in other parts of the country. That makes it harder for organizers to find local “enemies” or “targets” capable of delivering economic relief. You can’t force a mayor, or even a factory manager, to re-open a steel mill if the decision to close it is made in a far-away state. The remedy, say McKnight and Kretzmann, is to organize confrontations, not over the distribution of city services (like garbage pickup or neighborhood police patrols), but over economic production itself. McKnight and Kretzmann take the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as their model. In the name of fairness, CRA forces banks to make high-risk “subprime” loans to low-credit customers. Many believe that CRA helped to cause the current financial crisis. Yet McKnight and Kretzmann want to impose CRA-like redistributive constraints on a whole range of industries. For example, they favor laws that would give community organizers a place on corporate boards and regulatory agencies, thereby preventing businesses from leaving a community at will. Just as ACORN inserted itself into America’s banking system through CRA, McKnight and Kretzmann want organizers to press for laws that would give them influence over the entire system of production.
This movement to place constraints on capitalism “from below” was the strategy favored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the eighties. This socialist vision, I argue, inspired Obama to become a community organizer. He learned how to go about it from his mentor John McKnight.
McKnight is also an expert on health policy who has worked in close partnership with longtime Obama confidante Quentin Young. Young was a high official of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.115 Together, Young and McKnight founded the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, which published a maga- zine called Health & Medicine in the eighties.116 Health & Medicine strongly backed single-payer systems—health care run exclusively by the government. Young’s influence helped turn Obama into a prominent advocate of single-payer health care, and Obama worked with Young on the health-care issue during his time in the Illinois State Senate.117 Young was also present at the notorious kickoff event for Obama’s political career at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.118
Health & Medicine, the magazine of the group founded by Young and McKnight, is filled with socialist themes. The Spring 1987 issue (published in the middle of Obama’s Chicago organizing stint) features excerpts from the biography of “Red Emma” (leftist-anarchist Emma Goldman), along with a tribute to nurses in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (communist-supported fighters in the Spanish Civil War).119 A Winter 1985 issue of Health & Medicine, published just before Obama’s arrival in Chicago, features an article supporting health care as practiced by the Marxist Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and in Cuba as well.120 McKnight himself is featured in two pieces from that Winter 1985 issue of Health & Medicine. In one article, he leads a discussion among community organizers looking for ways to “capture a portion” of the health-care market.121 This is consistent with Mc- Knight’s idea that community organizations need to take control of the economy from below.
Also in the Winter 1985 issue of Health & Medicine, Quentin Young interviews McKnight about the latest developments in Sweden’s welfare state.122 McKnight is an expert on the Swedish system. Some of that country’s most left-leaning bureaucrats actually seek out his advice. In the interview, McKnight explains to Young that at a 52 percent tax rate (not including a 15 percent national sales tax), the Swedish state has probably reached the limit of its ability to extract income from its citizens. The solution, McKnight’s Swedish associates believe, is to “tax people’s time.” Sweden’s far-left bureaucrats call this idea “care conscription.” Under the plan, Swedes would be drafted to work in the state’s welfare system. At the same time, the government would limit the amount of time an individual could work for his own profit. This “care conscription” would compel citizens to mop floors and provide other sorts of manual labor in Sweden’s many state-run institutions.
While McKnight and Young acknowledge the radicalism of this proposal, they clearly admire the Swedish system and are at least open to the idea of compulsory citizen labor. These, then, are the values of Obama’s organizing mentors and political collaborators.
What about Obama’s fellow organizers at UNO of Chicago and its successor organization, the Gamaliel Foundation. Were they socialists? We know from Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts, who studied the organization in recent years, that Gamaliel-trained organizers intentionally avoid open ideological talk, although they freely spout leftist jargon behind the scenes.123 Knowing that their working-class followers will reject leftist ideology, Gamaliel organizers take care to present their ideas as “commonsense” solutions for “working families.”124 But consider Obama’s account of his mentor “Marty Kaufman” in Dreams. Kaufman’s plans for workers to take over a struggling steel mill and pressure local banks to fund it come right out of the socialist strategies of the eighties.125
With Greg Galluzzo’s support, in 2001, Dennis Jacobsen, the director of Gamaliel’s National Clergy Caucus, published Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing, a combination handbook and ideological guide for Gamaliel’s religious organizers.126 The book is socialist in all but name. Jacobsen decries America’s corporate system, which he claims is designed to benefit the prosperous and keep the poor down.127 The goal of Gamaliel organizers, says Jacobsen, should be to stir up public anger in order to “shake the foundations of this society.”128 Jacobsen never mentions socialism, but he does hold up communal property among the early Christians and “radi- cal sharing” by various African groups as models for the good society.129 Like Reverend Wright’s sermon’s, Jacobsen’s work is shot through with anti-American themes. The underlying point is clear enough for anyone with eyes to see: America is a “sick society” whose oppressive capitalist system must be transformed out of all recog- nition.130
In January of 1988, toward the end of Obama’s organizing time in Chicago, New Ground, the newsletter of the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, published a report called “Community Organizing: Building Democracy and Socialism in our Neighborhoods.”131 That article identifies an “emerging consensus” among area socialists that community organizing has become an indispensable element of their political strategy. DSA members are exhorted to work within existing community organizations, to “radicalize” their efforts. That is, socialist organizers are encouraged to agitate for laws and agreements designed to constrain banks, utilities, and other elements of the capitalist system. This is Marty Kaufman’s plan in Dreams. The 1988 New Ground report also cites the Citizen Action network, run by Chicago’s Midwest Academy, as the leading example of a leftist approach to community organizing. These socialist community organizers were at the very center of Obama’s political world.
Mike Kruglik, one of Obama’s early organizing mentors, once said of his protégé: “I think Obama already had his basic beliefs and values when he got [to Chicago].”132 So according to Kruglik, Obama’s politics were well established by the time he left New York. We now know that Obama was drinking in socialist theories of community organizing during those New York years. Chicago’s organizers provided Obama with new political tools, but not with a new ideology. That ideology was entrenched before Obama ever set foot in Chicago, and its name, evidence strongly suggests, was socialism.