There’s some kind of awfulizer gene embedded in human nature ( as evolved and especially among those who pay a lot of attention to politics) that makes us want to believe that things are worse than they are, and, if we can possibly manage to believe it, that things are the worst they’ve ever been.

As someone who pays way, way too much attention to the daily utterances of politicians, and the ads, and the press releases, and the constant stream of half (or less than half) truths, and the constantly improving post-modern methods of sneaking past our brains and appealing to the darker regions of our souls, I often slip into awfulizer mode myself. 

Maybe I exaggerate (which, of course, is a useful quality for awfulizing). But, as a history nerd, I am also burdened with too many facts that get in the way of truly believing that what we are now experiencing is the worst ever.

 Yes, our politicos can’t seem to find the spirit of compromise on such seemingly epic issues as adjusting tax rates, which our current discourse suggests is really about freedom versus oppression. But the country seems unlikely to literally break apart over it, as occurred in 1861 over the much more epic issue of slavery, which really was about freedom versus oppression.

Yes, Dems and Repubs in Washington are not always speaking to each other Minnesota Nicely. But no member of the House has marched into the Senate and attacked a senator with a metal cane putting the senator in the hospital and causing permanent brain damage, as Rep. Preston Brooks did to Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. Thomas Jefferson’s political opponents long traded on the rumor (which, so far as recent genetic testing can determine, turned out to be true) that Jefferson had a slave mistress who bore him several children. They called Abe Lincoln “the original gorilla,” and those who used that endearment included his own top general (George McClellan) and a member of his cabinet (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who is believed to have coined the phrase). So perhaps some of today’s name-calling isn’t the worst we’ve seen.

On last week’s "Meet the Press" panel, Doris Kearns Goodwin (to make a similar point that today’s discourse isn’t necessarily at record lows, mentioned a campaign ditty sung by Whigs in the 1840 election that said that then-Pres. Martin Van Buren “deserves the lowest place in hell.”

I dug up the verse:

Who rules us with an iron rod
Who moves at Satan’s beck and nod
Who heeds not man, who heeds not God?
Van Buren!

Who would his friend his country sell?
Do other deeds too base to tell,
Deserves the lowest place in Hell?
Van Buren!

And the same for 'dirty tricks'
Likewise, the tendency of any incumbent president heading into a reelection campaign to wish that he could choose the least electable opponent as the other party’s nominee and, if that can’t be arranged, to at least hope that the out-party’s nominating process will be as ugly and drawn-out as possible, leaving them less time and money to unite against him in November.

There is little doubt that Pres. Obama and his political team is enjoying the current Republican fratricide (see the current wry New Yorker cover, which captures it with a Super Bowl flavor). You will hear a certain amount of silly contrarianism on this point (after all, these contrarians say, Obama didn’t suffer from his own drawn-out nomination battle with Hillary Clinton), but there is really no doubt that Team Obama:

a) is very happy to hear all of the current Repub foursome pledging to stay in the race to the end and wishes they would mean it, although such pledges are always made and usually broken and really, shouldn’t journalists just stop asking the candidates the when-will-you-drop-out questions that elicit these particular white lies;

b) wishes they could arrange for Newt Gingrich to somehow beat Mitt Romney because the Obamians surely believe what all those current trial heat matchup-up polls show about which Republican would be the stronger challenger;

c) is willing to make some mischief in furtherance of either a) or b). If you look for it, you can see it when Dem-leaning “analysts” on CNN or Fox discuss the race. A great deal of what they say seems designed to either knock down whichever Repub is leading at the moment, in hopes of keeping the internal Repub race going  or piling on whatever criticism one of the Repub contenders is currently making against the other in a way that seems designed to tee the issue up for use by the Obama campaign down the road. And the same is of course true for the messages by various Obama surrogate organizations.

When Newt Gingrich’s SuperPAC (make that the pro-Gingrich SuperPAC that operates on his behalf but without coordination) was flaying Mitt Romney as a job-slayer during his private sector days, the Obama campaign itself put out a mildly nasty statement contrasting Romney's work as a young man, profiting off (in some cases) killing jobs, Obama was organizing unemployed workers.

A bit nastier and a step removed from the Obama fingerprints (of course, there is no coordination between the Obama campaign and the SuperPACs that support him), back when Gingrich was surging a pro-Dem SuperPAC managed to acquire the domain name “newtgingrich.com” and referred visitors to that site to negative articles about Gingrich or to sites that had unsavory connections to Newt’s reputation. That same pro-Dem SuperPAC, “American Bridge 21st Century” has been leading reporters to stories like this one about how Romney’s old firm practiced free enterprise by exploiting tax subsidies, and distributed flyers to South Carolina Republicans emphasizing the most pro-gay-rights things Romney ever said.

The right and proper thing to do, of course, would be to stay out of the other party’s internal deliberations, concentrate on your own very demanding job, and save your politicizing for the campaign trail. (I can’t believe I even wrote a sentence that naïve.) None of these tricks are exactly clean, and politics ain’t beanbag, as Mr. Dooley famously said (although, for some reason, Mitt Romney has changed it to “beanbags.”)

 But before I could awfulize into thinking that political dirty tricks are reaching any kind of new low, I finished reading Rick Pearlstein’s 2008 tome “Nixonland,” which reminded me what dirty tricks really look like. And yes, I’m afraid that all of this is really leading up to a rehash of a few of Nixon’s less-remembered crimes against democracy. The account below is derived from “Nixonland.”

Real dirty tricks
Chances are, you remember the really criminal stuff done by the Nixon White House as Nixon prepared to seek re-election in 1972. Illegal wiretaps placed by CIA-linked thugs after illegal break-ins into Democratic National Committee headquarters were, of course, the crimes that led the whole thing to ultimately unravel.

But if I mentioned the name Donald Segretti, perhaps those of you who were paying attention during the Watergate hearings (did I just date myself?) will recall a series of lower-order misdemeanors that really set the bar for messing with the other party’s nominating process.

Nixon hoped to run against any Dem other than Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine), whom he believed would be the toughest challenger. Nixon’s strongest preference was to run against South Dakota Sen. George McGovern whom he believed would be the weakest. The White House set up a unit to do something to Muskie that they called by a verb that started with “rat” and ended with a four-letter term for sexual intercourse. There were a lot of Dem candidates, and the tricks were played on several, but never on McGovern.

In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, voters got calls in the middle night from phony volunteers claiming to be with the “Harlem for Muskie Committee.”

The tricks often involved getting some young accomplice to volunteer for the target campaign, not only as a spy but also so they would steal letterhead and put out phony literature. Sometimes, the Segretti-run dirty tricks unit would put out fake fliers announcing a fake Muskie event. Democrats would show up, expecting to hear from the candidate and pissed off that Muskie stood them up. In other instances, they did the opposite: When there was a real rally, the Nixon tricksters would do something to screw up the candidates travel plans so the audience would be pissed off because the event would start late or the candidate would never show.

Some especially brilliant tricks would screw two candidates at once. The tricksters put out a phony letter, on Muskie stationery, informing Democrats that another Dem candidates, Sen. Henry Jackson, had sired an illegitimate daughter and been arrested for homosexual activity. The recipient could choose whether to think less of Muskie or Jackson or both.

 Another fake “Muskie letter alleged that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving while driving around with a call girl. The dirty tricksters got some Eugene McCarthy stationery and the campaign’s Florida mailing list and put out a letter to McCarthy’s own supporters in Florida asking them to ignore his name on the Florida primary ballot and vote for Humphrey instead.

When Muskie cried
Here’s the big one, at least in terms of kneecapping the Muskie candidacy in the run-up to New Hampshire. In a fairly famous incident, Muskie stood on a truck in the snow outside the office of the Manchester Union-Leader to denounce the paper for the lies it was running against him and his wife. Muskie got emotional and misted up, maybe even cried (back when men weren’t supposed to cry). The incident became at least the symbol of how Muskie blew his front-runner status.

Less remembered was the other lie in the Manchester paper. The paper reprinted a letter signed by “Paul Morrison,” recounting that he — “Morrison” — had asked Muskie how he could understand the problems of minorities when he came from Maine, which has a tiny black population. According to the letter (which, of course, the Union-Leader published without verifying its authenticity) a Muskie aide replied, in Muskie’s presence, that while Maine didn’t have many blacks, it did have “Canucks,” a mildly derogatory term for Canadians. New Hampshire (like Maine) had a substantial population of Canadian émigrés.

The incident reported in the letter had never happened. “Paul Morrison” didn’t exist. The letter was written by a dirty trickster on the White House payroll. Muskie won the New Hampshire primary but underperformed expectations, which led to a loss of front-runner status and eventually to the nomination of George McGovern (although McGovern wasn’t able to lock up the nomination until the convention itself) and to the re-election of Nixon by 49 states to one.

The public learned of the dirty tricks during the Watergate investigation, which led to the release of the secret White House tapes which showed that Nixon had been aware of the dirty tricks, had taken great pleasure at hearing the details of their activities and had suggested some additional ideas for more dirty tricks. The revelations of Watergate also lead to Nixon’s eventual resignation in disgrace. Segretti did four months in prison for distributing false campaign literature.

If you need to awfulize, awfulize that and maybe feel a little better about the politics of today.

Gov. Mitt Romney said it again last night, in his Florida victory speech, but he’s been saying it in almost exactly these words in most of his recent stump speeches. Here’s last night’s version:

“President Obama believes America's role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. He is intent on shrinking our military capacity at a time when the world faces rising threats. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it.”

I sincerely doubt that Romney or anyone else can find the quote from Obama about American leadership being over. As for the military cuts, it’s true. Obama, in fulfillment of the deficit reduction package agreed to by Congress last year, will ask for a mere $525 billion for the Pentagon for fiscal 2013.  That’s down from $531 billion for fiscal 2012, a reduction of $6 billion or 1.1 percent.

 (I should note that the $531 billion to $525 billion comes out of the Pentagon’s permanent cost structure and doesn’t include additional savings that Obama hopes to realize from the troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far as I know, Romney does not propose to resume combat operations in Iraq.)

At present, U.S. military spending equals roughly the combined budget of the world’s next 20 biggest military budgets. And if you look at the list of those next 20, almost all of them are reliable U.S. allies.

Romney, in the same speech last night and in his standard stump, promises to balance the federal budget without raising taxes (details to come when?) Romney says that passing on ever-increasing debt to our children is not just bad policy, but is “morally wrong.” (I agree.) But Romney also feels that a 1.1 percent cut in the military budget is a problem that leaves the U.S. so weakened that somewhere in the world someone might “think of challenging” us.

What does that mean? What constitutes “thinking of challenging” us?

Could it mean that China or Russia or Iran or whom (?) would actually attack the United States on its own territory?  No one has tried that since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. The way that worked out for Japan hardly seems to invite others to want to follow suit, but who am I to say. Before Pearl Harbor, I’d say you’re talking about the British in the War of 1812, which was the last foreign military invasion of U.S. soil. Anyway, I really don’t believe that Romney’s vision of someone “challenging” the U.S. militarily could really mean invading.

So what does it mean?

You could bring up Al Qaida and September 11 as an attack on America. I wouldn’t dispute that it was. But it was hardly motivated by a belief that the U.S. military budget was too low, nor does it seem likely that some higher military budget in 2001 would have deterred the atrocity.

Perhaps Romney’s vision of our inadequate (or soon-to-be-inadequate when the the $6 billion cut kicks in) power is about our treaty obligations. Is Romney talking about the ability to defend our NATO allies? To deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? Is it Israel? Is it the possibility that Iran will try to close the Straits of Hormuz to oil shipments? Does Romney think the $525 billion military would lack an answer? Which of these legal or even moral military obligations is it that the U.S. lacks the military might to fulfill?

It may be that the concept of a U.S. military so strong that no one could even think of challenging us means nothing, really, literally, concretely. Quite possibly, sentences like these in campaign rhetoric like this intended to pluck that resonant chord that exists in our hearts but not analyzed by our brains in the world of facts, logic and seriously thinkable possibilities. In this case, the chord is one of fear, especially the fear that Republicans feel at the possibility of Democrats in charge of the U.S. military.

Or perhaps Romney’s phrase means this: Perhaps it refers to the frustration that U.S. leaders sometimes feel when they cannot get some other nation to behave the way the U.S. says it should behave. Take Pakistan, for example, which is not cooperating as fully with U.S. operations (albeit on Pakistani territory) to capture and kill Al Qaida and Taliban forces. Or take Iran, with its unwillingness to drop its ambitions (although it claims not to have the ambitions) to develop nuclear weapons.

Or maybe it’s just the general cantankerous, truculent downright disrespectful attitude of some of those countries, toward the United States, calling us Great Satan, allowing mobs to demonstrate outside our embassies, hobnobbing and conspiring with others of similar bent.

If it means anything, I suspect that creating a situation in which no one would even think of challenging us, must be intended to invoke in the mind of listeners this last thing, to pluck the chord that says that when Republicans are in charge of the U.S. military, troublemakers are more inclined to do what we say and mind their manners.

But, seriously, back in that fact and logic world, is there a level of military budget so high that it could reasonably bring that about?

Mitt Romney will be in Minnesota today with one public event scheduled, a 1 p.m. rally at Freightmasters Logistics Inc. in Eagan (1980 Seneca Road) but the Boston Globe reports that he may also be trying to close a deal to secure the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann. Globe reporter Glen Johnson does not divulge the source of the Romney-Bachmann tip. He is a long-time Romney tormentor from his days covering Romney for the AP in the 2008 campaign when Romney and he got into a slightly famous contretremps captured on youtube.)

Anyway, a Bachmann endorsement of Romney would make little sense ideologicaly, which led Johnson to note that she could be looking for Romney's help in retiring the leftover debt from Bachmann's presidential campaign which, as MinnPost's Devin Henry reported, was about $1 million when she dropped out after finishing sixth in the Iowa caucuses.

As Devin noted yesterday, Romney and his family members and many of his business associates have been very helpful to Tim Pawlenty in retiring his lefotover campaign debt since Pawlenty endorsed Romney.

Update: Five minutes after I posted the above, Bachmann was interviewed on Fox News and knocked the story down pretty hard. She will not meet with Romney when is in Minnesota today (she's in Washington). She did not deny that she has been in touch with the Romney campaign, but portrayed the contacts as normal and similar to her ongoing relationship with all of her former rivals for the Repub nomination.

Bachmann said she has no plans to endorse anyone before the Feb. 7 Minnesota caucuses. She did say that she hopes to be a "unifying voice" to bring together the Tea Party and establishment wings of the party with the ultimate goal of defeating Pres. Obama. If you wanted to, you could read that last theme of reconciling the Tea Party with the establishment as paving the way for an ultimate endorsement of Romney. But, of course, almost all Repubs will get behind the ticket and call for unity once the nominating contest is over.

And an even stronger denial: On her campaign website, Bachmann said: “Let me be absolutely clear — there are absolutely no negotiations between me and the Romney campaign regarding any pending endorsement of Governor Romney. I continue to speak with all the candidates and plan on uniting behind the presumptive nominee. The Boston Globe article today is completely false and I call on the Globe to retract their article.”

Ten random thoughts after Repub debate No. (omg) 19.

Last debate until Feb. 22. My heart and oh my aching butt say “Yay.” We need a break. On the other hand, without the debates, the vast majority of the campaign messages come from 30-second half-truths paid for by a small number of rich contributors and, in the new world created by Citizens United, even most of those nastygrams are sponsored by SuperPACs so the candidates don’t even have to take direct responsibility. And, since those ad blitzes are state-by-state, they emphasize even more the vagaries of the primary and caucus schedule. Debates can also turn into drivel and gaffe-driven gong shows. And they emphasize many qualities that have little to do with the qualities that will make a good president (as if we knew what those are). But, on balance, a campaign driven by debates is better than one driven by ads. Churchill had it right: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” And he also had it right when he said: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

The applause was back. The last debate was the only one so far in which the sponsors asked the audience to keep quiet. That was better. This was worse. I have no evidence, but it seemed clear to me that Team Romney had done what it could to pack the room and instructed their fans to seize every opportunity to cheer and clap wildly for Mitt Romney who, notwithstanding other attributes, is not really gifted at emitting applause lines and has suffered for it in previous debates, especially as compared to Newt (they-always-love-it-when-I-bash-the-liberal-establishment-media) Gingrich.

Rick Santorum had the best night of the four contestants still in the pageant. The polls suggest that Santorum doesn’t matter much anymore, except to the degree that he continues to divide, with Newt Gingrich, the anybody-but-Romney (but not Ron Paul either) vote. Maybe so. But if you accept – as I do not -- the Repub premise that Obamacare is the end of civilization, then Romney has a big problem because the program that he signed into law and implemented in Massachusetts is so similar in its approach. Romney has figured out how to talk at great length about what are mostly small technical differences between Romneycare and Obamacare, plus the fact that (duh) one is a state program and one is a federal program. In an extended exchange, Santorum pounded away on the Romneycare/Obamacare similarities. Although this has been done before (as what has not?), it seemed to me that Santorum stripped away the excuses and left Romney promising to repeal for the other 49 states what has been a good and successful program in Massachusetts.

On the other hand, Santorum hit Gingrich and Romney for “falling for the global warming hoax.”

The pundits agree that Gingrich had a bad night. He didn’t actually commit a major gaffe and certainly suffered no brain freeze moment (which is usually what makes for a bad night in Punditland, see Rick Perry, except you can’t see him anymore because he is gone and even Texans don’t like him much anymore). But Gingrich – whose co-frontrunner status was created by winning debates – needs the big debate moments to keep moving forward. The big “gotcha moment” that stung Gingrich was when Romney revealed (and it wasn’t even clear that Gingrich knew this about himself) that Gingrich owned mutual funds that profited from investments in Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. This was totally silly, of course. Very few investors pay attention to all of the holdings within mutual funds. But Gingrich had just finished making a big deal about the fact that Romney had profited from investments in Fannie and Freddie. But mostly, Gingrich’s weak night was less about his bad moments than his lack of good ones.

Personally, I respect Ron Paul for his willingness to say what he believes irrespective of strategic considerations or political correctness. For example, he would move the United States toward normal relations with Cuba and said so last night even though the position is not politically smart in Florida. In general, we’ve reached the point where Paul is starting to be treated as a joke. I noticed that in the post-game analysis, those who praised Paul’s performance all said he was funny. One comment by Paul, which no one seemed to notice, showed what can happen when someone is blunt about the Republican anti-government message. Paul, like the rest of them, thinks government interference explains what is wrong with U.S. health care. It often occurs to me that if that is how they feel, they need to explain why they don’t advocate for abolishing Medicare. Dr. Paul came pretty close last night, noting that when he first started practicing medicine in the early 1960s, “ there was no Medicare or Medicaid and no one was out in the streets without it. Now, people are suffering.” Hmmm. Gingrich (who, I am sad to speculate, does politically calculate what he says) seemed to associate himself with Paul’s rosy view of a world without Medicare.  Gingrich: “You look at medicine in the early '60s, and you look at how communities solved problems, it was a fundamentally more flexible and less expensive system. And there's a lot to be said for rethinking from the ground up, the entire approach to health care.”

I guess if televised debates are going to be this common, they are going to become more and more televisionized. (Yes, that’s a made-up word.) They used to be special events, done without commercial interruptions. Now there are commercials. But even worse, they’ve started using the same hideous pandering techniques to entice the audience to stay through the commercials that the 24-hour news channels use all day long, which is to tease the viewers that something really hot is coming up after the break. Somewhere around the third commercial break, Wolf Blitzer announced: “All right, gentleman stand by. Much more to discuss. I want to take a short break. We have many more topics to include -- including this, we'll get into this a little bit, what would your wife -- why would your wife make the best first lady. I'll ask these four candidates. Stay with us.” Then after three minutes of commercials, instead of resuming, we had that incredibly annoying deal where it looks like the show is resuming really, it’s just another plug for sitting through more commercials:  “I'm Wolf Blitzer. We're here in Jacksonville for CNN's Florida Republican presidential debate. Many of you are watching online, commenting on Twitter, Facebook, at CNN.com. We have many more questions for the candidates, including one that hits close to home. Stand by to find out why each man on this stage thinks his wife would be the best first lady.” Then three more minutes of commercials. When the big moment finally came, the “My wife is a wonderful woman” answers were as maudlin as you would expect. (Except Ron Paul’s, who went for humor.) And Gingrich who wasn’t willing to say that his wife would be the best first lady because he’s gotten to know the other wives, and they are great too.

In general, I didn’t care for Wolf Blitzer’s questions (although one sympathizes with the challenge he faced after so many prior debates). But Blitzer and the journalists back at CNN did account for one of my favorite moments. Blitzer asked about and Gingrich complained about a Romney radio ad that attacked Gingrich for supposedly referring to Spanish as “the language of the ghetto.” Romney started his response by suggesting that he wasn’t aware of the ad and wasn’t sure it was really his ad. (Presumably, he meant “his” ad, as opposed to an ad sponsored by the pro-Romney SuperPAC over which he regrets he has no control). During the commercial break, the CNN newsroom double-checked and sure enough, they found the ad and it was indeed sponsored by the Romney campaign, not the SuperPAC and, here’s the beauty part, ended with the required tag line, in Romney’s own voice or that of a very good Romney impersonator: “I’m Mitt Romney, and I approved this message.”

Yes, it was a gotcha moment, but led to another moment during CNN’s post-debate analysis. Alex Castellano (who was triply qualified to discuss this because he is Hispanic, Republican and a media consultant to political campaigns) was asked about the credibility of Romney’s claim that he was unaware of the ad. Castellano said that, indeed, most candidates don’t know what their ads say. The ad-makers have a canned tape of their candidate’s voice saying “I approved this message,” and they are authorized to stick it on any ad they choose to air. I suggest the legal requirement be changed to require the candidate to say “and I approved this message even though I don’t know what it says.”

The polls suggested before the debate that Romney had halted Gingrich’s post-South Carolina surge and was back in the lead in Florida. After last night, they all predicted that Romney would win Florida and have started restoring the old narrative of the all-but-inevitable Romney nomination. Considering that everyone who has tried to make predictions about this race has been proven, I kinda wish they would stop making predictions. But don’t hold your breath.

It’s usually assumed that Joe Biden will be back on the Dem ticket this time. You’ve probably heard a contrary rumor, sometimes called the switcheroo and denied by all concerned, in which Hillary Clinton become the veep candidate and Biden slides into her current job as secretary of state. But Newt Gingrich has a different idea.

Gingrich is trying very hard to put Saul Alinsky on the Dem ticket. He’s been campaigning for Alinsky for several weeks but it became too obvious to ignore on the night of Gingrich’s big win in South Carolina when he drew this distinction between himself and the president:

“The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don't like the classical America.”

On Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked Gingrich about that message and he replied:

“What I said last night is the truth. Nobody in the elite media wants to cover it. Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what ‘neighborhood organizer’ meant. He wasn't organizing Boys and Girls Clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration. He is who he is. It's — you know, it's not that he's a bad human being, my impression is that he has a good family, that he really loves his children and his wife, that he's a very pleasant person in some ways. But the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 percent of this country.”

And on the same morning, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Gingrich said: “The values that [Obama] believes in, the Saul Alinsky radical values that are at the heart of Obama, are a disaster.”

He has kept it up all this week, dropping Alinsky into his rhetoric as he tries to make the case to Floridian Repubs that he, and not Mitt Romney, is the electable one.

Perhaps Gingrich is right about the percentage of Americans who share Alinskyite values. But a much larger percentage have never heard of Saul Alinsky. And relatively few of them will rush out and read Alinsky’s signature 1946 work, "Reveille for Radicals." Perhaps it is sufficient, for Gingrich’s purposes that, to his target audience, Alinsky’s name may sound vaguely Jewish or Russian. Of course, I can’t prove that, but I don’t guess Gingrich can exactly prove that Obama is practicing Alinsky-ism as president.

On the other hand, there is no question that in his days as a young community organizer, Obama studied and was influenced by Alinskyism.

Saul Alinsky, who died when Obama was 11 years old, is often called the father of modern American community organizing. Obama was indeed a community organizer as a young man. And, so far as we know, Obama did not organize any boys and girls clubs. And indeed, according to this long piece by Ryan Lizza when he wrote for The New Republic, Obama was recruited and taught during his early Chicago period by Alinsky admirers. So who was Alinsky?

Alinky’s past
Saul Alinsky was, indeed, a child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Chicago, where he also did much of his work. After dropping out of grad school archaeology and working briefly as a criminologist, then as a union organizer, he drifted into his life’s work as a more general organizer of the powerless, first in Chicago and then in various locales around the country. Alinsky can be safely described as a lefty and a radical.

He wasn’t a Marxist but he was deeply critical of capitalism. Mostly, he was interested in empowering the powerless. He was a skilled agitator who worked to get the poor and underprivileged riled up enough to get organized and force change. He preached non-violence and his techniques were designed to work within the U.S. democratic system. He stressed the importance of identifying self-interest and organizing around it because he believed that while many people like to ascribe their actions to altruistic motives, they are really moved by self-interest.

The Lizza piece gives the partial lie to Gingrich’s statement that no one in the media (excusez moi, the elite media), has paid attention to Alinsky’s influence on Obama. From the 2008 Lizza piece:

 “Obama so mastered the workshops on power that he later taught them himself. 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, ‘Power Analysis’ and ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.

“But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky's method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these ‘accountability sessions’ unsettling, even cruel. ‘Oftentimes, these elected officials didn't have that much more power than the people they represented,’ he told me.”

Understanding Alinskyism
If you would like to understand Alinskyism, you can read the prologue to “Rules for Radicals” here. If it’s the Alinsky-Obama connection you’re after, the Lizza piece would be a decent starting point.

But note that Lizza (who now writes for the New Yorker) is just out online with major piece that will appear in this week’s New Yorker. The piece is based on internal White House documents and explores in detail how Obama actually functions as president on a day-to-day basis and how decisions are reached in the Obama White House.

It portrays Obama as a captive of the disastrous economy and the intensity of partisan warfare. Lizza relies on a top presidential scholar who argues that presidents have much less ability to lead by persuasion than most of us think. Here’s a taste of that theme that also summarizes Lizza’s ultimate conclusions about what kind of president Obama has been:

“George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A. & M., who has sparked a quiet revolution in the ways that academics look at Presidential leadership, argues in ‘The Strategic President’ that there are two ways to think about great leaders. The common view is of a leader whom Edwards calls ‘the director of change,’ someone who reshapes public opinion and the political landscape with his charisma and his powers of persuasion. Obama’s many admirers expected him to be just this.

“Instead, Obama has turned out to be what Edwards calls ‘a facilitator of change.’ The facilitator is acutely aware of the constraints of public opinion and Congress. He is not foolish enough to believe that one man, even one invested with the powers of the Presidency, can alter the fundamentals of politics. Instead, ‘facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them.’

“Directors are more like revolutionaries. Facilitators are more like tacticians. Directors change the system. Facilitators work the system. Obama’s first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them. A close look at the choices Obama made on domestic policy, based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, reveals someone who is canny and tough — but who is not the President his most idealistic supporters thought they had elected.”

As portrayed here, Obama came into office really believing that there was a way, through his own attitude and leadership, to get past the partisan deadlocks and produce legislation that included must-haves from both liberals and conservatives, Dems and Repubs. But he was wrong.  Lizza concludes that:

“Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional.”

But, of course, because I was working on this piece, I rushed through the new Lizza piece looking for echoes of Alinskyism. Sorry, Mr. Gingrich. Maybe Lizza — despite access to a huge number of internal documents, including the decision memos that are sent to the president by his staff and how Obama responded to them — was duped. I can’t really picture the White House’s agenda in agreeing to the piece, although in the end it reaches a conclusion that the White House will like.

But the Alinskyism, it just ain’t in there.

Still, I expect Gingrich will continue to try to make Alinsky famous.