“Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen.” Barack Hussein Obama had been president of the United States for all of two months. He was lecturing the titans of American finance who were struggling to explain—to a man with no meaningful business experience—how high salaries are necessary if American companies are to compete for talent in a global market.
“The public isn’t buying that,” scoffed the president. He wasn’t talking about the public, though. “My administration,” he warned, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The pitchforks: that’s his public.
Obama’s formative background is the left-wing fever swamp of Chicago “community-organizing,” a gussied-up term for systematic rabble-rousing—one it’s now even acceptable to put on a resumé. The quest for raw power is the gospel according to the seminal organizer, Saul Alinsky—if we may use “gospel” in connection with an atheist whose most famous book, Rules for Radicals, opens with an ode to Lucifer for winning his own kingdom by rebelling against the establishment.
In Obama terminology, “hope” is the possibility that power may be wrested from society’s “haves” by infiltrating their political system. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, organizers must target the very system they reject to acquire power—making themselves attractive to the great mass of society despite having “contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class,” as Alinsky put it. This is the formula for transformational “change”: the exploitation of
