The Alinsky President Plays The Lincoln Card: Obama Attempts To Invoke Greatness To Sell His Suicidal Economic Plan

Fascinating, isn’t it? To read the complete Lincoln quote, it appears that he viewed the role of government as limited to certain tasks that individuals cannot effectively undertake themselves. Yet President Obama cherry-picks and paraphrases to give Lincoln’s words a seemingly innocuous communitarian spin.

Why is this significant, rather than just mere nitpicking? The answer lies in the fact that Obama used a tried and true Alinskyite tactic in his speech: wrapping communitarian and statist ideas in language that invokes the country’s great leaders of the past. It’s a time-honored tradition among radicals like Alinsky and Obama.

Stanley Kurtz lays out this aspect of stealth socialist strategy well in his book Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. Yes, we’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of it here at NewsReal Blog, but the book’s searing truth is worth pointing out time and time again. Please do yourself a favor and get your hands on a copy of it. (Get it for Kindle here.) According to Kurtz, one key tactic used by communitarians is:

…to use the language and ethos of traditional American communities…to promote a “populist” version of socialism.

Obama’s “we’re all in this together” reading of Lincoln on government, as well as going all the way back to his “Yes, We Can” campaign slogan are fine examples of radicalism in the guise of populist rhetoric.

Kurtz notes that this type of strategy hearkens back to the “Popular Front” days of American Communism, in which Communists worked hard to appear as patriotic citizens.

During that period, America’s communists dropped their openly revolutionary language and presented themselves as ordinary Americans instead. The Popular Front embraced American icons like Abraham Lincoln and the Founders, but moved to redefine them in de facto communist terms. The result was the greatest expansion the part had ever seen.

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Never before were so many Americans drawn to socialism as during the Popular Front…

It’s easy to look at Obama’s loose quoting of Lincoln as just a gaffe or a slight lapse in judgment, or to give him a mere slap on the wrist for paraphrasing rather than directly quoting, as Neil Hrab appears to do in the Washington Examiner. However, the truth seems much more likely to be that Obama intentionally picked those words to quote as an attempt to invoke Abraham Lincoln for communitarian, statist, and even stealth socialist purposes.

Given what we’ve learned from Kurtz about Obama’s political heritage, history, and associations, it makes perfect sense that pretty much everything the president says and does serves to advance a radical Left-wing agenda. Using one of America’s greatest statesman to do so is straight out of Alinsky’s playbook. After all, Obama learned from the best.

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Chris Queen hails from Covington, GA. Check out his blog, Random Thoughts From The Revolution, and follow him on Twitter.

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