III Understanding the GOP's Attack on Community Organizers

Read with a Grain of Salt

---

Part III

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Throughout his career, Obama has drawn on all of these strategies. In Illinois's Republican-controlled state senate, Obama specialized in incremental legislation, often drawn up in collaboration with groups like Gamaliel and ACORN. His tiny, targeted expansions of government-financed health care, for example, were designed to build political momentum for universal health care. And his claim to be a "common-sense pragmatist," rather than a leftist ideologue, comes straight out of the Gamaliel playbook.

New evidence now ties Obama still more closely to both organizations. Not only was Obama a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN, he appears to have used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups -- arguably stretching the bounds of propriety in the process.

In 2005, the year after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Community Change released a report titled "Promising Practices in Revenue Generation for Community Organizing." One of the report&! #39;s authors was Jean Rudd, Obama's friend and the president of the Woods Fund during Obama's years on that foundation's board. Buried deep within the report lies the story of Obama's role in expanding the Woods Fund's financial support for groups like Gamaliel and ACORN.

Since the start of his organizing career, Obama was recognized by the Woods Fund as "a great analyst and interpreter of organizing," according to the 2005 report. Initially an adviser, Obama became a Woods Fund board member, and finally board chairman, serving as a key advocate of increased funding for organizing during that period. In 1995, the Woods Fund commissioned a special evaluation of its funding for community organizing -- a report that eventually recommended a major expansion of financial support. Obama chaired a committee of organizers that advised the Woods Fund on this important shift.

The committee's report, "Evaluation of the Fund's C! ommunity Organizing Grant Program," is based on interviews with a ll the big names in Obama's personal organizer network. Greg Galluzzo and other Gamaliel Foundation officials were consulted, as were several ACORN organizers, including Madeline Talbott, Obama's key ACORN contact. Talbott, an expert on ACORN's tactics of confrontation and disruption, is quoted more often than any other organizer in the report, sometimes with additional comments from Obama himself. The report holds up Gamaliel and ACORN as models for other groups and supports Talbott's call for "‘a massive infusion of resources' to make organizing a truly mass-based movement."

Support from the Woods Fund had importance for these groups that went way beyond the money itself. Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and "civil disobedience" in the service of their political goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them without risking public criticism. As the report puts it! : "Some funders . . . are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates." The Woods Fund is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other foundations interested in funding the hard Left. Obama apparently sought to capitalize on this effect, not only by expanding the Woods Fund's involvement in organizing, but by distributing the Woods report to a national network of potential funders.

Formally, the Woods Fund claims to be "non-ideological." According to the report: "This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments,' without un! due risk of being criticized for partisanship." Yet ACORN receive d substantial funding from Woods, apparently aided by Obama's internal advocacy, and we now know that ACORN members have played key roles as volunteer ground troops in Obama's various political campaigns. That would seem to raise the specter of partisanship.

A 2004 article in Social Policy by Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes, titled "Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama Campaign," explains that, given Obama's long and close relationship to ACORN, "it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers" in Obama's campaigns. Perhaps ACORN volunteers observed the technical legalities and helped Obama merely in their capacity as private citizens. Even so, it seems at least possible that Obama used his position at a supposedly nonpartisan foundation to direct money to an allegedly nonpartisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly partisan ends.

Given Obama's political aspirations, it's notable that the focus o! f his Woods Fund report is its call for "improving the tie between organizing and policy making" and shifting organizing's focus from local battles to "citywide or statewide coalitions." The report boldly criticizes Saul Alinsky himself for being excessively focused on local issues, complaining that "he did not seek to fundamentally upset the distribution of power in the wider society."

The ultimate goal of all these efforts -- fundamental disruption of America's power structure, and economic redistribution along race, poverty, and gender lines -- is entirely compatible with the program outlined by Dennis Jacobsen in Doing Justice. Obama could hardly have been unfamiliar with the general drift of Gamaliel ideology, especially given his reputation as an analyst of community organizing and his supervision of a comprehensive review of the field.

Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the Gamaliel! Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, "it is almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago." Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel's core ideology, given Obama's close association with Gamaliel's co-founder, Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama's role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer, and given Obama's outsized role in channeling allegedly "nonpartisan" funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his knowledge of Gamaliel's guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in fact a stealth radical.

-- Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the E! thics and Public Policy Center.