President Obama: Community Organizer In Chief

President Obama: Community Organizer In Chief In Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he rebuked “those who are preparing to divide us,” and famously declared, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Paradoxically, his unifying speech seven years ago and his divisive rhetoric of today both reveal the president’s governing philosophy, at its very core, is that of a community organizer. The only thing that has changed is the reality of how the economic policies of a community organizer when applied at the national level are themselves, inherently divisive.

Once elected president, Obama’s vision of the United States as a single community collided with one of the fundamental goals of a community organizer, to gain political power for the purpose of transferring resources from those outside the community to those inside the community. By so doing, the community organizer accomplishes several objectives.

First, he serves his community by increasing the resources in that community, from increased government services to expanded payrolls.

Second, the community organizer increases his or her power by direct or indirect control of who benefits from those additional resources and by becoming the spokesperson for the community.

The challenge that Obama faces as president is that the community now consists of the entire United States. When seen through the lens of a community organizer, the vision of a single American community must fracture into those who are inside the community, and therefore deserve favorable treatment, and those who lay outside the community, and who rightfully should fund the community organizer’s goals. As the president makes clear: * Teachers are inside the community; oil companies are outside. * Unions are inside and deserving of government spending; those who make more an $200,000 a year are outside the community and deserve higher taxes * The rich who raise money for his campaign are inside

the community, and their businesses, such as Solyndra, deserve massive government subsidies. No effort is made to close the loopholes that are exploited by General Electric to avoid paying any federal income taxes. Instead, its chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, a major Obama fund raiser, is appointed by the President to chair his “jobs council.” By contrast, successful entrepreneurs, highly paid corporate executives and owners of corporate jets not connected to the Obama campaign are targeted with higher tax rates, fewer deductions and increased regulatory burdens. * Owners of windmills that kill thousands of birds a year, including bald eagles, are not prosecuted under the migratory bird act. But the Obama Justice Department has sued seven oil companies in North Dakota for allegedly causing the death of 28 migratory birds.

President Obama’s stimulus plan supported those he favors with targeted and temporary tax cuts, and spending to support state and local government payrolls and the creation of “green jobs.”

But when the community is the U.S., every dollar transferred to some group must, by necessity, come at the expense of someone else in the community. For every winner, there is a loser.

As economic policy, this fails because shuffling resources from one group to another cannot increase the aggregate resources available to the community. At best, aggregate demand is transferred to those who are favored, from those who are not. The fact that the U.S. borrows billions from non U.S. residents does not change this result. Every dollar borrowed brings with it a future tax liability.

Ironically, as social policy, community organizing at a national scale also fails. While it is true that roughly 50% of Americans do not pay taxes, it does not follow that they escape the consequences of the community organizer’s policies. For example, higher unemployment rates have hurt most the least skilled, and the African-American community with its Depression level unemployment rate of nearly 17% has suffered disproportionately from the failure of the Obama’s massive increase in government spending to stimulate the economy.

Second, many of those who are inside the community today because they make less than $200,000 a year aspire to make more than that amount in the years ahead. This is particularly true of the baby boomers as they hit their peak earning years of between 45 and 65.And finally, squandering resources — such as losing more than $160 billion on mortgage loans guaranteed or owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reduces the wealth of the entire community, leaving fewer resources for governments to actually provide good highways and bridges. Think of it: Just to replace the $530 million in taxpayer money lost on Solyndra alone, 500 Warren Buffets would have to pay $1 million each in higher taxes. And, not so much as an apology from the president or his secretary of energy for losing the money. Just a call for higher taxes on those “who can afford it.”

President Obama’s 2012 campaign strategy, too, comes right out of Saul Alinsky’s classic guide for community organizers, Rules For Radicals. In his demonization of “the “rich” and his charge that Republicans are putting politics ahead of the country, Obama is employing Alinsky’s thirteenth rule: “pick the target, personalize it, freeze it, and polarize it.

Although this strategy may be successful in rallying the base of the Democratic Party, it violates two of Alinsky’s other admonitions. The sixth rule is: “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.” Based on the tepid support Democrats in the House and Senate have given Obama’s “jobs bill” it appears that the president has run afoul of this rule. And, by launching his campaign more than a year before the election, he has ignored Alinsky’s seventh rule: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

Perhaps more damaging to President Obama’s sinking popularity is the growing realization that, as Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, laws designed to achieve distributive justice must favor some Americans over other Americans. By treating people differently such laws lead to the breakdown of the Rule of Law. As such, the policies of a community organizer at the national level risk sacrificing one of the principles of liberty — that all are equal before the law.

NOBAMA 2012