Question posed to an Wall Street Occupier: Do you know who Saul Alinsky is?
Answer: Does he have a deli on the Lower East Side?
Question posed to Bob Grainger, Chair of the Lake County Democratic Committee: Do you know how Saul Alinsky is?
Answer: Al who?
Question posed to MathMan, a native of Chicago: Do you know Saul Alinsky is?
Answer: No. Why?
Me: Newt Gingrich is talking about him in relation to the President and he's trending on Twitter.
MathMan: Oh. Here, look at this graph of the x^2cos(1/x)
Question posed to a regular consumer of Fox News and right wing radio: Who is Saul Alinsky?
Answer: He's the guy from Chicago who wrote Rules for Radicals which influenced the radical methods of Obama when he was a community organizer and who is now taking our country in the wrong direction with his radical ideas and trying to turn us into a radical European style socialist version of Europe. With its radical ideas. I think he was a communist.
Ah. And, of course, only radical liberals use Alinsky's principals for organizing.
Alinky's main message for organizing: Pick the target (Big Government), freeze it (Do Nothing Congress), personalize it (Gov't wants to take away YOUR rights), polarize it (We're going to take OUR country back). Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual (Obama) . Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame (Stop blaming Bush, this is YOUR mess, Obama!).
