Kagan’s lack of experience

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama today called Supreme Court nominee Elaina Kagan’s lack of judicial experience a “dramatic deficit.”

Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also worried she would try to mold the law to her liberal beliefs, instead of simply ruling on the evidence on constitutional grounds.  He believes Kagan has a dangerous political approach to the law that makes her unfit for the Supreme Court.

In short, he’s worried that she’s a liberal activist with no experience at being a judge, but only in writing politically-charged speeches for others to argue.

Sounds familiar.  I have often spoken about our President’s lack of experience to do the job he’s been elected to do.  Organizing others to take freebie handouts from the government is not the same as making hard managerial decisions.  He wants to compare himself to Reagan, but Reagan had been a Governor, as have 4 of the past 5 presidents. (Bush 42 had been a senior government civilian and gained governing experience that way.)

Mr Obama makes good speeches, but he lacks depth for the job.  I call him an empty suit.

Organizing the Global Community

When asked during the campaign what management experience he had had, Mr Obama cited his experience as a community organizer.  He wanted us to think he was experienced at getting people together to get things done.  But if you’ve read Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, you know better.

Mr Obama was an organizer, but mostly he was a trainer of organizers.  He was a disciple of Alinsky’s methods, even better at it than Hillary Rodham (Clinton).  But his expertise was in the organizing and the mobilizing, not the doing.

The Organizer’s toolbox was to get people angry at the status quo, find a target in the public eye, and focus that anger at the target.  They would show their own anger and indignation (even if it was only a feignt).

Alinsky wrote about the time he knew the state had a program to provide free medical care, if a community asked for it, but they had to ask.  He organized a community meeting, and told them they ought to be getting the service, and it wasn’t right they weren’t.  He told them they ought to go down and DEMAND the service.  He said he was going to go himself, and they would go with him.  He stormed into the office and bellowed his request.  When the clerk tried to offer instructions on how to begin, he cut her off and said “yes or no, are you going to help us?”  She agreed, they cheered, and he led them out of the office to the victory party.

Pres Obama told us he was going to get BP to fix the leak, as if they weren’t trying hard enough already.  He says he’s gonna “kick some ass.”  But he’s not gonna do anything.  Organizers don’t do.  They only bluster.

Our Community-Organizer-In-Chief

The American media didn’t take Sarah Palin seriously during the campaign, so even when she said something worth listening to, it was immediately discounted as just another crazy idea from the funny lady up north.  But when she made a distinction between managing and organizing, she was foretelling the current crisis.

What Mr Obama learned about community organizing is that it’s hard to get people excited about a problem taken care of quickly.  It has to escalate into a crisis to be solved, so the organizer can be the one to offer the solution.  You have to keep the workers from talking to management until the situation gets out of hand, until the point when an outside mediator is needed to come settle the issue.

Perhaps that’s why Mr Obama did nothing about the BP oil spill for the first week.  It was not a national priority to enforce an environmental impact study before authorizing drilling.  It was not a crisis yet when the rig caught fire.  It still was not a crisis when the rig first sank.

Indeed, on Earth Day, April 22, two days after the rig started to burn, Mr Obama gave a speech on the importance of off-shore drilling, hearkening back to a speech given April 2, when he had confidently declared “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”

The next day, Friday, April 23, the president affirmed there was nothing to worry about, and left Washington for a vacation in North Carolina.  But by the time he returned home Wed night, the well was already leaking, and the White House was starting to look around at who to give the blame to.

Not until May 3 did the Coast Guard send out the cutter Oak to start the skimming operation.  The day before, the President had made a hastily arranged visit to the Gulf, but bad weather kept him standing on the Louisiana beach, promising to do something, to spend as much of the national treasury as needed to clean up the spill.

Rather than managing the accident, he’s organizing an excuse to spend someone else’s money to fix a massive problem that could  have been prevented, had the nation had a Chief Executive.  That’s why I call him an Empty Suit, only able to organize disaster.

source:  NPR

Our Arrogant President

“As usual, Barack Obama believes he’s the smartest guy in the room, and he can trick the American people because they only pay attention to his words, not his actions.”

So says JC Arenas of BigGovernment.com.  Recently, he reported how Mr Obama has begun using the power of Executive Orders to do what Congress won’t or can’t.  Unable to legislate a bipartisan congressional panel to find how to cut the deficit, he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to do the same.

This panel’s job is to reign in spending, like the 2009 Obama Stimulus Plan and the TARP bank bailout and the automakers’ bailout.  In other words, once the President is done spending a record-breaking $3.52 trillion during his first year in office, he’s gonna spend the second one trying to figure out how to pay for it – and hammer the Republicans for not helping fix the problem they voted against in the first place.

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll see this as classic Alinsky.  Create a problem, and then propose yourself as the only person able to fix it.  He thinks he knows better, and can say one thing and do another, claiming credit for the good others do and ignoring his own failures.

And that’s why his approval ratings are at 45%, 52% say he shouldn’t be re-elected, and 3/4 think the economy is in the toilet, even while the Administration says we’re improving.

What Community Organizing Isn’t

If you want to make changes in your community, instead of just writing about it, you have to read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

I regret I didn’t get my copy until December, after Obama took the election.  I was quoting it from other people’s writings, but didn’t fully understand the import of the book.  No wonder ACORN was using it, and how Obama successfully came out of nowhere politically to beat all the insiders for the office.

Today, I found an old post by beeveedee on Community Activism, what it is and what it isn’t.  He/she quotes from Alinsky on why Palin didn’t understand the importance of being an organizer.

Advocacy / Activism – Simply being in favor of something does not make you an organizer. In fact, community organizers are, at least in their professional lives, distinguished by not really being in favor of anything except building the power of organized people. Once you’ve built power, then you don’t have to stop at being in favor of things. You can actually get them. Advocacy and activism are about being right. Organizing is about being effective.

This is why we couldn’t understand Mr Obama.  Whatever we claimed he was, he wasn’t.  He acted however he needed to act to build power.  He promised what he thought his listeners wanted, only he did it with more finesse than Ms Clinton, his primary opponent.

Question now is whether he’s got the skills to use that power.  He advocated for a portion of the electorate, most of whom lose interest between elections.  But he didn’t organize Congress.  He wasn’t there long enough.  Alinsky told us:  If you’re not there organizing, you’re just increasing the census.

Let me leave you with beeveedee’s concluding thought:

Let me say at plainly as I know how: If you are building the power of organized people to hold political and economic systems accountable, you are organizing. If you aren’t doing that, you’re not organizing.