Chicago, city of the wide shoulders and radical community activists

El Rushbo fires back at the President via the increasingly predictable (post-WFB) pages of NR O, but concludes with Rule 1 from the Karl Rove Playbook: 

One more thing, Byron. Your publication and website have documented Obama's ties to the teachings of Saul Alinksy while he was community organizing in Chicago. Here is Rule 13 of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

What's most striking about the conservative response to the Obama campaign and election has been how they- the white males of the Right, men in their 50s through their 80s, just reverted back to their views a la 1970: drugs (which leads to law and order), free love (which leads to abortion and the queers), and national security (Communists, give way to terrorists). A good analog is in Margaret MacMillan's book about Versailles, 1919 , whose postscript demonstrates how the Depression, World War II and the Cold War just delayed all the unresolved issues of the Great War to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Another is Uncle Grumpy's bitch-fest with the she-Clinton over her support for a grant for a Woodstock Museum. 


Even though we have a post-Vietnam president, it will be another ten or twenty years before rationality- in some post-1960s form- will return to US politics as the old white guys finally die off.


Oh, and by the way: it was Rule 12 , not 13.