Politics

The Agitator

Barack Obama's unlikely political education.

Ryan Lizza
March 19, 2007 | 12:00 am
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In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn't fully understand. But, while he knew little about this new vocation--community organizer--it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24- year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change.Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: "Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That's what I'll do. I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change."

His excitement wasn't rooted merely in youthful enthusiasm but also in the psychology of a vagabond. By 1985, Obama had already lived in Hawaii, where he was born and raised by his white mother and grandparents; Indonesia, where he lived briefly as a child; Los Angeles, where he started college; and New York, where he finished it. After these itinerant years, he would finally be able to insinuate himself into a community--and not just any community, but,as he later put it, "the capital of the African American community in the country." Every strain of black political thought seemed to converge in Chicago in the 1980s. It was the intellectual center of black nationalism, the base both for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns and for Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Moreover, on the eve of Obama's arrival, Harold Washington had overthrown Richard J. Daley's white ethnic machine to become the city's first black mayor. It was, in short, an ideal place for an identity-starved Kenyan Kansan to immerse himself in a more typical black American experience.

Not long after Obama arrived, he sat down for a cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a fellow organizer named Mike Kruglik. Obama's work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago's South Side fight thecity for things like job banks and asbestos removal. His teachers were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago-trained social scientist. At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of "agitation"-- making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that heagrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to "rub raw the sores of discontent."

On this particular evening, Kruglik was debriefing Obama about his work when a panhandler approached. Instead of ignoring the man,Obama confronted him. "Now, young man, is that really what you want be about?" Obama demanded. "I mean, come on, don't you want to be better than that? Let's get yourself together."