Newt Needs a Lesson about Saul Alinsky

WASHINGTON — GOP White House hopeful Newt Gingrich constantly — the latest time on Sunday — invokes the name of the late Saul Alinsky — a Chicago native — when he wants to assert that President Barack Obama is a “radical.”

Gingrich, a historian, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the work of Alinsky, a legendary community organizer in Chicago’s Woodlawn and Back of the Yard neighborhoods and beyond.

With his anti-elitist, anti-establishment populist rhetoric—on display Saturday night in his South Carolina victory speech in which he slammed “elites” in Washington and New York — Gingrich seems as if he is taking a page from the Alinsky playbook.

“Newt’s anti-elitism is so much what Alinsky really was about,” Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt told me Sunday. “Alinsky was about organizing ordinary people so they could get a seat at the table rather than getting crumbs or no crumbs at all when public policies were decided,” said Horwitt, the author of Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy.