“The Tea Party comes from the same sense of outrage that the elites, as Gingrich calls them, are running the country,” Dick Simpson, a University of Illinois at Chicago political scientist and former Chicago alderman, told Bloomberg News. “The Tea Party has understood how to mobilize their anger and turn it to political results, which is the underlying motif of Alinsky.”
Alinsky, Simpson says, was “a master community organizer who attempted to organize people without power, people that today we’d call the 99 percent, by using the strength of numbers to overcome clout and wealth.”
FreedomWorks, the tea party group headed by former Republican House Leader Dick Armey, gives copies of “Rules for Radicals” to its leaders. “His tactics when it comes to grass-roots organizing are incredibly effective,” FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon told the Wall Street Journal. Tea Partyers aggressively confronting lawmakers at town hall meetings is straight from Alinsky’s playbook.
Who is Saul Alinsky, and why is Newt Gingrich so obsessed with him? - CSMonitor.com
