Anyone who thinks it’s too early to talk about the 2016 presidential campaign should be aware that the Right has just chosen its Big Narrative for the cycle, via the Free Beacon‘s discovery of correspondence between Hillary Rodham and–wait for it!–Saul Alinsky. It was previously known that HRC had written (both favorably and unfavorably) about Alinsky in a college thesis on community organizing (it would have been rather difficult to ignore him on that subject–sorta like writing about Chick Fil-A without interviewing the late Truett Cathy). But direct correspondence is a new thing.
No, it doesn’t reveal any revolutionary plotting between the two, and yes, this was forty-six years ago. But we’re off to the races.
National Review‘s Stanley Kurtz, who wrote a whole book about Barack Obama’s alleged devotion to an Alinskyite conspiracy. is a very happy man today. And he shows his appreciation by laying out exactly what he and hundreds of other gabbers are going to do with this very old news:
Hillary has never abandoned her early leftist inclinations. She has merely done her best to suppress the evidence of her political past, from barring public access to her thesis on Alinsky during her time in the White House, to papering over the significance of her internship at Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein, to pretending that she turned away from Alinsky after her undergraduate years, when in fact she brought his methods and outlook into the heart of her political work. Her strategic preference for polarization and targeting enemies is well documented from her time in the White House, even, or especially, by sympathetic writers like Bernstein.
Hillary is fortunate in having a more open and straightforward champion of the left like Elizabeth Warren as a foil. Yet far less separates the two of them than meets the eye. Not only have Hillary’s deepest sympathies always been on the left, but the newly ideologized Democratic
With Obamacare and much else besides, the legal and bureaucratic groundwork has already been laid for a leftist transformation of America. It is naïve to believe that Hillary would roll any of this back. On the contrary, as president she would finish the job Obama started. A Hillary presidency is destined to be Obama’s third term. Two Alinskyite presidents in a row? Hillary said it best: “the result would be a social revolution.”
This last quote was something Clinton said in her thesis about what Alinsky’s vision if implemented would mean. But don’t expect such nuances to be given a lot of attention. Kurtz’s meme will soon be coming to a viral email near you.
