Saul Alinsky and Newt Gingrich

In a rather weird turn of events in an already weird political season, the Democrats now apparently have a new candidate running for president: Saul Alinsky.

Anyway, according to Newt Gingrich, Alinsky is someone the Republicans ought to be running against.

Gingrich has declared the need for "somebody who is a conservative and who can stand up to [Barack Obama] and debate, and who can clearly draw the contrast between the Declaration of Independence and the writings of Saul Alinsky."

He later said: "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism vs. the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."

Why Saul Alinsky? Maybe because Gingrich thinks Alinsky was some sort of bomb-throwing radical whose ideas the Dems have employed to help them win.

And then there is his ominous sounding name: Alinsky, which sounds a little like "A-lenin-sky" or A-trotsky" or something equally dangerous and foreign.

I doubt that even 1 percent of the American people know who Saul Alinsky is. I do, because I was in college from 1950 to 1954 -- the halcyon years of Alinsky's activities. He had the respect of many students, from conservatives to liberals.

Despite Gingrich's vague references to some "European economic system," Alinsky was as American as apple pie -- born, raised and educated in Chicago. And his work represented the best American traditions of protest.

Though he wrote two books whose titles contain the word "radical," Alinsky's views were hardly dangerous. In fact, his use of the word "radical" served simply to position himself as a danger to the "haves" in order to validate his role with his constituency.

In his 1946 book "Reveille for a Radical" he points out in his efforts to organize the have-nots: "A People's Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life."

If fighting for a decent way of life is radical, so be it. But as far as being politically left or right, Alinsky was neither. He was largely apolitical.

When asked if he was a communist, he replied; "Not at any time. I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.

Nor was he thrilled with the conventional American political parties. He was especially critical of the Southern Democrats as he turned his organizing efforts from the poor Northern whites to the blacks in the south.

"Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South ... and many of the white civil rights organizers who had started to work with them were tarred and feathered, castrated -- or killed. Most Southern Democrat politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."

It is a source of irony that Gingrich himself is battling his own party's establishment, just as Alinsky did his whole life -- a fact apparently lost on the candidate.

To miscast Alinsky as Gingrich has done is wrong -- but to attach him to President Obama is legitimate. We know that Obama, too, was a community organizer, and in Chicago as well.

And we assume Obama learned many lessons from Alinsky, because that was his legacy: developing and writing the primer on "have-not" community action. But having said that, Obama was not the only one to learn from Alinsky. Conservatives, too, respected his lessons, and used them.

ormer Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey also gives copies of "Rules for Radicals" to Tea Party leaders.

In the wake of the devastating Detroit riots of the summer of 1967, Michigan Gov. George Romney -- a Republican -- met Alinsky to discuss the grievances of the urban black poor.

"I think you ought to listen to Alinsky," Romney told his white allies. Respected conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. called Alinsky "very close to being an organizational genius."

In the end, Gingrich has done a positive service resurrecting Alinsky's name and deeds. Today we are faced with the same abyss separating the haves and have-nots that Alinsky dedicated his life to narrowing.

As summed up by my own personal political hero, Adlai Stevenson, Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual."