Who is Saul Alinsky, and why is Newt Gingrich so obsessed with him? [View all]

[steve2470]

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2012/0128/Who-is-Saul-Alinsky-and-why-is-Newt-Gingrich-so-obsessed-with-him

Wherever Newt Gingrich goes these days – stumping in Florida, arguing on televised debates with fellow Republican presidential hopefuls, jotting down notes for his umpteenth book – he carries with him a scary but useful ghost: Saul Alinsky.

The radical community organizer (gone now these 40 years) is the specter on which Barack Obama has modeled his life, Gingrich warns. It’s no coincidence, he says, that both Alinsky and Obama were from Chicago or that the President passed up far more lucrative possibilities to become … a community organizer.

“The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” Gingrich said in his South Carolina primary victory speech, a charge he finds constant ways to repeat. "Saul Alinsky radicalism is at the heart of Obama,” he said on CNN.

So who was Saul Alinsky?