Obama's McKnight In Shining Armor

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, September 29, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Obama needed help getting into Harvard Law School. He got it from a disciple of Saul Alinsky who shared the socialist agitator's belief in the radical change the young community organizer could embrace.

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Obama doesn't talk much about his years at Columbia University and Harvard Law other than he attended both and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. The reason may be his records at both were, to say the least, undistinguished.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors. What his grades were we do not know. As the New York Times reported, "Obama declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Seems like a job for those 30 people sent to Alaska to investigate Gov. Sarah Palin.

Harvard Law School is hard to get into, with some 7,000 applicants vying for about 500 seats. The LSAT scores required are usually in the 98th or 99th percentile range with grade point averages between 3.80 and 3.95. If Obama's scores were that high, you'd think we'd know them. But we don't.

Obama waited five years to apply to Harvard. As WorldNetDaily reports, from 1985 to 1988, he worked for a subsidiary of the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, founded on the principles of Saul "The Red" Alinsky. He worked as a consultant and trainer. On the board of Gamaliel sat Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight, a student of Alinsky's radical tactics. While at Gamaliel, McKnight became Obama's mentor in community organizing.

As we have noted, when Obama worked for Gamaliel, he was paid by the Woods Foundation, which supported the radical group. Obama would later serve on the Woods Foundation board with terrorist and socialism advocate William Ayers. McKnight schooled young Obama in the gospel according to Alinsky. He apparently saw much promise in the budding politician, a way to advance Alinsky's radical socialist agenda into the highest levels in government.

Obama had been ready to be radicalized. A revealing profile in 1995 in the Chicago Reader, a far-left free weekly, tells of how the young Obama had fully rejected "the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation." According to the profile, Obama said he was "tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up — at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit — and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change."

In his 1995 memoir, Obama said he wanted to go to Harvard Law School to "learn power's currency in all its intricacy," with the goal of "making large-scale change" as a national politician. But he needed to get there first. So Obama approached McKnight to write a letter of recommendation, which he did.

Being tutored by McKnight and other Alinsky disciples, Obama said while campaigning in Iowa last year, was "the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School."

Shortly before Obama entered Harvard, he praised McKnight and his organizing principles in an article titled "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois." In it, he called for more "power" to put in place "a systematic approach to community organization." Power seems to be a recurring theme with Obama.

At Harvard, Obama took advanced training courses at the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group founded by Alinsky and associated with Gamaliel. He certainly didn't spend much time working on the Harvard Law Review. Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other legal publication. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

Obama may have had other help getting into Harvard. As we and others have reported, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton said on a New York cable station that he was approached by Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to radical Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, to write a letter to Harvard on Obama's behalf. Both the Sutton family and the Obama campaign have denied the veracity of 88-year-old Sutton's statements.

It is said knowledge is power. Power is what Obama has always sought, and he has learned how to get it and use it at the feet of some of the most radical socialists in America. Now he seeks the power of the presidency to organize every community of America according to their agenda.

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