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Yet there is considerable evidence that, even as he was writing these words, Obama was having doubts about community organizing. By the early fall of 1987--a little more than two years after he had come to Chicago--Obama had decided to apply to Harvard Law School. At some point thereafter, he began to explain his decision to friends and colleagues. The most revealing of these discussions are not reported in Dreams from My Father.

It was not just the walk he took with Kellman through Harvard's campus. Obama also talked to Kruglik about his reasons for leaving Chicago. In their conversations, he described politics--and winning political office--as the most important step toward achieving change. And, instead of seeing Harold Washington as buffeted by forces beyond his control, he now aspired to be Washington. "He was fascinated by Mayor Washington," says Kruglik. "Harold Washington inspired him to think about becoming a politician." Kruglik says that Obama wanted to follow in the mayor's footsteps: Washington had gone to law school, later becoming a state senator, then a congressman, and finally Chicago's mayor. "He told me that he was thinking of running for mayor some day, " Kruglik says.

Obama also talked to Northwestern professor John McKnight, a former community organizer who is a member of the Gamaliel Foundation's board of directors and had helped to train Obama. He asked McKnight for a law school recommendation and told him that he eventually wanted to go into politics. McKnight warned him that politics, unlike community organizing, would inevitably require compromising his values and ideals. "The average legislator is surrounded by competing interests," McKnight told him. "Most of the time what they are doing is trying to balance interests." Obama, however, was not to be dissuaded. Recalls McKnight, "At the time, neighborhood organizing was very parochial. ... He could see that the impact wouldn't reach beyond the neighborhood. The change he was seeking was bigger."

But it wasn't simply that Obama dreamed of pursuing change on a grander scale. By late 1987, he seems to have grown disillusioned with the underlying principles of community organizing. In September 1989, the editors of Illinois Issues organized a symposium featuring, among others, the contributors to After Alinsky. It took place around a circular table in a conference room at the Woods Charitable Fund (a backer of the Gamaliel Foundation) in downtown Chicago. Kretzmann was the moderator, and participants included political scientist Paul Green, author Ben Joravsky, and Obama, who was then entering his second year of law school.

Joravsky kicked off the discussion by recounting Alinsky's core principles. Green then brought up a controversial organization, Save our Neighborhoods/Save our City (SON/SOC), that had launched in February 1984 in response to fears that Harold Washington would promote public housing in certain white neighborhoods--leading to an influx of black residents. As Green noted, SON/SOC was organized by Alinsky disciples who were following their mentor's principle of basing demands on self-interest.

Green insisted that there was an anti-establishment core to son/soc's agenda. "Here are a bunch of blue-collar people ... working to help their neighborhood, " he said. He also pointed out that the group had carefully directed its ire against unscrupulous realtors rather than blacks and had tried to reach an accommodation with Mayor Washington. Joravsky responded by criticizing SON/SOC for using racial appeals to build its organization. As others joined and the argument threatened to grow heated, Kretzmann called on Obama to discuss organizing in low-income black communities. But Obama had been provoked by the discussion of SON/SOC. And, a year removed from South Chicago, he wanted to say something about community organizing in general.

Obama--sporting a white shirt, tie, and incipient Afro--was clearly troubled by the example of SON/SOC, which suggested that an organization, acting on Alinsky's principles, could become racist. (Indeed, Alinsky's first group, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, had become a bastion of support for segregationist George Wallace in the 1960s.) Obama was also troubled by his own experience in South Chicago, where he had failed to make any headway on the community's central problem--the absence of jobs--and had been reduced to demanding repairs in public housing. That, too, had derived from acting according to Alinsky's principle of trying to win victories against the powers that be based on immediate self-interest.

But Obama was not ready to state his case forthrightly. ("We were all on our best behavior," Joravsky recalls.) Instead, he expressed his doubts obliquely by drawing a distinction between the "two roles that an organizer was supposed to play ... getting power, getting the stop sign, making things work" and "the educative function of organizing." By the latter, Obama meant an organizer's duty to frame citizens' efforts in terms of a larger objective and a greater good: something more noble than dissuading realtors from selling homes to blacks in white neighborhoods or more substantial than getting a stop sign installed.

Obama put it this way: "The process whereby people in communities, like the community SON/SOC was organizing or the community where I was organizing, start to get bigger horizons, start to understand how they connect up with other people, how their power is involved with the power of other people--it seems to me that that strain gets lost. ... At some point, you have to link up winning that stop sign or getting that home equity with the larger trends, larger movements in the city or the country." He quoted an Alinsky disciple as saying, "I am not trying to build some grand utopian organization. I would just like to win it." "That's problematic," Obama noted. In other words, winning wasn't important if what was won was harmful or insignificant.

But Obama didn't stop there. He had a litany of criticisms of Alinsky-style organizing that he wanted to put forward. He objected to community organizers' dismissal of charismatic leadership and of movements. Instead of making the point directly, he recalled a friend telling him of an IAF trainer who complained that "movements are rotten with charismatic leaders." Obama said his friend had responded, "That's nonsense. We want a movement. I would love to have Martin Luther King here right now." Obama argued that charismatic leaders and movements bring "long-term vision," and that community organizers cannot be effective without such vision.

Obama also criticized community organizers' "suspicion of politics." "The problem we face now in terms of organizing is that politics is a major arena of power," Obama said. "That's where your major dialogue, discussion, is taking place. To marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought."

Before he was done, Obama had rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself. But he did so in a way that seemed to elude the other participants. Two decades later, Green couldn't recall any disagreement over his more positive take on SON/SOC. Joravsky also didn't remember Obama's criticisms of organizing. Instead, he recalled thinking how "cool" and "well-spoken" Obama was.

Obama, too, seemed initially oblivious to the harsh implications of his own words. While he was at Harvard, he would return to Chicago to train organizers at Gamaliel, and, after graduating and moving back to Chicago, he would retain ties to the city's community organizing network--serving on the boards of the Woods fund and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, which promotes organizing among African Americans on the city's South Side. But he would never again practice community organizing, as he did in the 1980s. And he would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer--but was, in fact, its very opposite.

Based purely on his organizing background, one would have expected Obama to become a bread-and-butter politician, a spokesman for his constituents' immediate needs. Instead, Obama became a politician of vision, not issues--one who appealed to voters' values rather than their immediate self-interest. As a state senator in Illinois, he was best known for his advocacy of government reform. Asked in September 1999 to explain why someone should vote for him for Congress against incumbent Bobby Rush, Obama told the Hyde Park Citizen that, unlike Rush, he had "a vision." And, as a Democratic presidential candidate, he has run on an abstract platform of "change" that appeals to many young and upscale voters, but has fallen flat among the white working-class voters whom Alinsky once courted.

Obama has also eschewed the retiring persona of the organizer. Initially awkward as a speaker, he became a charismatic politician whose run for president has produced something very much like a movement. And, while his campaign has used some techniques from community organizing to rally state-by-state support, it is the antithesis of the ground-up, locally dominated, naturally led network of community groups that Alinsky envisioned. Obama, in short, has become exactly the kind of politician his mentors might have warned against.

None of this is to say that Obama was wrong to abandon community organizing for politics. Or that his critique of organizing was incorrect. In fact, many of today's community organizers would acknowledge that Obama was absolutely right to question the limitations of Alinskystyle organizing. The elevation of self-interest at the expense of higher ideals can clearly be an ugly thing. Improving people's lives has to be about more than installing stop signs. And no one who hopes to truly change urban communities can stay out of politics altogether. Indeed, in contrast to what Alinsky advised, many community organizations now participate in political campaigns.

Still, one has to wonder: In making the transition from organizer to politician, did Obama go too far in rejecting one of the cardinal principles of community organizing? True, appeals to selfinterest can sometimes lead organizations astray. But such appeals are also a necessary part of community organizing--and politics as well. Few candidates could hope to win an election at any level without convincing their constituents that they understand their immediate hopes and fears. And presidential candidates are no exception. Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton certainly had the ability to persuade voters that he identified with their interests. So did Ronald Reagan. Al Gore and John Kerry did not.

In this election, Obama can count on the votes of African Americans in Roseland as well as many upscale voters attracted by his message of change. But he also needs to win support from the descendants of Back of the Yards and SON/SOC--working-class voters who, today, are more worried about high gas prices and rising heath care costs than about the prospect of blacks moving in next door. To win their votes, Obama needs to do precisely what he once taught organizers to do: speak to the self-interest of ordinary people.

So far, this has not been Obama's strong suit as a presidential candidate. To his credit, he has certainly talked about gas prices and health insurance. But, as Obama would have told his trainees 20 years ago, conveying concern requires more than saying the right thing; it involves seeing the world from the vantage of those you are trying to win over--and convincing them that your empathy is sincere.

When Obama came to South Chicago, he believed in community organizing; within two-and-a-half years--by the time he and Jerry Kellman went for their late October walk around Harvard's campus--he was clearly growing disillusioned. Now, having fashioned a political identity in near-total opposition to the core principles of his one-time profession, Obama's bid for the presidency may come down to this: Is he willing to rediscover--and put into practice--one of the main principles he followed as a twentysomething activist all those years ago?

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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