Keeler: Gingrich subtly plays to prejudice

Who is this Saul Alinsky, what is he up to, and can we buy insurance to protect ourselves from him?

That's a question that Newt Gingrich's down-up-down campaign seems to be raising.

It's pretty clear that Gingrich is using code words to describe President Barack Obama's sympathies. He often calls him "the greatest food-stamp president in American history," for example. And he says things like this: "Obama is a Saul Alinsky radical." But Gingrich simply drops the name, as if everyone would know all about Alinsky.

So, let me ask you this: How many of you know who he is? A show of hands, please. OK, just as I thought. But don't feel bad about not knowing. He's not exactly a household name.

Now, a brief Alinsky 101: First, you need not fear the man himself. He is, after all, dead. But Alinsky, born in Chicago, was the guru of community organizing, inspiring generations of organizers, including the one now in the White House. And he wrote a book called "Rules for Radicals."

But why does Gingrich think that the mere mention of the name, one that most Americans don't know, would make them tremble? Is it scary because it sounds Russian? Or is it simply that it sounds Jewish? Alinsky's family was both. But wait. Gingrich calls himself a friend of Israel. So why would he use a code phrase that evokes Jewishness? Nah, that can't be it.

Maybe the idea is to make voters fear community organizing itself. After all, in the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin asked what community organizers do. Ask Jeannie Appleman, the lead organizer for LI-CAN, Long Island Congregations Associations and Neighborhoods, one of many affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by (cue the scary music) Alinsky.

LI-CAN has 18 member organizations, including Catholic and Protestant churches, Catholic Charities, synagogues, a mosque and others -- and Appleman is recruiting more. They have organized around such issues as regulation of sober homes, jobs for at-risk youth in Nassau County, and provision of better home health care for the elderly. In the City of New York, IAF affiliates have led campaigns that built thousands of homes that working families can afford.

The Long Island IAF affiliate, like all the others, is about power, the power of large numbers of people working together, to bring about social change.

"Alinsky's real point was democracy is not just about going to the voting booth," Appleman said. "If we want democracy to have legs, we have to be in the public square, putting our interests on the table."

The congregations that have chosen to join LI-CAN don't represent only one kind of people. "We have Democrats, we have Republicans, the whole gamut," Appleman said. "By not being partisan, and by going after the common good, we don't paint ourselves into a liberal corner."

The Rev. Ralph Sommer, pastor of St. Brigid's, a dynamic Catholic parish in Westbury, is glad he's involved with LI-CAN and learned its methods. They came in handy when the parish wanted to lease its convent for use as a residential high school for kids with autism and Asperger's syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. Some in the community pushed back, but Sommer used his LI-CAN organizing skills. So the proposal drew 300 supporters, and only nine opponents, to a village hearing.

"The techniques and the process that I learned through LI-CAN certainly helped us bring all the allies together to speak for something that's good," Sommer said. The result: approval of a much-needed local facility.

So, Alinsky is dead, but his ideas are alive, helping people. He's even helping Gingrich, giving him a scary name to evoke. The question is, how will voters read the code?

Bob Keeler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.