Until Barack Obama was elected president, Chicago’s Saul Alinsky was America’s most famous “community organizer.” While Obama never met Alinsky, who died in 1972, I did. It was in the late 1960s, shortly after he published Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Here’s how it happened.

I was a grad student at Indiana University studying political economy and economic anthropology. My advisor, Professor Bill Siffin, received a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation to produce a lecture series on social change. Although I had a fellowship with no duties, Professor Siffin asked me to organize this lecture series. He thought it would be a good experience for a budding academic. It was.

My job was to contact and invite distinguished academics to come to Bloomington, give a public lecture, and meet with graduate students and faculty over lunch and dinner. I had the liberty to invite potential speakers—with one constraint. I had to accept the nomination of the radical student group, SDS I recall, dominant in Professor Siffin’s department.

They, of course, nominated Alinsky. His perspective supported their youthful fantasies as radicals, “[T]he community organizer...must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” (From Rules for Radicals.)

I selected professors from the Ivies, the Big Ten, and a few other noted scholars with national reputations. One, Marion J. Levy of Princeton, was a challenge, but manageable. Alinsky was from a different world—and considerably more trying.

Bloomington is 57 miles south of Indianapolis International Airport, an easy drive. Bloomington had a small field not serviced by scheduled airlines, so IU had a regular car and shuttle bus arrangement with the Indianapolis Airport. Everyone understood and accepted it—except Alinsky. He explained that his time helping the poor and disenfranchised was too valuable to waste time being driven. He would only come by a charter plane from Chicago.

So this I arranged. And I learned about the self-importance of the professional left. Some things stay the same while others change.

When Alinsky and his acolyte, Bill Ayers, were mobilizing Chicago through ACORN, the Woodlawn and Gamaliel Foundations, the Weather Underground, and related groups, their recruitment was by direct personal contact. The Internet brought efficiency to the time intensive process of recruiting, motivating, and producing political pressures, but no one has a monopoly on the Net.

On August 19 a Wall Street Journal article, “Conservatives Take a Page From Left’s Online Playbook,” described how Americans for Prosperity is mobilizing its 700,000 members and pointing them to town meetings to protest Democrats’ various health care proposals. It used the Web to identify specific town meetings and then alerted its members within 100 miles of the event, urging them to protest.

Many other libertarian, classical liberal, and conservative groups are likewise engaging members. The National Center for Policy Analysis recently sent this e-mail: “We need your help to reach our goal of 1.5 million signers of our petition to deliver to Congress on September 9th. With your support, the ‘Free Our Health Care NOW!’ petition has more than 1,140,000 signatures of Americans that have voiced their opposition to nationalized health care and the increased cost, reduced access and lower quality which it threatens to impose on us. ...[W]e would like to take another ‘first’ to Washington — 1.5 million signatures — the largest policy-oriented petition ever delivered to Congress.”

We are most unlikely, however, to hear an elected politician state the obvious when advocating reforms. It takes someone with the independence and character of Thomas Sowell to say: “No small part of the current confusion between ‘health care’ and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives.” Might Alinsky’s followers heed this admonition when designing reform?