Barack and Michelle Obama's "epic first date" is heading to the big screen in a film titled "Southside With You," Deadline.com reports.
However, descriptions of that first date one summer afternoon in 1989 seem to have scrubbed a significant detail. In 2009, Michelle Obama said the first date included a trip to a “community meeting” in which Barack Obama paraphrased radical community organizer Saul Alinsky.
The “community meeting” visit is not mentioned once in news media descriptions of the coming film.
Nor is it mentioned in a 2012 video posted at Barack Obama’s official YouTube account recounting the first date. The video is currently being utilized to promote the upcoming film.
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In the YouTube video, Michelle recalls a “cool date” in which they spent the whole day together, including a walk down an avenue and a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago where Barack Obama said the couple ate lunch. Barack Obama said they attended a showing of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing.”
“He was showing me all facets of his character,” said Michelle Obama in the video.
The first couple failed to mention the trip to a “community meeting” described in 2009 by Michelle Obama in a videoed talk to London’s Elizabeth G. Anderson school.
Stated Michelle: “And these were the same qualities that I looked for in my own husband, Barack Obama. And when we first met, one of the things that I remember is that he took me out on a date.
“And his date was to go with him to a community meeting. (Laughter) I know, how romantic. (Laughter) But when we met, Barack was a community organizer. He worked, helping people to find jobs and to try to bring resources into struggling neighborhoods.”
Michelle Obama went on to quote her husband’s speech to the “community meeting” in which Barack Obama paraphrased Alinsky.
She said: “As he talked to the residents in that community center, he talked about two concepts. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And I talked about this throughout the entire campaign. What he said, that all too often, is that we accept the distance between those two ideas.”
In his defining work, “Rules for Radicals,” which he dedicated to “the first rebel,” Lucifer, Alinsky used those words to lay out his main agenda. He asserted radical change must be brought about by working within a system instead of attacking it from the outside.
“It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system,” wrote Alinsky.
Former 1960s radical and FrontPage Magazine Editor David Horowitz describes Alinsky as the “communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.”
Horowitz writes in his 2009 pamphlet “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution. The Alinsky Model”: “The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what ’60s radicals called ‘boring from within.’ … Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.”
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.