Kudos to Bill Dedman and MSNBC for breaking the hot news about a 38-year-old academic paper. For years, there has been much speculation about the thesis Hillary Clinton wrote about community organizer Saul Alinsky when she was a senior at Wellesley College in 1969. Hillary haters on the right have considered it the Da Vinci code of her radicalism. Sympathetic biographers, perhaps worried it was a bit too revealing, barely mentioned the paper. No one read it--because no one could read it. The Clintons had Wellesley create a special rule sealing any theses written by a president or a first lady. This rule, of course, only applied to one thesis. But when the Clintons vacated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the paper was unsealed. Yet no one apparently noticed until Dedman.

His report basically breaks in Clinton's favor. Her paper--which she titled, "'There is Only the Fight...': An Analysis of the Alinsky Model"--was no recipe for revolution. It also was no full-throated celebration of Alinsky's radicalism. In the paper--a nuanced piece of work--Clinton critically evaluated Alinsky's model of organizing, agreeing with certain aspects of it, taking issue with others.

This is not much of a surprise--though it still may be a disappointed to the rightwingers who have long promoted a Hillary-the-Socialist false narrative. But what's most intriguing about the thesis is how it foretold Clinton's penchant for conventional politics and her desire to be part of the establishment. The paper--retroactively--illustrates a divide that has long been present within the Democratic Party, between (to be crass about it) those who want to work within the system and those who want to apply pressure upon the system. Oddly enough, nearly three decades after Hillary Clinton chose a side, this ideological-cultural intra-party tension has become personified by the face-between her and Barack Obama.

In her thesis, Clinton noted that Alinsky had offered her a job in his new training institute for organizers. She wrote, "His offer of a place in the new institute was tempting, but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor." She went on to Yale law school, where she would meet another fellow looking to rise within the system: Bill Clinton. In her 2003 book, Living History, she wrote of Alinsky, "we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't."

Dedman points out that her attitude was different from that of another idealist looking for change upon graduating college. After Barack Obama left Columbia University, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago in Alinsky style. He even contribute to book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Following his stint as an organizer, Obama went to Harvard law school and then entered state politics in Illinois.

One might argue that Clinton and Obama ended up in the same place--the U.S. Senate--after one eschewed the Alinsky path and one embraced it. But the difference in how they spent their early years does represent that divide that has long existed within a Democratic Party that tries to be a home both to street-level activists and big-donor corporate lawyers. One question for 2008 is how this divide will affect the clash between Hillary the Inevitable and Barack the Inspiring. Our pasts are never as far behind us as we think.

Posted by David Corn at March 2, 2007 11:36 AM