PATTON AND PALIN

On March 23, 1943, an overconfident Afrika Korps ran into a well prepared ambush at El Guettar, Tunisia.  The lead German tanks were slowed by a minefield, then devastated by pre-registered artillery and anti-tank gun fire.

"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!" gloated George C. Scott, playing Gen. George S. Patton, in the 1970 movie "Patton."

And indeed, the real Gen. Patton had read the Afrika Korps commander’s 1937 book "Infanterie greift an" ("Infantry Attacks" – Patton could read German) and thus had a good idea of the tactics Gen. Erwin Rommel would employ.

The Obama administration has a playbook, too.  It’s "Rules for Radicals," written in 1971 by Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky, the godfather of community organizing.

Mr. Obama’s aides have faithfully followed those rules, in particular his rule number 13 under tactics:  "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.  Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies.  Identify a responsible individual.  Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame."

The main job of the community organizer, Mr. Alinsky said, is to bait an opponent into reacting.

"The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength," Mr. Alinsky wrote.

Following Mr. Alinsky’s tactics has worked well for Mr. Obama.  But unfortunately for him, Sarah Palin — arguably the principal target of rule number 13 — has read the book, too.

Journalists who wrote off Ms. Palin as politically irrelevant after she resigned as Alaska‘s governor last month spent much of this past weekend discussing how she has shifted debate on President Obama’s health care reform plan.

"We are back to is she crazy or is she crazy like a fox," said the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblutt in a panel discussion on ABC’s "This Week" program Sunday (8/16).  "We all wrote her off a month ago.  We said she would have no platform if she were not governor of Alaska."

During the presidential election last year, journalists marveled at how the Obama campaign was running rings around the McCain campaign in the utilization of new communications technologies.

But, noted Stephanie Condon of CBS on Friday (8/14), it is Sarah Palin’s shrewd use of the new technologies that have shifted the health care debate.

All it took for Sarah to shift the focus was to post this paragraph on her Facebook page: 

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care."

Ms. Palin could count on an hysterical overreaction from Democrats and journalists to give her remark widespread publicity.  And so it came to pass. Even President Obama felt compelled to respond.

To describe the "end of life counseling" provisions in the health care bill as creating a "death panel" is an egregious overstatement, they said.

"Death panel" is a phrase which sticks in people’s minds, like Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," a phrase which, noted Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online, also drove Democrats and journalists to hissy fits.

"‘Death panels’ caught on with the public just like ‘evil empire’ did because, for all their ‘heat rather than light’ tut-tutting, critics could never quite discredit it," Mr. McCarthy said.

"Needless to say, the (end of life counseling) proposals themselves had been couched in ‘feelgood’ language, with public relations campaigns at the ready in case someone like Palin called a spade a spade," wrote Canadian columnist David Warren.  "She did so in full knowledge of how that publicity machine would respond."

"When I first saw that (death panel) phrase, I burst out laughing," wrote Camille Paglia, an Obama supporter.  "It seemed so over the top. But on reflection, I realized Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowing, unelected government figures controlling our lives."

The Senate Finance Committee has dropped the provision for end of life counseling from its version of the health care bill, because, according to one member, "it could be misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

"That’s a very nice way of saying Sarah Palin had a point," Mr. Warren said.  Sarah Palin is playing her opponents with Saul Alinsky’s fiddle – and defeating them like Patton did Rommel.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.