Did you ever see so many political signs? The Big O has Oak Park in a hammerlock. But you John-and-Sarah supporters-don't you just love her?-need not fear. Oak Park's Republican committeewoman, Marlene Lynch, has a few left of the ten (10!) signs she got from the Cook County party. She'd prefer not having her number given out, however. Republicans lie low in Oak Park.

Meanwhile, Big O signs metastasize, and so what? He's most Oak Parkers' beau ideal. Heck, I met him at a reception for him in an Oak Park home in the mid-'90s, before few besides William Ayers, that unrepentant son of a ComEd CEO, knew his potential. He was running Annenberg Challenge, funding school programs in how to overthrow the government and helping ACORN register voters as only ACORN knows how-look them up under vote fraud. Little did I know, sipping wine and munching cheese, what a giant was in our midst.

He was a community organizer, as we know. We had that sort of thing next door in Austin in the '60s when the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA), a Saul Alinsky operation, was headquartered in the St. Catherine of Siena rectory. In 1968 I rented an apartment at Lotus and Lake in an OBA-approved building reserved for whites with Baird & Warner's cooperation. It was integration, Alinsky style.

Tom Gaudette, a Boston Irishman, headed the operation. Young activist Jesuits sometimes found his methods incompatible with their "theology," they told him. Tom was an Alinsky man. Alinsky was the absolute charmer of a guy who described Jesus as a community organizer.

Alinsky was also French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain's idea of a wonderful individual. "Jacques dear: I wept over your letter," wrote Alinsky in response to Maritain's words of consolation on the death of his first wife. When Alinsky died, the late Msgr. Jack Egan and columnist and one-time Alinsky organizer Nick Von Hoffman cried together over the phone.

Alinsky is also the guy who told Look Magazine, "If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?" Battling the corporate enemy in Rochester, N.Y., he bragged, "When I get through with Eastman Kodak, there won't be enough toilet paper in the world to wipe them clean." In Rules for Radicals, he explains: "The man of action" sees an issue "in pragmatic and strategic terms," thinking "only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action." He asks, "only whether [this or that means] will work." He rejects "the immaculate conception of ends and principles."

Forget corruption: "Life is a corrupting process," he wrote. "He who fears corruption fears life." Etc. Chilling stuff, which I once ate up, from a red-queen sort who decides what words mean and tells you to deal with it. The "man of action" business is particularly foreboding. It's a staple of fascism, of course. Mussolini, Hitler, and FDR were a mutual admiration society before the stuff hit the fan in the matter of Jewish people being rounded up and beaten up and eventually much worse-the German contribution to fascism. The political appeal was based on admiration for the strong man who brooked no opposition.

Mussolini was crafty about it and inspired admiration in "progressive" circles in this country, as he had admired American pragmatism in Woodrow Wilson, the college professor-become-president with a yen for power that puts even today's tenured radicals to shame. Then came FDR, the roaring pragmatist, and then Hitler. Progressives, later called liberals, yet later progressives again-the name changes keep them ahead of the awareness curve-love the man of action.

Now they have one. He's The One, our smooth-talking Democrat presidential candidate with a yen for deciding how much you should earn before being hit with a tax hike-to "spread the wealth around," as he unfortunately told that plumber in Ohio. Could this be the slip that sinks Big O's ship?