while he was imprisoned for his political beliefs.

(if memory serves me correctly)

he's the candidate in a presidential primary campaign.

One of the best signs of this is that no Alinskian organizer would ever put him or herself at the center of attention the way that a candidate has to.  This isn't Obama's fault -- it's just the nature of the enterprise.

And there's another very key difference between an electoral campaign and an Alinskian community organization:  an electoral campaign has a very clear, unambiguous goal:  winning the election.  Obama's campaign can be open to ideas and input and suggestions, but it's not open to thousands of Obama volunteers saying, "We've decided to drop this whole Presidential campaign -- we're going to fight for better public transit to our neighborhoods.  With your money."  

I think Obama has been very vague so far about exactly what kind of "change" he wants to achieve.  Alinsky built organizations so that communities could deal with external institutions of power -- City Hall, the companies that owned the livestock yards and slaughterhouses, etc -- that were screwing them over.

Democratically negotiating priorities within the community was a part of this.  But it wasn't the only point of the enterprise.  The point, in the end, was to help ordinary people fight back against people who were messing with their lives.  I fully agree that Alinsky believed strongly in letting community/organization members figure out who to go after in that effort, but he certainly had his own ideas about how society actually worked -- he just thought the most effective thing in the end was to ask people, rather than tell them.

What would it mean to try to organize the entire US as an Alinskian community organization?  Or is Obama only trying to include as subset of America in the "unity" (that doesn't seem likely, or in keeping with his rhetoric)?

Back to Debs:  he had a very clear sense of what workers had to do to "lead themselves out of the capitalist wilderness": organize unions (or one big union), take control of industrial capacity, and organize the economy and society on democratic lines.  

Debs was an ideological socialist, and in that sense incredibly and unapologetically partisan.  I'm having trouble bridging the gap between Obama's rhetoric of change and his calls for post-partisan, general unity.

When youi find people are better than you imagine then you might become less cynical and develop heroes of your own. If all we had was examples from our leadership over the last years we would all be cynics.  But there is much good in humans when they are allowed to nurture their better angels.