After hearing (over and over and over ...) clips of Palin, Pataki and Giuliani all repeating, condescending, sarcastic and dismissive the same question, "What is a community organizer? Is that a real job?" I actually started to wonder whether they're really that out of touch or this is Karl Rove's hand at the controls. I suspect they could really be that out of touch, the lot of them.

I know better than to expect more than bald faced hypocrisy from any politician, but it still surprises me to hear the party of self reliance and bootstraps deriding anyone who might work to make change in their own community instead of sitting around waiting for it to rain down from on high.

There's a facebook group that has formed, "We are all community organizers" that I can't bring myself to join, because I know I'm not. Not in any substantial way. Even working closely to support community organizers through the LINC project, I rarely worked the 12 hour days that I saw staff at our partner organizations working week after week.

Sarah Palin, in her vast and varied political experience might never have met a community organizer in the flesh but Pataki and Giuliani should know better. They've both met professional organizers and been at the receiving end of the wrath of the organized often enough to know exactly what a community organizer is.

One mission of the community organizer is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Is it any wonder these comfortable folks turn out to be not so fond of the profession?

For those of us who are new to this: Can you articulate what Obama did in Chicago?


I know he did something with people who had lost their jobs, but I'm not sure what the "something" was.

I think this Nation article by David Moberg provides a good picture of Obama's work as an organizer. It describes how he "helped win employment training services, playgrounds, after-school programs, school reforms and other public amenities."

The article also recounts this story: "One day a resident at Altgeld Gardens, a geographically isolated public housing project surrounded by waste sites, brought a notice about planned removal of asbestos from the project manager's office. Obama organized the community to find out if there was asbestos in their apartments. They persisted as officials lied and delayed, then took a bus--with far fewer people than Obama had anticipated--to challenge authorities downtown. Ultimately, the city was forced to test all the apartments and eventually begin cleaning them up."

The fact that the GOP attacked Obama during their convention was to be expected. He's a big boy and he can (and should)respond for himself.

But Gov. Palin attacked a profession of people who dedicate their lives for very little pay to help people in poor communities to help themselves improve their own communities. The people who do this kind of work everyday are not the one's running for president and did not deserve to be mocked.

The lawyer in me can't resist making one point:

Obama was an organizer at the same time that Sarah Palin was a sports reporter and stay-at-home mother. When she was a mayor, he was a state senator. When she became governor, he was becoming a U.S. Senator. It was inaccurate and deceptive for her to compare what what she was doing now with what Obama was doing right out of law school. If the reverse had been done (Obama comparing his duties as a state and U.S. senator while mocking Palin as a "stay-at-home mom"), people would have been rightfully outraged.

Morris, I'm assuming you're asking for me to translate for lay people what Obama did, qualitatively, as a community organizer, rather than just convey the facts.

As far as facts, in the mid-eighties Obama was a community organizer on Chicago's South Side for a faith-based organization that used Saul Alinsky "direct action" organizing principles.

What does that mean? It means that he worked for an organization that believes that poverty and political disenfranchisement can only be overcome when poor people build a network of relationships, cultivate leadership among themselves, and exert collective power.

"Direct action" refers to method of identifying an institutional target - like a company that is discriminatory in its employment practices, or a developer who is displacing local residents - and launching a sustained campaign against that institution to secure some sort of community improvements. The campaign includes identifying what the collective self interests of the community are; a systematic setting of goals and objectives (What do we want?); establishing strategies and tactics (How will we get it?); identifying targets (Who are we trying to force to change?); and devising a series of aggressive actions -from letter writing to marching on a CEO's lawn -that disrupt business as usual and compel the institution in question to improve conditions for the aggrieved people, or at least respond.

A Saul Alinsky-style organizer, almost by definition, is an outsider who helps guide this process from behind the scenes, while doing whatever is necessary for people to function as their own spokespersons, act on their own behalf, and build power for themselves. It entails having countless on-on-one meetings with individuals, knocking on thousands of doors, building coalitions and alliances, training people in organizing skills, inspiring people to action, holding meetings, helping people strategize, stuffing envelopes, making posters, disputes, etc.

Most Alinsky-style organizers work for peanuts, work ridiculous hours and get burnt out very quickly. It's almost impossible not to internalize the pain and struggles of the people you are organizing. Campaigns often go on for years and can be an exhaustive, protracted process of taking two steps forward and three backwards.

In Obama's case, he worked with members of the Altgeld Gardens public housing project to improve neighborhood environmental conditions, improve the local schools, build playgrounds, secure job training programs, etc. As I understand it, they lost more campaigns than they won, which is typical of community organizing efforts.

This is just one style of community organizing, and it has its fans as well as its detractors. Most corporate interests or elected officials that have been the target of these kind of community organizing bodies regard them with disdain, fear, or both, because they can often be forceful and blunt in the way they wield community power.

The most obvious, hypocritical part of the RNC mocking the community organizer background is that with neo-cons' "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", small government mentality, it is EXACTLY the dedicated organizers that they should be thanking and looking at as tomorrow's leaders on the macro level. These hardworking people do much of the work that government could do--but doesn't--to support people in need.

Just what the Republicans told us we should do, right? But, you know. Do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do is pretty much their MO.

I applaud the discussion of the serious and important job of community organizers. But there is a risk in the criticism of the Republicans to lower the level of debate (http://blogs.pioneerlocal.com/religion). I mean, comparing Sarah Palin to Pontius Pilate might seem like a good line, but it ignores the greater meaning of the words just as her speech got it wrong about community organizing.