Motivating Organizers To Organize Against You Is A Political Mistake
Condescending remarks about community organizing by Sarah Palin and others at the GOP convention have motivated organizers to organize against her election.
As I said earlier, those wisecracks got big laughs in the convention hall, but I suspected they would backfire.
It's like the stupid trash talk before a big game. Sometimes a player goes too far, and the opposition uses the bulletin board material as motivation.
In cities, where most Americans live, thousands of community organizers, many connected to religious organizations and non-profit organizations, are feeding hungry people and performing many other tasks that strengthen families, small businesses, and neighborhoods.
And help stabilize the larger society and keep the peace - - something good for everyone, rich or poor.
Barack Obama's community work in the 1980's in Chicago was sponsored by a coalition of eight Catholic parishes on behalf of unemployed southside steel workers.
Those wacky churches, putting that Golden Rule into practice.
Hilarious, right?
The GOP attack on community organizing, and at an honorable, altrustic piece of Obama's resume, was ignorant, and an act of blatant class warfare - - an unseemly and snarky barb aimed by people already with power and wealth.
And politically foolish, too.
It's self-defeating for the GOP to try and reinvent itself at its convention as a party of regular Americans while its standard-bearer (McCain) forgets he has seven houses and thinks making an annual income under $5 million makes you middle-class.
It adds to the contradiction if you pose as regular folks - - and then attack actual regular people who spend their working days, and nights, and weekends helping other regular people who have even less money and status.
I expect to see McCain try and smooth this over, as he is trying to do with his appeals for an end to divisive partisanship, but people will see it as insincere.
Double-talk won't erase the fact that the GOP's leaders and conventioneers were enjoying themselves at the expense of people already down on their luck - - like those now unemployed at a five-year high at 6.1%, or who are losing homes in foreclosures at the rate of 7,000 a day.
These are the regular American voters who will need a community organizer - - and who knows when that person might be you?
8 comments:
James you really mike me laugh. I guess it was fine for Obama to look down at Sarah Palin because she was only a mayor of a small town?
Obama was a community organizer for ACORN, which I think is being investigated.
Give me a break
To Anonymous:
You are wrong about Obama and ACORN. Get yourself acquainted with the facts.
Obama did not work for ACORN. He worked for a Catholic Church coalition of eight southside Chicago parishes that created the Developing Communities Project (DCP).
That is well-documented. Google it for yourself.
Obama never disrespected Palin or her small-town service and roots.
They and the campaigns are having a disagreement about the value of their relative experiences.
It is Palin and others who are openly mocking Obama's community service, and by implication, are sneering at people who work with the poor, and the poor themselves.
Whatever Jim. Just keep up your rage and negative slants. If Palin was so bad as a VP pick, you guys would not care in the least. Obviously she must have hit a nerve. I find it funny that you think that she is sneering at the poor.
Wasn't he a "leadership trainer" for ACORN?
By Obama's own telling in Dreams from My Father, he didn't get much of anything accomplished working as a community organizer.
Sarah Palin wasn't denigrating the work of community organizers in her speech. She was simply making the point that it's not something so utterly selfless and amazing that a presidential candidate would focus so much attention on it. And consistent with that, you don't find Palin constantly bringing up her work in Watch on Wasilla.
We all start somewhere. Obama started well before he was an organizer, and he learned a lot from it. Just as I've learned a lot from the organizing I've done, albeit of totally different forms.
Aren't evangelical Christians community organizers?
The fact is that community organizers don't work in communities that will vote for McCain.
The people they organize don't vote Republican and the organizers themselves don't traditionally vote Republican either.
So it's a wash. McCain/Palin knew exactly what they were doing.
Insert NARAL organizers for community organizers - the result is the same. NARAL supporters aren't the target voter bloc.
You may be right in that it is class-warfare or demographic warfare, but that is politics and McCain only needs to get to 51%. In his calculations of 51%, community organizers and the organized aren't in the equation, but the people who have the little old lady watching after their neighborhoods while they work or have nieghborhood garage sales and gossip are IN that 51% percent.
Small-town America doesn't need "professional" organizers. The reality is, in most places outside of urban areas, there isn't a lot of respect for organizers - think Jehova's Witnesses or the Mormons in their black pants and white shirts on Saturday mornings.
Most people don't answer the door and assume that whoever is knocking just wants more money. And 90% of the time they are right.
While I applaud the effort to go door-to-door to solicit funds/resources because it's better than the government outright redistrubting via increased taxes, most people stick with what they know: the Salvation Army, Goodwill, Purple Heart, the drives by local firemen and policemen.
To Publius: Don't be too sure that community organizers don't work in communities where people will vote for McCain.
Most Americans do not live in small towns.
And don't assume that those towns do not have community organizations with staff or volunteers who work in teams in the town, the schools, and so forth.
I have lived in a two small towns, one with a population of 35,000 and the other with a population under 5,000, and in both there were very active community organizations working on health care, education and other issues on behalf of working people, single-parents, and lower-income people.
And those people still would not be inclined to vote for McCain or Palin.
Think of teacher's unions; I know a lot of teachers who vote for the GOP despite the GOP's anti-union stance.
Maybe, just maybe, they have other concerns - and if they are as altruistic as you want them to be - and are driven by other considerations when they vote. Certainly, they should be more altruistic than to be driven in their voting patterns because someone mocked what they do.
And if they aren't, then my comments from a few days ago stands that community organizers are actually driven more by their self-interest and sense of self-worth.
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