Hey! ....leave the snakes out of it; other than that, I agree w/ you.
Posted on 09/06/2008 8:45:26 AM PDT by bluegirl
As a community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama didn't accomplish much.
He'd be the first to tell you that.
He got a job bank opened and brought public attention to an asbestos problem at a housing project.
He had his failures, too.
But Obama's record of accomplishment wasn't what Republicans were criticizing last week when they sneered at his time working for the city's poor from 1985 to 1988.
They lambasted the job itself.
"He worked as a community organizer," former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said in an ugly speech Wednesday night to much sneering in the convention arena.
"What?" Giuliani asked, his shark smile wide, his voice dripping scorn.
Which made us wonder what the Republicans were talking about.
Republicans insist that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Communities should take care of their own and not depend on big government to do the job. And the folks who do make it should give back.
We agree wholeheartedly.
But on what is the job of community organizer premised, if not those very principles?
Community organizers come into poor neighborhoods and try to get people knocked down by life back up on their feet.
They tell them where to find jobs, where to send their kids for day care, where to get drug counseling.
They show residents how they can organize to protest poor housing conditions, low pay and other inner-city woes.
When the job is done right, a community organizer helps the most powerless among us gain some small sense of power over their lives.
The job is tough.
Most community organizers work for peanuts, and they burn out fast.
The folks they want to help often don't trust them. And some people are beyond help, no matter how hard they try.
Maybe that's why the trails left behind by community organizers are so often littered with good intentions and failed plans.
Some community organizations that start out lean and mean become bloated with bureaucracy. Other groups seem to exist only to perpetuate themselves.
Too often, the nonprofits that foot the bill for many community organizations act as if their responsibility ends at writing the checks, instead of following up and assessing the effectiveness of their investments.
Like virtually any well-intentioned human endeavor, community organizing has its virtues and drawbacks.
Obama could have skipped community organizing and headed straight to an Ivy League law school -- and straight to a big-money law firm partnership and a summer home in the Hamptons.
Instead, he spent a few years of his life working with the poorest and most powerless people on the South Side of Chicago, doing his damndest to help them help themselves.
This is a bad thing?
This is something to be sneered at?
Obama embarked on his brief career as a community organizer as an idealist. He dreamed of the power for good that could be wielded if some of Chicago's black churches banded together. But he learned the reality that many ministers were loath to share their power.
He left the job, his old thinking tempered by failure, now a pragmatist who saw what it really takes to get things done.
American politics is no place for starry-eyed idealism.
But hard-earned pragmatism is more than welcome.
Registering Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse to vote has enabled Toon Town to have a voice in local and national politics.
In answer to your question do community organizers ever do much the answer is sure. One woman (age 70+) at a prior church decided that she needed to respond to the needs of the hungry. She set up a breakfast program 3 days a week and fed over 200 meals a day. In addition she set up a facility for the homeless to be able to wash their clothes and bathe. She recruited her own volunteers and obtained her own food to feed the people. The Methodist Church let her use their gym and kitchen at no cost. She took NO government aid of any kind. She felt if you took their money you also gave them control. She ran this program for over 17 years until she became to old and sick to continue.
Another group built an organization which helps the unemployed. Chrysalis here in Los Angeles retrains the chronically unemployed to be able to hold a job and provides them the other skills they need. While they take government funding they started as a grassroots effort to solve this problem. How successful. Well they define success as someone who completes their program having a job for 3 years afterwords. They have over a 90% success rate and 90% of all funds go to services.
These aren’t community organizers like Barack because they accomplish something for the people they serve rather than burnishing the resume of the organizer for a political run at higher office.
I mean those who are paid shills that suddenly arrive in the community promoting the "cause du jour".In Addyston ,Ohio they did their best to shutdown the manufacturing plant that has been the major source of tax revenue and jobs.By invoking overblown claims of pollution and cancer threats and other scare tactics these out-of-town young activist women caused loss of jobs and funds.
Then they went back to their wealthy eastside homes.
Right on, check this out http://www.theusmat.com/
I think if you review what Gov. Palin meant, was Obama relied on his community organizing as his experience. If you note, and she also stated that she started her political career as a community organizer in the PTA. However, she went on to become a mayor and put her ideas and what she learned as an organizer into practice as a councilperson, mayor and now governor. Obama has not been where his the decision and not one of 100. Voting present does not make a leader.
Community organizers, especially those on Chicago’s South Side, are usually taxpayer funded people who register people to vote Democrat, and help them to the polls to vote. They are generally run by the most left-wing groups around. Take ACORN for example, as a Marxist organization that is under indictment in several states for voter registration fraud. By chance, B. Hussein worked for ACORN.
“I also wonder why we don’t see people who have benefitted from Obama’s community organizing lined up to tell us of his wonderful accomplishments.
Or any accomplishments, for that matter.”
More than one person has noticed that very few from Illinois are coming out to sing Obama’s praises and one media type said nobody in Chicago is talking.
Compare that with Alaska’s response to the media attacking Sarah Palin, immediately asking the media to bring it on so that they could set the record straight and support her.
If that’s not telling, I don’t know what is.
Republicans are “sneering” at Obama’s “community organizing” also because he WAS NO GOOD AT IT BY HIS OWN ADMISSION. Sarah Palin was a SUCCESSFUL Mayor. That is positive experience. Why put a job that you fired yourself from for incompetence on your resume??
Its sneered at for the very reasons the article lists. The job, as admirable as it may be carries no real responsibility. If one fails, they only need to shrug it off and try again, when a president fails the whole country suffers a “malaise” to quote a most famous failure.
Of course the article fails to mention that the reason Republicans even bring it up. Obama sneered at a governor and mayor and made the claim that Palin was “inexperienced” when her accomplishments tower over his like the sears tower over a KFC.
He did have a lot in common with another famous community organizer, Harold Hill.
I guess Republicans just don’t have the respect for those who stand there with bullhorns, and exhort the rabble to shout “Gimme, gimme, gimme,” the way DemonRats do.
Exactly, a community organizer may have responsibilities. But what they do not have is accountability.
In his own memoirs, Obama states he cannot explain what it is he did (even while doing it) for his friends. To now point to this amorphous “experience” as proof of his fitness to be CEO of the most powerful nation on Earth is, charitably, disingenuous.
I actually spoke to some Chicago friends about Obama’s ties to Daly, and they had an interesting story I can’t confirm, but that wouldn’t surprise me.
One interesting thing is that Daly actually didn’t initially want Obama in his organization. He beat one of their crony’s and suddenly they decided he was someone they wanted on their side.
The rest is history.
As a community organizer he worked for ACORN, the same group that will help him commit voter fraud this year is my guess.
When I was in Chicago last spring it came out that his wife WORKED for the Daley Machine instead of being a lawyer and that her Dad was a Precinct Chair for the Daley Machine which means had had walking around money to get out the votes. He also worked for the City so the ties were already in place when Obama came along.
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