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.
He worked with ACORN — the voter fraud types.
As well as Obama may have organized his community in Chicago, it is now more dangerous than Iraq is. 123 murders in Chicago this summer?
Question answered:
Barack Obama didn’t accomplish much.
To discover what the term really means go here: COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
her accomplishments tower over his like the sears tower over a KFC.HEY! That's a racist comment. He's black and everyone knows blacks love fried chicken
I think you won the award.
Blackmail the corporations, get a grant to help the poor, do the least possible, grease the hands of the politicians and/or allow them media time championing the poor.
You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
I like that McCain is running on the maverick position. I didn’t think I’d ever WANT to vote for McCain.
I have no objection to the job itself, but would love to know how much salary BO was pulling in compared with the real people who do the real work.
This guy is/was an activist - and the Dems pretty it up with community organizer?
Gimme a break.
If memory serves, didn't some millions of dollars turn up unaccounted for on O'Bumers watch?
Chicago Sun-Times=”Midwest Daily Worker”.
I don’t know. I don’t recall seeing anything about that.
We agree wholeheartedly.
A complete, unadulterated fabrication.
Hey, I’ve got some “organizing” experience of my own out here in Los Angeles — was a volunteer at a Los Angeles police station, headed up a graffiti removal group, and served on the Board of my homeowners’ association for some 15 years.
Can I run for President now?
“Community organizer” sounds like a post held in Communist China.
I had to laugh when the Democrats said the speech was offensive to “community organizers”. Isn't that just a made up term anyway. Who is offended exactly?! HaHaHa
ACORN = proven vote-fraud conspirators
Obama = member of ACORN
therefore Obama = member of organization involved in vote fraud and he did not mention or condemn such acts.
QED
The “experience” touted by godbama as a community organizer certainly had no accountability that went with it—no executive decisions and no life or death decisions which others were counting on. Heck, Cindy McCain has more experience as a community organizer —and in foreign nations, to boot.
Chicago Community Organizer often leads to corruption and is about seeking power.
I lol’d.
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