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.
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.
Community Organizer must be a very important position as it takes someone with an Ivy League Law degree. He should have spent some more time with the Harvard Guidance Counselor for career choices.
It's another word for Communist, Red, Pinko, Fellow Traveller, etc.
Democrats’ Platform for Revolution
The term was used by, possibly coined by, Saul Alinsky. Wikipedia's entry is too kind to Alinsky . Alinsky hated America. His followers hate America. Hillary Clinton is a Alinsky inspired Commie too.
Right on, Rhode Island has essentially been taken over by the type of “HOPE” and “CHANGE” that the big O wants to bring to the rest of the country. “Community Organizers” have created a state where welfare queens, illegal immigration, outrageous taxes and low paying jobs are plentiful but personal responsibility, common sense and good paying jobs are a thing of the past. Be afraid people, don’t let this snake oil salesman into the White House...
Why not. You have more experience than Obama. Now if you could get elected to the city council or something and serve a few monthes, you could even hold yourself up above the govinator.
“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.”
Because they:
a) are in jail
b) are wanted, dead or alive
c) cant put down the crack pipe
d) never saw him, just as he was never seen at Columbia.
This is the most amazing admission in the article -
“And some people are beyond help, no matter how hard they try”
Obama was a lecturer for the University of Chicago, which has always been a private institution. It’s his friend Bill Ayers who teaches at a public institution, the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The actual SNEER was from the OBAMA camp about Palin being a small town mayor.
Not to mention, that was their INITIAL criticism, very snide, the mispronunciation of Wasilla and completely ignoring the fact that she is a sitting governor. Their immediate reaction to her selection led to the comebacks, not attacks, both from former MAYOR Giuliani and former mayor, CURRENT governor Palin.
so true, the pubbies just reacted to the audacity of Obama challenging the leadership experience of being a mayor.......and I think in the debate of opinion, the pubbies won out.
> Obama was a lecturer for the University of Chicago, which
> has always been a private institution. It’s his friend
> Bill Ayers who teaches at a public institution, the
> University of Illinois at Chicago.
Thank you for the question.
Let me modify my question, which remains unanswered, accordingly.
How did a “community organizer” and “lecturer” at the University of Chicago compile a multi-million dollar portfolio, complete with a million-dollar mansion in one of the nation’s most upscale neighborhoods?
And here’s another question.
How did this do nothing empty suit, never had a real job, consort of terror bombers, Marxist radicals, racist bigots, and anti-Americans ever get elected to the U.S. Senate and have almost half the population of the U.S. willing to elect him President?
Something is mightily WRONG with this picture.
Is this the beginning of the “strong delusion” of the End Times mentioned in the Bible?
I sincerely doubt that Hotjobs, Careerbuilders and SimplyHired were around in the late 80s when BHO started his “job bank.” More than likely it was a storefront with a couple of desks and a few five-button key sets put in place to justify the $$$ it recieved from the Annenberg Fund. IIRC, 0’s “job bank” closed after only a few months.
because he first sneered at Palin's position as Mayor of a small town named "Wa-silly," and he conveniently disregards her job as Governor of Alaska... that's why...
Al Capone was a Chicago community organizer
It's also interesting that he doesn't send HIS kids to the CPS where he'd have a chance to join the PTA.
Pretty much. LOL!!
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