In otherwise strong performances by Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin, I was struck by the sneering arrogance in their dismissal of community organizers and the rabid reaction of the GOP audience.
Weren't Jesus and Mother Teresa community organizers? Didn't they, in the words of Palin, have "actual responsibilities?" Aren't Evangelicals such as this group "Christians for Community Organizing" or this group "Evangelicals for Social Action" dedicated to community organizing? Aren't faith based initiatives built on community organizing?
Look for the Obama team to use the GOP's arrogant dismissal of community organizing as another example of how McCain & company are out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of Americans.
UPDATE: An hour after filing this post, as I predicted, the Obama campaign hit back on the community organizing angle. From an email that is sure to be part of media talking points:
Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.
Let's clarify something for them right now.
Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.
And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.
Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.
Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.
It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.
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Jesus didn't organize the community -- that was the job of the Zealots who sought to overthrown Rome.
http://thekingdomcome.com/jesus_community_organizer
The Republicans and their claim to be Christians is a big lie. In fact, Palin and all the others lied in their speech.
Some much for Christian values. Jesus says in Matthew 25 that if you do not help the "least of these" you well go to hell.
Christian values is deciding to be a Community Organizer rather than working on Wall Street for big money.
Republicans were not into loving your neighbor.
Palin and McCain are two of a kind. Palin scares me more than George W Bush.
I'm just looking forward to Jon Stewart's montage of famous Republicans exhorting their followers to get out and organize their communities. There are also probably good clips out there of Republicans saying how much they appreciate the efforts of organizers and how they're vital to the party. Maybe the Obama campaign will get to it first! "Organize" could also represent a great 'word of the day' for Colbert too.
In the end, attacking community organizing seems like a strange tactic, though I suspect they must have done some audience research before they made the decision. On the other hand, given what we've learned about how Republicans go about vetting their VP candidates and how they feel about people who attend good universities, maybe they don't believe in research.
On a more academic note, I believe there's stuff in the literature on advertising that suggests that sarcasm doesn't really work in promotional messages. Let's hope that's true.
JCB
After 3 years, Obama gave up on it, telling Jerry Kellmann he didn't see community organizing was making any difference. He went to law school.
He seems to have changed his attitude since.
Mike the Mad Biologist hit it right on the head -- it's a dogwhistle phrase. When Palin talks about "community organizers", she's not talking about real people, on the ground, fighting city hall for clean parks, community investment, cheap heating oil, and reductions in drug or gang activity. She's talking about the imaginary enablers of the lazy and stupid that the GOP holds up such figures of self-parody as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as. In the Right's world, community organizers are uppity n----z (or other undesirable minority) who are motivated entirely by jealousy of rich white people and, supposedly unable to acheive for themselves, have made it their mission in life to tear down other people who have.
On the news today there was a group of people in Roxbury (a predominantly black, desperately poor part of Boston) who were arrested while protesting the foreclosure of a local woman's condominium. To those who showed up there, they were protesting an eviction notice handed down by a mortgage company who had created the problem by creating a loan structured so the owner likely could never pay it back. But to someone on the right, they were likely being taken to jail for attempting to enable a squatter. That's the difference in mindset that we're dealing with.
Somebody pointed out to me that Jesus lived at a time when people were executed for petty theft, yet we have no account of him organizing protests of such barbaric injustices.
So, no, I don't think Jesus was a community organizer in the modern sense.