Did Republicans Mock George Washington?

Jim Hansen at the Idaho Democratic Party is all upset about Republican jokes about Obama’s Community Organizer status:

When Republicans mocked Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, they mocked the most fundamental American experience that has made our country such a beacon of hope throughout the world.

ALL of America’s great movements – our country’s struggle for independence, to abolish slavery, to give women the right to vote, to end child labor, to provide for the 40-hour work week – happened because ordinary people organized in their communities and demanded change from their government.

Republicans are against American Independence! How dare we!

I never knew Samuel Adams was a Community Organizer. It might be because he wasn’t. Community Organizer is a term of much more recent vintage. The Democratic Party has been trying to play a clever game:

“Thinking claiming Community Organizing is not a qualification for the Presidency=Thinking Public Service is bad.”

First of all, Senator McCain has talked how many times about wanting to get Americans to serve a cause better than themselves. Take a look at Senator McCain’s acceptance speech with his recommendations for making our country better:

Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

Also, I find the definition of community organizing to be somewhat amusing: ”becoming organized and demanding change from your government.” I guess Brandi Swindell and Bryan Fischer are now community organizers because this is exactly the type of work they do. I wonder why liberals attack them if this is such a universally noble profession?

I would note that, based on Swindell’s history of doing what Hansen defines as community organizing, the left attacked her as having no experience and being totally unqualified for the Boise City Council. If community organizing does not qualify someone for the city council, how the heck does it end up on the resume for President of the United States?

Overall, the issue here is that Hansen isn’t quite defining community organizing correctly.

My first impression of the term “Community Organizer” is that it was a resume puff. Similar to how putting “Customer Service Provider” on your resume may have a better ring to it than “waiter.” I’ve known a lot of people active in the community in this cause and that. I have yet to meet someone who says, “I’m a Community Organizer.” It seems pretentious really, but when I dig into it, it’s actually a liberal term of art.

The term “Community Organizer” was coined by radical leftist Saul Alinsky in 1940, so it didn’t really have anything to do with women’s suffrage or the Revolution.

Byron York describes the profession in National Review:

In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising.

Sounds like the type of things that will bring our communities together-to rip each other’s throats out.

Barack Obama worked as a community organizer for an affiliate of ACORN, which has committed serial voter fraud. I’m sure Idahoans would be interested to know that ACORN has been involved in defending cities which have infringed on their citizens’ rights to keep and bear arms, harassing people circulating petitions, and other dishonest schemes. One could get quite exhaustive, but it suffices to say community organizing has not been all positive.

What exactly is Community Organizing good for? John Judis of the left wing New Republic interviewed Barack Obama mentor Jerry Kellman who relayed this story:

He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.” To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. Personally, he might end up like his father; politically, he would fail to improve the lot of those he was trying to help.

And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school. Kellman, who was already thinking of leaving organizing himself, found no reason to argue with him. “Organizing,” Kellman tells me, as we sit in a Chicago restaurant down the street from the Catholic church where he now works as a lay minister, “is always a lost cause.” Obama, circa late 1987, might or might not have put it quite that strongly. But he had clearly developed serious doubts about the career he was pursuing.

Judis sees that, as has been the case several times throughout this campaign, Barack Obama and the truth don’t necessarily see eye to eye:

But his campaign has taken the point a step further, implying that Obama the politician is a direct descendant of Obama the organizer–that he has carried the practices and principles of community organizing into his campaign, and would carry them into the White House as well. This is the version of Obama’s biography that most journalists have accepted.

In truth, however, if you examine carefully how Obama conducted himself as an organizer and how he has conducted himself as a politician, if you consider what he said about organizing to his fellow organizers, and if you look at the reasons he gave friends and colleagues for abandoning organizing, then a very different picture emerges: that of a disillusioned activist who fashioned his political identity not as an extension of community organizing but as a wholesale rejection of it. Indeed, the most important thing to know about Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer in Chicago may not be what he gained from the experience–but rather why, in late 1987, he decided to quit.

The reasons given for Obama’s decision to leave organizing don’t seem to justify all this outrage. Byron York sums up Obama’s organizing experience well:

The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a “Camp Obama” program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama’s opponents admit is a very impressive operation.

But Obama’s time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for.

Today, Obama carries the same liberal myopia that’s bad for Idaho and bad for America. Good intentions mixed with seriously flawed views do little good. That is what Barack Obama’s community organizing tells us.