Lots of outrage from the Left over Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani
mocking Barack Obama's early career as a community organizer, with
Ezra Klein endeavoring to obscure categories:
A community organizer can be a PTA member or a
Christian Coalition lieutenant. Indeed, there's something deeply
conservative about the vocation, which informally organizes
citizens to demand better, fairer, and wiser treatment from
detached government bureaucrats.
Well, no, a PTA member is not a "community organizer," Ezra. The
"community organizer" gig, as now practiced, goes back to
Saul Alinsky
and the Industrial Areas Foundation, and is based in the
Marxist notion that the problems of the poor are essentially
political.
Community organizing as a practice got a federally-subsidized
boost via Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," and the effect of the
community-organizing model on municipal governance is hilariously
chronicled in Tom Wolfe's
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.
Several journalists have noted that Obama's organizing efforts
didn't bring any meaningful, lasting improvement to the Chicago
South Side community in which he worked, but then community
organizing never does, simply because politics is not the solution
to poverty.
topics:
Barack Obama, Sarah Palin
