Last updated: 7:41 am
September 5, 2008
Posted: 4:28 am
September 5, 2008
I LAUGHED out loud Wednesday night when Rudy Giuliani laughed out loud while noting Barack Obama's deep experience as a "community organizer." I laughed again when Sarah Palin cracked: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."
Apparently, the jibes rendered the Democrat's advisers sleepless. In a crack-of-dawn e-mail to Obama's followers hours after the speeches, campaign manager David Plouffe tried to gin up faux outrage (and, more importantly, donations) by claiming grave offense on the part of community organizers everywhere. Another gripe e-mail signed by Obama himself went out later in the day. And a press release by Obama's cronies at ACORN parroted the campaign line.
Fumed Plouffe: "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."
Let me clarify something: Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors' lives.
What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama's brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.
What deserves derision is "community organizing" that relies on homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon.
As I've reported previously, Obama's community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub "direct actions"); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago's minority lobbies.
