The McCain/Palin Campaign, indeed – the whole Republican Convention, made fun of Community Organizers as an important background to the Obama campaign. What this has led to is complaints from thousands of Community Organizers throughout the country. This new ad, for instance:
It has also prompted the creation of web sites like Community Organizers Strike Back. There we find quotes like: “The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed.”
John Raskin, who founded Community Organizers of America, went further to make this statement:
Community organizers work in neighborhoods that have been hit hardest by the failing economy… Maybe if everyone had more houses than they can count, we wouldn’t need community organizers. But I work with people who are getting evicted from their only home. If John McCain and the Republicans understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to make fun of community organizers like me.
When Rudy Giuliani made fun of Community Organizers and Palin said her career as Mayor was like being a Community Organizer… exept that she had actual responsibilities, it prompted this response from Jacqueline del Valle, a community organizer in the Bronx:
I have “actual responsibilities.” If Mayor Giuliani and President Bush cared more about working people instead of just people who can hire high-powered lobbyists, maybe I wouldn’t have so much responsibility. Maybe working people would have an easier time in America today. But that’s not our reality, and they don’t have to mock us while we’re trying to clean up their mess.”
And this comment from US Action:
These groups, and the millions of individuals they represent, are dismayed by the recent dismissal of their efforts in the form of political attacks. Community organizations have been at the heart of every major reform in modern history – from the Boston Tea Party to the civil rights movement for example, the quest for civil rights began when community organizers mobilized the disenfranchised.
In the New York Sun, the attack by the Republicans on Community Organizers drew this response:
A number of New York-based community organizers are furious with the way their profession is being depicted by Governor Palin and a number of other top Republicans at the party’s national convention.
“Everyone I have talked to is absolutely appalled,” the organizing director for the Brooklyn-based organization Make the Road New York, Irene Tung, said. “It is both naive and offensive. Community organizing has been crucial to progress in this country and to the civil and women’s rights movement.”
Indeed, according to USA Today, the Republican mockery of Community Organizing triggered immediate fund-raising for Obama:
Some of the loudest roars at the Republican convention this week came when vice presidential pick Sarah Palin and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani made fun of Democrat Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Hours later, the Obama campaign started raising money off the jokes.
“They insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process,” campaign manager David Plouffe wrote Thursday in an early-morning fundraising e-mail. “Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”
All this is probably one of the leading reasons that the McCain campaign is keeping Palin away from the press. If she were asked directly about her Community Organizing mockery she would most certainly be walking into the spotlight of truth.
