Ambinder nails this. The joke about community organizers like Obama for elite Republicans is “Look at this Harvard-educated dilettante. He’s so stupid that he wastes all his youth, education and opportunities on the urban poor instead of using these to benefit himself and his family. After all, we all know they would never reciprocate and are in these situations because they didn’t work hard/smart enough or prepare for market realities.”
It’s a joke I’ve heard many times myself, and one that community organizers and others ministering to the poor put up with all of the time. It’s mocking what for elite Republicans is a moral disability, a refusal to be selfish. It’s also why they insist that there must be ulterior motives, like career advancement, underlying this work. I find the joke particularly appalling coming from the mouths of professed Christians. I hope that one benefit of this campaign, and Obama showed a willingness for this during his acceptance speech, would be a defense of the moral foundation of liberalism. This community organizer mocking joke provides us with an appropriate context for it.
From Marc Ambinder:
The four mocking mentions last night of Barack Obama’s service as a “community organizer” have ignited a metapshereic debate about whether the term has racial connotations.
The McCain campaign says no: they insist that no one knows what a community organizer is, and whatever they think it is, it doesn’t compare to being a mayor. They say that because Obama cites his organizing work as a key point on his resume, it’s fair for them to tickle it. Their point is: he’s a governing dilettante.
Indeed, the Obama campaign knows that many Americans don’t know what a community organizer does, and they’ve changed the way they refers to Obama’s experience too. When he talks about community organizing now, he references his organizing work for churches. That embeds the work in a more familiar context. Inner city Catholics know what community organizers do, certainly.
But community organizers tend to work with poorer folks, and there’s some chatter among Democrats that it’s a subtle way to highlight Obama’s urbanity. Some Obama aides see it as a knock against the poor and their material needs.
I think it’s a cultural trope, like when Rudy Giuliani (lacking, I might add, any sense of irony or awareness of his own life), referred last night to Obama’s “cosmopolitan” background. It stirs up resentments. It makes elite Republicans feel comfortable with themselves. The audience repeatedly laughed; they got the joke. The question is: what was the joke?
Halperin piles on about this as the Republican’s tried-n-true “secret” plan:
Define Obama as so left he’s left America.
An out-of-touch, bead-and-sandal-wearing community organizer (whatever that is).
