Jonathan Capehart’s blog item on The Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog is one of the better dismantlings of Sarah Palin’s — and the GOP’s — attack on community organizers that I’ve seen. Palin (who gave her speech immediately following Rudy Giuliani, who also dissed community organizers) compared organizers and small-town mayors, using a dismissive tone that made the delivery of the punchline — “except that you have actual responsibilities” — a painful bite.
Capehart points out, however, that the remark shows an incredible ignorance of what community organizers do and betrays her ignorance of the kind of difficulties faced by people in distressed urban areas. Community organizers, as he says, are the ones who fight the placement of incinerators in poor areas, who help rally the community to take back the streets from drug dealers and violent criminals, who work with residents to help them navigate government bureaucracies that often are designed to keep them at a distance.
One would think that the up-by-the-boot-straps Republican Party would celebrate the work of community organizers like Torres-Fleming and Shepard. They are doing work that government can’t or won’t do. They are helping people in a world that might seem stacked against them.
Palin was mayor of a town of about 9,000 people. It’s a safe bet she didn’t encounter the grinding issues that urban communities deal with daily. Shepard and Torres-Fleming have faced down more challenges and have been responsible for more people than Palin could possibly imagine. They deserve to be celebrated not dissed.
The key to understanding the community organizer line, I think, is to understand the larger dynamic that the Palin speech attempted to create. The idea was to create a idyllic small-town past that can serve as a kind of racial code when juxtaposed with the unstated connotations that urban conjure. Basically, small towns are filled with hard-working whites who have tradional American values; cities are filled with the other — blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, the poor, crime, homosexuality. Take your pick.
This is the argument that New York Gov. David Paterson made Monday:
“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a ‘community organizer.’ They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.
Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.
“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.
Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as
Republican code for “black”. “I think where there are overtones is when there
are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a
subtle reference to their race,” he said.
He’s not the only one who views the GOP attempts to turn “community organizer” into an insult. Even Chris Matthews saw the comment in this light — and no one has ever accused him of being the deepest of thinkers.
Chris Matthews, on Monday night’s “Hardball,” speculated that Republicans were playing the race card, when they made fun of Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer, even going as far to say they’re using the phrase like a “bullwhip.” In a segment with NBC’s Chuck Todd and pollster Stuart Rothenberg, Matthews suspiciously noted that Republicans like Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, at last week’s GOP convention, were “giggling” over the “community organizer” title as he pondered: “Is this the new ‘welfare queen?'”
Then a little later in the program, in a segment with the Financial Times’ Chrystia Freeland and the Independent Women’s Forum’s Michelle Bernard, Matthews returned to the subject as he declared: “It seems to me that the use of the word, ‘community organizer,’ is almost like a bullwhip.”
“Bullwhip” is a perfect word, given the racial undertones and it is time that the GOP be called on their willingness once again to take us down this ugly road.
Hank Kalet 