I’m not sure about anyone else, but I don’t find this answer very reassuring. In facat, it scares the daylights out of me.
Tag: Palin
Republicans unleash their code words
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.
The problem with pit bulls
This is a good column from Mary Mitchell in the Chicago Sun-Times that calls Sarah Palin out for the coded language she used in her Wednesday night speech. Consider:
During her debut, Palin electrified the Republicans, but she also shook up every registered voter in the ‘hood.
Besides mocking the historic breakthrough of Barack Obama emerging as the Democrats’ nominee, Palin was relentless in her use of language that reinforces divisions among black and white voters — particularly pitting small-town people against the rest of us.
She explains:
It is scary that a woman who hails from a small town in Alaska felt so at home on the national stage being downright mean.
And for some of us, Palin reinforces every stereotype, rightly or wrongly, of what we think white people think in those small towns.
“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity,” she said.
Does that mean people who grew up in urban Americas are less honest, less sincere and have less dignity?
“They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America,” Palin said.
Does that mean the rest of us are unpatriotic?
Although a spokesman for McCain told me that Palin’s comments about McCain being the “kind of fellow whose name you will find on war memorials in small towns,” was not a put-down of Obama’s name, given Palin’s rapid-fire attack, I can see why some people took it that way.
You should have asked
I love this story.
Ann and Nancy Wilson are hoping the Republicans change their tune—and aren’t planning on waiting until November to find out.
The sisterly duo known as Heart sent a cease-and-desist notice to the McCain-Palin campaign Thursday afternoon after their hit “Barracuda” was used—twice—without permission as the official rallying cry for the vice presidential candidate after her nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Apparently, the Wilsons are not fans of John McCain or Sarah Palin, saying that “permission to use the song was never requested, nor would it have been granted.”
“Sarah Palin’s views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song ‘Barracuda’ no longer be used to promote her image…[It] was written in the late ’70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women…There’s irony in Republican strategists’ choice to make use of it there.”
Obviously, someone dropped the ball on this. Shouldn’t someone tell the candidates — who say they are ready to lead and run a massive federal bureaucracy — that the little things do matter?
Time to retire ‘maverick’ label
This is an interesting analysis of the Palin pick and what it says about McCain. I would add that eight years of running for the nomination of a party that doesn’t trust you makes candidates do things that they say they never would do.
The Palin pick, I think, rather than demonstrating his “maverick” credentials, should put to rest that singularly meaningless word. From now on, we should reserve maverick for references to the James Garner TV series or the 1970s automobile.
Hank Kalet 