‘Community organizer’ becomes a punch line

He added, “It’s like a title that doesn’t have a lot of responsibility, and you can’t get hurt if you screw up, you just disappear into the woodwork. To be fair, some do very good and credible work, but others are almost like the protestors” seen here in St Paul.

Good preparation for presidency?
But Democrats I interviewed last winter before the Iowa caucuses admired Obama’s community organizing. And they saw it as directly relevant to his ability to handle the presidency.

When I asked about the argument used by Obama’s then-rival for the nomination, Sen. Joe Biden, that he (Biden) had worked with the foreign ministers and presidents ever since he went to the Senate in 1973, while Obama had not, one Obama fan, Margaret Weiner scoffed, “Hot air.”

She added, “To me the experience of (Obama) working on a community organizing level shows a way of relating to people that’s important, which is helping them decide what is good for them.”

Republicans could not see it more differently.

An Arizona alternate delegate Lou Munoz brushed off Obama’s work.  “A community organizer is nothing but a rabble rouser,” Munoz said. 

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Democrats had brought the mockery on Obama by belittling Palin’s work as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

“This is nothing I heard people make fun of, until the Obama campaign belittled her mayoral experience,” Flake said.

'The block watch kind of thing'
Flake said in his district in Arizona people would not know what a community organizer is – since they aren’t any there of the kind that Obama was. “It’s more the block watch kind of thing — that’s’ what people put it in the realm of,” Flake said.

But other Republicans in St. Paul said they either know a community organizer, or had done some work as community organizers themselves.

For these Republicans “community organizer” is a synonymous with volunteer.

“We all know that. We all do it on an everyday basis,” said Ed Sanchez, a delegate from Phoenix. “So what else can you do? What else can you show me?”

Sanchez has a job as a government consultant for the Hopi tribe and other clients, but has worked as a volunteer board member for a group which works in Arizona with senior citizens and runs a charter school.

Brent Lovett, a general contractor and a delegate from Las Vegas, said, “I don’t believe a community organizer is in the same realm or on the same level as a city council person, a mayor or a governor."

"I’ve actually done some community organizing myself, working in parts of Las Vegas that are more poverty-stricken and trying to organize communities to paint over graffiti and things of that nature," Sanchez said. "We’re trying to clean up a certain section of Las Vegas. Still, it’s not the same as city council person or mayor or governor. I don’t think it even comes close.”

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