I think of all the political barbs being thrown around over the past month, the one I'm most irritated by is the "community organizer" thing.
THE LEFT: Community organizers are valuable! Their goals are to end poverty and promote social justice! They're doing the work the government ought to be doing, without more government, so conservatives should praise them! Being a community organizer is excellent experience on the road to serving in government!
THE RIGHT: "Community organizer?" You call that a job description? No real responsibilities, no defined objectives! It's just a feel-good phrase that really means deliberate agitation! It exploits the very people it purports to be helping! The phrase is "synonymous with working for a liberal nonprofit organization!"
What irritates me the most about it is that the argument has almost exclusively focused on that two-word phrase, an argument over what it "really" means. Does it really mean "closet Marxist?" Or does it mean "selfless volunteer?"
Wouldn't it be easier, if this were important to you, just to list what the man (Senator Obama, in case you have just crawled out of a cave) actually did during those years? And then people could discuss what those things reveal about him, whether they were good or bad things to do, whether he did them well, and whether the act of doing them made him more or less qualified to serve as head of government and head of state?
Just askin'. It's not like nobody has written about it — there are several articles out there which purport to describe what Sen. Obama's community-organizing work accomplished. You can read versions from the right and from the left. I'm just wondering why so many are acting as if those two words, themselves, are proof that the man is either a selfless saint or a laughable loser. I guess because it's easier that way.
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