Obama: Poor Excuse for a Community Organizer

At that snooze-fest of a service forum last night, Judy Woodruff betrayed her journalistic sensibilities when she spiraled down the Obama rabbit hole with this exchange while questioning Senator McCain, which I think he handled well:

WOODRUFF: Senator, at the Republican convention, a couple of speakers, most notably your running mate, vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, made somewhat derisive comments about Senator Obama’s experience as a community organizer. I’ve heard you say you haven’t taken that tone. So I guess my question is, are you saying to others in your campaign and your supporters that that’s not the kind of language you want to hear?

MCCAIN: Well …

WOODRUFF: How do you — how are you approaching that?

MCCAIN: First of all, this is a tough business. Second of all, I think the tone of this whole campaign would have been very different if Senator Obama had accepted my request for us to appear in town hall meetings all over America, the same way Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater had agreed to do so. I know that, because I’ve been in enough campaigns.

Look, Governor Palin was responding to the criticism of her inexperience and her job as a mayor in a small town. That’s what she was responding to.

Of course I respect community organizers. Of course I respect people who serve their community. And Senator Obama’s record there is outstanding. And so I praise anyone who serves this nation in capacities that, frankly, we all know that could have been far more financially rewarding to individuals, rather than doing what they did.

After that lengthy, sensible response, Woodruff asked this ridiculous question:

WOODRUFF: Less significant than the work of a small-town mayor?

McCain should have said, "Yes, you damn fool! What do you think?!" Instead, he went with this:

MCCAIN: I think a small-town mayor has very great responsibilities. They have a responsibility for the budget. They have hiring and firing of people. They have great responsibilities. They have to stand for election. I admire mayors.

I’m — listen, mayors have the toughest job, I think, in America. It’s easy for me to go to Washington and, frankly, be somewhat divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have.

First of all, let's take a look back at those whopping three years that the Holy Anointed Messiah served as a "community organizer". From the N.Y. Times [Obama's Organizing Years, Guiding Others and Finding Himself]:

It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished. Mr. Kellman said that Mr. Obama had built the organization’s following among needy residents and black ministers, but “on issues, we made very little progress, nothing that would change poverty on the South Side of Chicago.”

"Mr. Kellman" is one Gerald Kellman--who was also a community organizer and is white by the way, so cease that noise about "community organizer" being a code word for "black". Ignorant fools abound!. Kellman is the one responsible for giving this clown the community organizing job, causing us to be stuck with his weak ass as the Democratic nominee after foolish elitist white folks pumped him up after hearing these over-hyped community "organizing" speeches who hired Obama for the job. He seems to have a very favorable view of Obama as a person but he is very clear, at least in this article, that Obama didn't change a damn thing of note for those folks in Chicago while he was "organizing".

That vagabond Obama even joined Trinity United Church of Christ simply to shore up his career. Not due to some holy visitation from on high:

Mr. Obama faced skepticism from Baptist and Pentecostal pastors unwilling to use their influence to help him organize their members. His group had consisted almost entirely of Catholic churches, and its top officials were white and Jewish.

“Barack had to get beyond the accusation that he was working for Catholics and Jews who were trying to make money off the community,” Mr. Kellman said.

Mr. Obama wrote that a minister suggested it would be helpful if he belonged to a church, and he joined the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s congregation after hearing a sermon about faith’s power to inspire underdogs.

The article even points out some blatant lies in one of those works of fiction that phony ass fraud released:

Mr. Obama recounted that he helped arrange a bus trip to the housing authority headquarters where residents had demanded a meeting with the executive director and a pledge that residential units would be tested for asbestos. As television cameras rolled, the residents were promised testing and a meeting.

“I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” Mr. Obama wrote. It was the kind of action that “hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on.”

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue.

Then, the article goes further into the lies surrounding this asbestos-busting "community organizing" achievement of Obama's:

Hazel Johnson, an environmental activist at Altgeld, said that she started to raise the asbestos issue with the housing authority in 1979, but that it had failed to act. Ms. Johnson and Ms. Randle pointed out that only some of the asbestos was removed from pipes at Altgeld, but not until 1989, a year after Mr. Obama left for Harvard. (An Obama campaign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said, “The book is meant to be an autobiography about Obama’s experiences, not a history of social and environmental activism in Chicago.”)

Now, back to that bus trip to talk to the folks at the housing authority about the asbestos. Let's see how good those "organizing" skills really were:

Meanwhile, the residents’ meeting with the housing authority’s executive director was a debacle, an illustration of the setbacks faced by Mr. Obama and other organizers.

The crowd of about 700 residents grew irritable in the stifling heat and booed the director when he arrived an hour and 15 minutes late, according to people who were there, as well as newspaper accounts. [Couldn't control them much in the same way he can't control his thuggish supporters even now.]

The meeting became even more raucous after the director indicated that the agency still did not have a plan to remove the asbestos. The director abruptly left 15 minutes into the meeting after a resident wrestled with him for the microphone. Angry tenants followed him out the door, chanting, “No more rent!”

Later that night, Mr. Obama called Johnnie Owens, whom he would hire as a community organizer. Never had Mr. Obama sounded so downcast or frustrated, Mr. Owens said.

“Barack basically talked about how tough it was to generate real results through organizing and that it was embarrassing to him to have the residents out of control,” he recounted.

“He wondered if he had done a good enough job preparing them for the meeting,” Mr. Owens said. “He sounded angry at himself. He was questioning the whole methodology.”

Mr. Obama had risen to executive director of the Developing Communities group, but the demanding hours, small victories and low pay took a toll on him, and he decided to leave.

So, can we stop talking all of this crap about him being some great, effective community organizer!? He was not! I'm sure there are some community organizers who do a magnificent job of "effecting change" for folks in their communities and helping them find a better life, but Barack Hussein Obama was not one of them. --SUGAR

Comments

[Cinie]

Sugar, you're absolutely correct that Obie sucked as a "community organizer." But not as a "vote-getter-outer." That's what "community organizer" is code for in Obie's case. That's the only thing he does fairly well, that's what he sold HoDean, that's the only thing he's got going in this campaign. This article from 93, I think, spells it out.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-1993/Vote-of-Confidence/

[imustprotest]

Thank you for posting this Sugar. You posted a similar diary in early July that discussed his lack-luster organizing days and it's good to get it out there again when the issue is now (finally!) on the radar screen of America.

Bottom line Obama does not = results....he is Bill Clinton's candidate "X".

[Ken in IL]

This article and analysis needs wider distribution, particularly to the McCain camp. John McCain does not need to complement Barky on his community organizing if he did a crappy job. He needs to note he did a crappy job and give a reference.

[DancingOpossum]

My neighbor is a community organizer. Well, she doesn't have that title and nobody hired her or pays her to do it, but it's what she does. So far she has successfully organized a corner pickup for recycling four our little community (this was previously available only to the affluent neighborhood one block over); organized food drives for the needy; and put together a neighborhood round-up of care packages for soldiers in Iraq. Not satisfied, she volunteers nights at the local fire station and recently enrolled in training courses to become an EMT. She doesn't even have a degree from Harvard--only a high school diploma. And she does all this on top of raising a child and working a low-paid job. (Don't ask me how she does it, I do volunteer work but certainly can't match her!)

Can she be the president? I mean, seriously, what actual viable differences can Obama say he made in peoples' lives the way this woman--albeit in a very small way--has?