Those trying to tarnish Sarah Palin’s speech last night have decided to criticize Palin’s alleged insult of community organizers: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” MoveOn.org wrote in an email that Palin’s speech “told us that she can be condescending and dismissive of the real work Barack Obama did helping real people on the South Side of Chicago.”
By Obama’s own telling in Dreams from My Father, he didn’t get much of anything accomplished working as a community organizer, but today he didn’t deal so well with this criticism. When asked how community organizing is relevant to the White House, Obama said:
This is work I did three [sic] years ago They haven’t talked about the fact that I was a civil rights lawyer. They haven’t talked about the fact that I taught constitutional law. They haven’t talked about my work in the state legislature or the United States Senate. They’re talking about the three years of work that I did right out of college, as if I’m making the leap from 2 or 3 years out of college into the presidency.
No one denies that civic activism can be meaningful work. Before she was even elected as a city council member, Palin was engaged in grassroots local politics. According to Time magazine, her first leadership role in her community was as one of a few people chosen to create a police department:
In the early ’90s, Wasilla was little more than half as big as it is today, and much more loosely confederated. The main issue then, says longtime resident Chas St. George, was public safety. “We needed a police department,” he says. “So we set up a group to make it happen.” That group — Watch on Wasilla — included a handful of the town’s most influential figures: St. George; the town’s mayor, John Stein; and Palin, who wasn’t in elected office yet. Her father-in-law Jim Palin and his wife Faye were also in the group.
Sarah Palin wasn’t denigrating the work of community organizers last night. She was simply making the point that it’s not something so utterly selfless and amazing that a presidential candidate would focus so much attention on it. And consistent with that, you don’t find Palin constantly bringing up her work in Watch on Wasilla.
Weekly Standard
9/5/8
