Community Organizing Experience v. Executive Experience

During the recent GOP convention, Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani mocked Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Chicago (population nearly three million). The one-time mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population nearly 7,000), Palin said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

Well, we know what mayors do, but what exactly is a community organizer?

On the invaluable daily show Democracy Now! of September 10, the host Amy Goodman interviewed one, John Raskin, who said:

"Community organizing is kind of the antidote to big money lobbying. It's the way that ordinary people come together to hold the government accountable to what they actually need. So the job of an organizer, someone like me or what Barack Obama was doing twenty years ago and other folks do around the country, is bring people together. You know, you knock on doors, you go to churches, you go to synagogues, you go to mosques, you have meetings. But people come together around what they need in the community."

Raskin referred the audience to a website for Community Organizers of America. On it, there is a good defense of the work. "Regular people, working together, are the lifeblood of American democracy. Community organizing is how we keep that democracy strong, vital and accountable to its people."

Much is made of how important it is for a president to have been a governor rather than a senator: that way they have "executive experience" and have no paper trail in the Senate that can be used for opposition research.

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But this election is different. The times are different. We have three senators and a governor on the two tickets.

But of course Barack Obama also was a community organizer.

What we need so urgently in our country is to awaken the sense of community.

As global warming worsens, and the global economy, so dependent on transportation of product via vehicles that use fossil fuel, becomes less and less justifiable, we will need to become much more local, fostering the sense of local community within regional community within national community within world community.

As we seek to find ways for our bloodied world to live in peace, we will need people who can build the community of nations.

We have gone through decades where presidents of companies have transmogrified into ludicrously overpaid chief executive officers of corporations. In the early 1970s a new term, CEO, had to be created for them. Accompanying this shift is the widening gap between the salaries of CEOs and the average worker. Forty years ago, the president of an American company made no more than 20 times what workers in that company made. Today CEOs average 400 times and can reach 1,000 times what their workers make.

Executive experience in our time usually means destroying companies from within, from ENRON in 2002 to Lehman Brothers just yesterday.

This nonsense has to stop.

Bush 43 is our first MBA president, our first CEO POTUS, and his formative executive experience was as founder and CEO of an oil company, Arbusto Energy, later Harken Energy, that kept hemorrhaging money, ending its pathetic existence $23 million in the hole. Bringing this experience to Washington, he has bankrupted the government, killed a million Iraqis and made refugees of another three or so million.

During the Bush presidency, the executive branch has operated under the theory of the unitary executive, which allows for the president to be a tyrant.

Now, this election year, Barack Obama's formative work experience was as a community organizer. That is, instead of making decisions from the top like a CEO with executive experience and not knowing how most people live, he worked with people to help better their communities. As he said on September 7 on ABC's This Week:

"Understand what I--what I did as a community organizer. When I got out of college as a young person, twenty-four, twenty-five years old, I had moved to Chicago and worked with churches, who were dealing with steel plants that had closed in their neighborhoods, to set up job training programs for the unemployed and after-school programs for youth and to try to deal with asbestos in homes of poor people. Community service work, which John McCain has been talking about putting country first and extolling the virtues of national service, that's what I did between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-seven, before I went to law school. I would think that's what we want all our young people to do."
This experience is probably the best reason to vote for Barack.

That and his eloquent opposition to invading Iraq, and his experience as a professor of constitutional law, and, well, 6.6 billion (current human population of the world) other reasons.

Comments

[SPinSTL]

CommonSenseVoter (www.commonsensevoter.blogspot.com) has come to the defense of Obama over the dismissive comments about community organizing:
"...I guess you could say being a community organizer is sort of like being a beauty pageant contestant or a sportscaster, which is what Palin was doing around the time Obama was ... helping residents of the south side of Chicago. So, except for the fact that community organizing involves more than smiling and looking good in a swimsuit or reading hockey scores off of a teleprompter, maybe Gov. Palin was on to something.
"In pointing out that small town mayors have actual responsibilities, Palin also could have noted that good community organizers produce results and bring about real change not by executive order but by bringing people together to work collaboratively toward a common cause. ... an effective community organizer helps people of diverse backgrounds move past their differences to establish a shared vision; and a successful community organizer recognizes that his or her primary responsibility is to work toward the fulfillment of the vision and goals of the community, not his or her own personal aspirations.
"Given the challenges our nation faces, our next President will need to help Americans unite around the principles and values that unite us rather than pursuing an agenda that pits us against each other. ...Barack Obama is the only candidate who has exhibited those characteristics of leadership from the very beginning of his career."

[JHRolling]

The United States as we know it would not exist if it were not for the responsibilities shouldered by selfless community organizers and activists:

¢ The United States won its independence from the British Empire because of the service of community organizers. Paul Revere made his midnight ride to alert and organize the community! To unite the widespread and loosely connected communities of local fighting militia, George Washington was appointed as commander-in-chief by the Continental Congress.

¢ The community organizing work of the early abolitionists helped strike down the legal practice of slavery.

¢ Women gained the right to vote in the United States because of the community organizing efforts of leaders of the women"s suffrage movement.

¢ The community organizers in associations like the Children"s Aid Society fought for child labor laws in the United States and originated innovations in child protection and welfare such as the first parent-teacher associations, the first free school lunch programs, the first free dental clinics for children, the first day schools for disabled children, the first kindergarten in the U.S., and the first foster homes.

¢ The community organizers of the Civil Rights Movement were willing to sacrifice their lives so that every citizen of our nation might be recognized as having the same rights by law regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.

The responsibility of a community organizer is the greatest responsibility of all--Christ"s commandment to "Love your neighbor as yourself."

[LeftRight]

You need to exclude about 50 million people from that estimate. That's the number of people in the US who think that he would be bad, and I'm sure that they wouldn't appreciate being lumped in with those of us who admit that we can't do it alone.....