The 'Community Organizer's' New Clothes
By JAMES TARANTO
ST. PAUL, Minn.--"Community organizer" is to Barack Obama what "war hero" was to John Kerry.
To be sure, the analogy is imprecise. After all, Americans know what a war hero is, and the question in 2004 was whether Kerry really was one. It also was awkward for Republicans to address Kerry's war-hero claims directly, because on paper his military record was more impressive than that of President Bush, who only served stateside.
By contrast, it is a mystery exactly what a "community organizer" does, as we wrote Friday, after John McCain chose Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate:
Obama spokesman Bill Burton quickly denounced McCain for proposing to put "the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." This took a degree of chutzpah, since the Democrats have just spent four days touting Obama's experience as a "community organizer" as a central qualification to put him no heartbeats away. Even after listening to those speeches, we're still not sure what a "community organizer" is.
Are we supposed to cast our eyes on the slums of Chicago, behold how well organized they are, and exclaim in wonder, "Wow, Barack Obama did that!"?
Unlike with Kerry, Republicans (who coincidentally have a real war hero atop the ticket this year) have no reason to hold back the mockery. And mock they did. Sarah Palin slammed Obama in the course of describing her days as mayor:
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.
And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.
It's a good line, but it still doesn't explain what a "community organizer" does. Take away the "actual responsibilities" of a small-town mayor, and you have . . . nothing. Oh wait, that's her point, isn't it?
But the mystery of the "community organizer's" job description was solved this morning, when an Obama campaign email, signed by the delightfully named David Plouffe, popped into our inbox. It is worth quoting at length:
I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.
I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.
But worst of all--and this deserves to be noted--they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.
You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.
Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.
Let's clarify something for them right now.
Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.
And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.
That's right--community organizing consists of helping elect Barack Obama president! This fits right in with Obama's claim, noted here yesterday, that he is more qualified to be president than Palin is to be vice president because, whereas she has run a mere town, he has run a campaign for himself.
The community Barack Obama has organized is, in Plouffe's own telling, the community of those who admire Barack Obama. He is mayor of Obamaville and aspires to be president of Barackistan. At the center of it all is a man who, like Hans Christian Andersen's naked emperor, may or may not believe that his veneer of accomplishment is real.
Notes From the Floor
Sarah Palin's speech promised to be the biggest event of the Republican National Convention, and we were determined to get a floor pass. This we did. It didn't hurt that the convention staffer in charge of handing out media floor credentials was Elizabeth Crowley, who helped compile this column between 2001 and 2004.
We arrived on the floor as Rudy Giuliani was speaking and made our way to the Alaska delegation (which, oddly, was positioned toward the back of the floor, not near the stage like Arizona). We figured this would be the ideal location to watch the governor's speech. Apparently other journalists had the same idea.
As Giuliani spoke on energy and the crowd chanted, "Drill, baby, drill," a British-accented man to our left with a media floor pass turned to us and asked, "Have you seen 'Marathon Man'?"
We have, but we weren't sure what he meant, so we looked at him quizzically, whereupon he explained:
"The dentist."
Later, Giuliani complained that "for four days in Denver, the Democrats were afraid to use the words 'Islamic terrorism.' " The hall filled with boos, as he continued, departing from his prepared remarks:
I imagine they believe it is politically incorrect to say it. I think they believe it will insult someone. Please tell me, who are they insulting if they say "Islamic terrorism"? They are insulting terrorists.
A guy to our right quipped, "As a terrorist, I am deeply offended by that." We're pretty sure he wasn't a terrorist. He may or may not have been a journalist--we didn't get a look at his pass--but his comment was typical of the species. Even this columnist has been known to utter the occasional smart-aleck remark.
To judge by the Giuliani and Palin speeches, Obama's biggest mistake of the campaign was his April remark at what was supposed to have been a private San Francisco fund-raiser:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
In response, Palin painted Obama as both an elitist and a phony:
In small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.
We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
Giuliani also defended Palin and her small-town origins:
She's already had more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined. She's been a mayor. I love that.
I'm sorry--I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough. I'm sorry, Barack, that it's not flashy enough. Maybe they cling to religion there.
Well--well, the first day--as far as I'm concerned, the first day she was mayor, she had more experience as an executive than--than Obama and Biden combined.
We smiled at the thought of Giuliani--a man who personifies the flashiest, most cosmopolitan city in America--mocking Obama's urban hauteur. It struck us as a show of chivalry, the big-city guy standing up for the small-town gal. Along similar lines was this:
How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president? How dare they do that? When do they ever ask a man that question? When?
Giuliani and Palin hit almost every anti-Obama theme, either directly or by implication. "You can be certain that wherever he goes, and whoever is listening, John McCain is the same man," said Palin (Obama: flip-flopper). Small-town Americans are "always proud of America" (Obama's wife: not so much). Giuliani said, "Our hero, our candidate, John McCain said, 'I'd rather lose an election than a war' " (Obama: defeatist). And Giuliani had this riff on Obama's indecisiveness:
Then he ran for--then he ran for the state legislature and he got elected. And nearly 130 times, he couldn't make a decision. He couldn't figure out whether to vote "yes" or "no." It was too tough.
He voted--he voted "present."
I didn't know about this vote "present" when I was mayor of New York City. Sarah Palin didn't have this vote "present" when she was mayor or governor. You don't get "present." It doesn't work in an executive job. For president of the United States, it's not good enough to be present.
The Democrats' attacks on McCain last week were near-beer compared with Giuliani's and Palin's 100-proof spirits. All we can remember about the former is that John McCain has a lot of houses, and George Bush is bad and we can't afford moreofthesame.
Interestingly, the GOP seems to be forgoing one line of attack against Obama. No speaker we saw, including Giuliani or Palin, mentioned the Democratic nominee's 20-year relationship with erstwhile "spiritual mentor" Jeremiah Wright, whose anti-American tirades caused Obama so much trouble back in the spring. Maybe it's because Wright is old news, but we suspect the GOP is eager to avoid being tagged as racially insensitive. So much for that national conversation on race we were going to have.
Sarah Palin's folksy accent--she refers, for instance, to Iraq as "Eye-rack" and Saudi Arabia as "Soddy Arabia"--reminds us of someone, and during her speech, it hit us who it is: Jane Curtin playing Mrs. Loopner on the original "Saturday Night Live." (There are supposed to be videos here, but we weren't able to get them to play.)
As for the Alaska delegates, we noted that some of them wore buttons with a photo of Palin and the slogan "Hottest governor, coolest state." We also noticed that they applauded far more enthusiastically when she mentioned a state tax rebate than when she described turning down federal money for the Bridge to Nowhere.
Palin's speech included a joke that was not part of the prepared text: "You know what they say about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." Perhaps someone can recast this as an Obama joke. Here's our attempt:
What's the difference between a "community organizer" and a Chihuahua? A Chihuahua has a real job.
An Actuarial Perspective
If you're concerned about Sarah Palin's lack of experience, Politico's Alexander Burns has some numbers that ought to put your mind at ease:
For a man who has lived 72 years and 67 days (McCain's age on Election Day this year), there is between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration's 2004 actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Going by the Social Security Administration's tables, that's nearly ten times the likelihood that a man aged 47 years and 92 days (Barack Obama's age on Election Day this year) will die before Jan. 20, 2013.
Let's take the average of the two figures and say that McCain has a 14.65% likelihood of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, while Obama's likelihood is 1.465%.
For the sake of argument, assume further that Joe Biden and John McCain are equally qualified to be president, and Sarah Palin is as unqualified as Barack Obama.
That means that if McCain is elected, there is better than an 85% chance that America will have a qualified president at the end of the term. If Obama is elected, the likelihood of having an unqualified president at term's end is higher than 98.5%.
The Equatorial Guinea Model
Barack Obama is far more radical than he and his supporters have let on, if a comment by his running mate is to be taken seriously. London's Guardian reports:
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said earlier this week that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.
Biden's comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. . . .
When asked during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, whether he would "pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration," Biden answered in the affirmative.
"We will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offence that's occurred," he continued, going on to praise congressional committees for the deliberate pace of their inquiries into alleged Bush administration misdeeds.
A June article in London's Times began as follows:
It was the biggest event that the sultry little capital of Equatorial Guinea had seen since 1979, when the previous dictator, President Macias Nguema, was overthrown, tried in a cage suspended from the ceiling of a cinema, sentenced to death 101 times, then executed by firing squad.
As the Guardian recounts, Biden temporized, saying, "No one's talking about pursuing President Bush criminally." In fact, some of Obama's more fevered supporters are talking about just that. By entertaining such speculation, Biden is pandering to those whose political hatreds are so intense that they would prefer if America were government more in the manner of Equatorial Guinea.
Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
• "Russia to Create Electromagnetic Super Weapon"--headline, Pravda, Sept. 4
• "Duck Stamp Includes Phone-Sex Number"--headline, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Sept. 4
• "Cross-Dressing Purse-Snatcher Loses Fake Breast in Port St. Lucie"--headline, TCPalm.com (Treasure Coast, Fla.), Sept. 3
• "Zombie Plague Sweeps the Internet"--headline, BBC Web site, Sept. 4
• "Doughnut Shop Flirting Turns Into Wild Rampage"--headline, FoxNews.com, Sept. 4
News You Can Use
"How to Survive a Bellyflop From a Height"--headline, BBC Web site, Sept. 4
Bottom Stories of the Day
• "Green Party Candidate Added to Utah Ballot"--headline, Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 4
• "Reid Not Happy With Lieberman's Speech"--headline, CNN.com, Sept. 3
• "Ron Paul Likely Won't Endorse McCain, Eyes Third Party Candidate"--headline, CNSNews.com, Sept. 3
A Community Needs an Organizer Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
One of the interesting things about Sarah Palin's rise to prominence is that it has exposed how jaw-droppingly clueless liberals are about sex. When Bristol Palin's pregnancy became known, for instance, we kept hearing that it was proof that more sex education was needed and that "abstinence doesn't work."
Folks, we know enough about this subject to say with complete confidence that Miss Palin did not get pregnant by practicing abstinence, and that she either was educated about sex or figured it out on her own.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, Gloria Steinem compares Sarah Palin unfavorably with Hillary Clinton and declares: "[Mrs.] Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with [Mrs.] Clinton." In fact, women have two X chromosomes, whereas men have an X and a Y. That means Mrs. Palin shares two chromosomes with Mrs. Clinton but only one with, say, John McCain.
Of course, Steinem has always been confused about such matters. Back when she was closer to Sarah Palin's age, she famously likened human reproduction to some sort of interaction between a fish and a bicycle. We guess she's as confused as ever. Good thing people like the Palins understand this stuff, or the survival of humanity would be in doubt. |
