Community organizing also widens a future candidates experiences and knowledge base. Through organizing he became familiar with and dealt with the problems of the people. In a sense the experience is about broadening Obama and educating in problems of the inner city people. It is questionable that you can hold him responsible for projects that were begun a long time ago. They need continuing leadership and funding. He had moved on.
Getting a little defensive, aren’t we? And actually, I do have some clue whereof I speak: when working for a County Council, I was involved in a number of county-wide projects to do with schools. How about you?
I’ll do the same for McCain when the circumstance arises. And I’m not ‘enjoying’ it, as you put it - I’m simply curious. Sam Stone has raised an issue which has piqued my interest, and Liberal appears to have misrepresented the Annenberg Project. It’s better if voters know if Obama’s a false face before the election than for them to find out afterwards, don’t you agree?
It was successful in gathering data that says that for the most part, these kinds of progams don’t work. I don’t have a quibble with the program itself, but with people who still want to pursue large-scale government projects as a way of solving local problems.
Good for him. Are his social policies going to reflect that attitude?
What does the failure of the Vietnam War tell us about John McCain’s ability be a Commander in Chief?
Can you give a single example of a “dirty deal” that Obama was involved with. Please be specific about anything he did that was either illegal or unethical.
This link goes to Obama’s website, but everything on the page is linked to legit sources and articles essentially debunking the idea that Obama ever had any unethical dealings with Rezko. Theres nothing here. If you think there is, I’d like to see a specific cite for anything Obama ever did vis-a-vis his relationship with Rezko (or anybody else, for that matter) that was either illegal or unethical.
They already do. His support for fixing and expanding FBCI, for instance.
I’m just saying that it doesn’t sound like much, but he wasn’t making starvation wages, either. I even lived in his Hyde Park neighborhood at the time, so my experience is comparable to his in that way. Money was tight, but it was livable. Of course, there was a stock market crash while I was in school, and consequently I was lucky to have a job at all, low salary or no, but that’s neither here nor there.
Not sure that has to do with anything. War can be well-intentioned and still ill-advised, and if so, hopefully John McCain or any other president we have will oppose it.
That all debunks the claim that Obama was Rezko’s attorney. It has nothing to do with whether or not goverment contracts were given to Rezko in exchange for campaign donations.
I don’t understand why you think your salary compared to his matters, unless ya’ll were doing the same exact job. What kind of work were you doing? How much harder was he working than you (or vice versa?)
As far as I’m concerned, the kind of work a 23-year-old chooses is much more important than his achievements. I wasn’t helping anyone but myself when I was 23. At least Obama tried.
Our current president was not very successful in his 20s (or 30s…or 40s). The party who put him into power has no right to now demand we have a miracle-performing wunderkin for president.
My point was that it’s as specious to judge McCain’s potential abilities as CIC by the Vietnam War as it is to judge Obama by his involvement in unsuccessful projects when he was 24 year old community organizer (projects he did not even lead).
No one has ever made that accusation, that I’m aware of. Cite?
Who is “very successful” by 26, for that matter? And why would it matter? It might turn out to be the kid who started selling used cars after dropping out of high school.
BTW, this suggests to me an additional, not-race-related, reason for Palin’s slam. It occurs to me that if the GOP can succeed in implying that “community organizer” is just a fluff job description along the lines of “life coach” or “TPS Report Coordinator” and that during those years BHO was basically doing a feel-good extended internship, or shooting the bull about social justice, then that takes care of the final link in a fairly popular narrative (sometimes heard on both sides of the aisle) called “And He’s Never Held Down A Real Job In His Life.”
This is a pretty good populist narrative, sometimes more justified than others, and they are certainly positioning Palin as a populist anti-Obama in terms of not having spent extended time in rarified academic institutions or the corridors of power, and having had very hands-on, entrepreneurial work experience.
The GOP base reacts well to the snarky characterizations of Dems as aloof elitists. Whether this has much traction in adding votes beyond the base is not so clear – Clinton got elected twice, and he certainly never did a lick of work in the private sector, IIRC, other than nominally being on the payroll of a friend’s law firm while campaigning full time.
Isn’t Iraq also a large-scale project? Nearly anything the federal government does is a large-scale project. The current administration is very big on privatizing federal projects, including Iraq, by hiring private contractors such as Blackwater. And just as in Iraq, it’s extremely disconcerting when more money is dished out to pay private contractors than would be paid to government employees to do the same job and there does not seem to be consistent or well-thought out oversight and accountability for the actions of these private contractors.
The No-Child Left Behind Act is a similar large-scale project that is entirely well-intentioned but similarly ill-advised.
No. He was much much better than that. I’m still thinking about it and what it means.
I remember liking Obama enough to vote for him about the time of the Democratic primaries. Afterwards, I started to like him less. I like him very little watching his speech at the Democratic convention.
I got fired up by Palin, and let down by McCain.
Then I saw Obama on O’reilly, and I really liked him and what he had to say, and the way he said it.
Palin criticized Obama for saying one thing in Scranton and another in San Francisco. It may be there is some validity to that criticism but I’m now thinking it’s more of a good thing.
Nobody can be all things to all people. You will fail. Obama seems to be trying to be most things to most people, and maybe he’s succeeding. What I’m thinking now is that his actual message and substance isn’t really changing. The way he is framing it and the terms he is putting it in are what is changing. He can speak to the audience at the DNC and appeal to that audience, and he can get on O’reilly and appeal to conservatives without changing his message meaningfully.
I think that that is a crucial skill and gift. I think he genuinely has it. It helps that I really liked most of what he said on O’Reilly. There was real substance there.
I have no idea what I’m going to do in this election. I want an Obama/Palin ticket. I want it bad.
All in all I’ll be happy with an Obama and a republican congress or a McCain and a Democratic congress. Either would be ok, imo.
But, I was super-impressed and can’t wait to see the rest. As was mentioned he even made O’reilly look good!
Shouldn’t programs be measured by their success rather than their effort, though? That’s to say that if you have some community program that is, admittedly, trying really hard, but utterly failing, it’s time to shut it down and try something else. Otherwise, the only people being helped are the organizers, instead of the community they’re trying to serve.
Now, obviously, you can’t know if something is going to work until it’s tried, and a lot of the things a group tries won’t work, so there’s no shame in failing, but ultimately, because groups and communities do only have limited resources, you do have to measure community organizations by results.
A relevant link.
The article summarizes Obama’s experience and his eventual disenchantment with the dominant theories of community organizing.
It should also be kept in mind that community organization was his first job, not his only job. He has also been a civil rights attorney and a law professor. Why the microscope on his first after-college job?
I was struck by how the press went right to work researching all about Palin and her life story, while with Obama all they ever did was wring their hands and plead that “he has to tell us his story”. With him, they left it at “nobody knows him”. With her, they gave a whole list of shit for days — some of it now known to be false or embellished.
Odd conclusion in that article. All the skills and techniques Judis recognizes as once being important to Obama as a community organizer (“speak to the self interest of ordinary people”, “see the world from the vantage of those you’re trying to win over”)are absolutely part of his appeal now, but Judis fails to see them.
It’s a contrarian-in-spite-of-its-own-evidence sort of article.
You can’t know the results until you try, though. I think you have to draw a distinction between the individuals whio are trying and the relative success of specific strategies and programs. Trying something that doesn’t work is not a failure. Not trying at all is a failure.
First of all, my apologies for conflating his community organizing with the Annenberg Challenge and the Grove Parc Plaza. I was actually under the belief that it was all community organizing. I didn’t realize that this was a specific title for specific things done a long time ago.
I picked these two topics because they were the only ones I could remember. I decided to look into his community organizing, and vaguely remembered that he had worked for public housing and on the Annenberg Challenge, so I Googled them.
So let’s forget the ‘Community Organizer’ label entirely - I’ll dig into that later, now that I understand what we’re talking about. Let’s specifically talk abou these two projects, because A) they’re fairly recent, and thus indicative of his current judgment, and B) they seem to reflect some of his current policies (he still advocates giving money to real estate developers to build low-income housing, for example, only he wants to do it nationally).
So, how would you judge his performance in the Annenberg Challenge, and the results of his advocacy for Grove Parc Plaza?
I agree with that assessment. I think Judis over-reached in trying to argue that Obama rejected all of it, wholesale. But I thought parts of it seemed spot on. In particular, Sam Stone is mostly right that many of his efforts failed. But Obama recognized that, and learned.
I think, if you read the whole thing, you see that Obama had initially been a disciple of Saul Alinsky, a 30’s era Chicago Organizer whose principles were used by the foundation which trained Obama to work for the CDC:
Over time, he describes Obama as becoming disillusioned with this particular philosphy:
Basically it says that Obama came to the conclusion that it would be impossible to make meaningful change without the involvemnt of elected officials. That’s when he left to go to law school. I don’t think it’s quite correct for Judis to characterize Obama’s disllusionment with Alinsky’s principles as a whole sale rejection organizing, though. It was a rejection of a specific philosphy of organizing. Particularly in three main points – he rejected the idea that appealing to self-interest was more important than underlying values and “moral vision…” that charismatic leadership should be rejected, and that politicians should be seen as poison.
All in all, I think the whole article speaks pretty well of Obama. It supports what Michele Obama is quoted as saying in the article:
So, contrary to waht Judis, says, I think Obama does see politics as a necessary extension of Community Organizing, or at least as a necessary component to achieve the goals of Community Organizing.