No inside joke. The phrase was given the necessary sneering emphasis and the monkeys responded with the appropriate Pavlovian hooting. They could have said “…and he wears shoes on his face!” and the audience would have reacted exactly the same.
It sounds to them like some kind of liberal, do-gooder, social service job, even though they don’t really know what it is. A lot of them think it’s a government job. Guiliani’s sneer was even nastier and pissed me off more than Palin’s. Palin is an idiot and was reading someone else’s line. Rudy Guiliani knows damn well what a community organizer does, probably backslapped hundreds of them as Mayor of New York, and chose to piss all over them to cynically score soem cheap applause from an audience he was consciously talking down to .
Nah. They know lefties have been making fun of it, and the mirth derives from that.
You guys take yourselves too seriously.
The lefties have been making fun of community organizers? WTF are you talking about?
They’ve been making fun of her experience, some of which has been her service as a community organizer.
Cite? Obama was a community organizer. Palin was not.
When was she a community organizer, and who made fun it?
The fact that they’re trying to package her experience as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska as “executive experience” analogous to be President of the United states is, of course, eminiently laughable.
I’ve done comminity organizing and this bitch can fuck right off for pissing all over two years I spent busting my ass for peanuts starting and running inner city day camps and after school clubs, cleaning up and restoring neighborhood parks and helping build habitat houses just to try to make a little bit of difference in the world. I’d like to see that stuck up, elitist cunt do one fucking day of the work that I did.
Jesus, the more I think about the community organizer swipes, the more it pisses me off. Was it really necessary to insult thousands of people who aren’t doing anything but trying to help others? What pisses me off the most is that they’ve gotten a totally free ride for it. No one’s called them on it. If Barack Obama had insulted, say, plumbers, it’s all that would get talked about for a month.
Who the fuck do these fucking rich, snob Republicans think lives in those communities? It’s the exact same, blue collar, working class stiffs that McCain is trying to court.
Well they can all lick my community organizing ass.
I could have sworn I’ve seen posts around here making fun of her so-called community experience. You know, PTA mom and all that shit.
It was Obama who turned down job offers from high paying law firms and a clerkship with the Supreme Court to work as a community organizer for $13K a year. Palin has tried to inflate her resume with her exprience on the PTA and the Wasilla City Council. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.
Perhaps so. At any rate it looks like I erred, so I retract. Who knows what the hell they were laughing at then. 
ETA: I do commend you on your service, Dio.
Getting back to the speech, I dropped in to say – forgive me if I’ve missed it earlier on – the BBC pointed out at the time that one of Bush’s personal speechwriters wrote it, No doubt she had some input and was responsible for its delivery. But still, I’ve been seeing a lot of good reactions to that speech, and I’d like to know if so many people think it’s so good, why don’t they vote for the speechwriter instead of Palin? Isn’t he the one they should really be impressed with?
Of course not. Speech writers write. By and large I don’t imagine they have the faintest idea how to lead.
We’ve been over this. ALL Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates have speechwriters. Somehow, only Palin’s seems to be the one who deserves the credit for the speech.
For an indication of how important the speech maker is as compared to the speech writer, let me point out that the writer in question is also a writer for GW Bush, who in 8 years never managed to deliver a speech anywhere near that good.
Oratory requires both written and performance skills. You need both. But from what I heard, Palin had a fair bit of input into the speech. They had a canned speech ready, but it was deemed too masculine, so they had to tear it apart and rebuild it and replace sections, and Palin worked with the speechwriter on that effort.
Yes, I know all of that. I even know the person who wrote Bill Clinton’s speech that he delivered here in Bangkok in November 1996. (He never met Bill but was told what Bill wanted covered.) I just get tired of what appears to be people thinking these guys all make up their own speeches. I don’t mean people on the Board, but rather the gushers you see elsewhere
Because the speechwriter needs to be told which ideas the speech must express and which points it must cover. Those will come from Palin and her team. And then there’s the oratory angle, which others have already covered.
Where are you seeing these gushers, Sam? If it’s on television you be pretty sure they already know who wrote the speech. I think the thing that effective speakers get accolades for is delivering the speech in a way that resonates with people. It’s like Sam Stone said, some have the gift and some don’t. Those who have are much more successful in rallying people behind them. Kennedy had that quality, Reagan had that quality, some feel Clinton did, and Obama surely does. McCain not so much, and that’s one way Palin, a wonderful speaker, helps complete McCain on the campaign trail, and, I would presume, with Congress, the elecorate in general and foreign countries as well in the event McCain gets elected.
For Palin, first on the BBC of all places. The Brit reporters even had to tell themselves to settle down a bit after becoming “electrified” by her speech. And then other online media sources.
But I don’t mean just for Palin alone. I’ve noticed it more and more lately. It seems like for candidates everywhere, people are acting like their words have just fallen from their lips spontaneously. It’s almost like the early movie days when some fans were naive enough to think the actors were improvising their roles and making the lines up themselves. It’s just I seemed to see it even more after Palin’s speech.
The Man Behind Palin’s Speech. Pretty interesting, actually.
C’mon guys, it was a damn fine speech. She rallied the base and probably won over some independents. For someone (man or woman) who had never been in the national spotlight, she did an amazing job.
Still a terrible choice, IMHO. Even conservatives don’t think she’s ready to be President, and she has less than 2 months to convince us all (unlike Obama who’s had over 18 months). With McCain’s age and health (which will be hammered on from now to Nov) Sarah Palin is a hard sell. But she did a hell of a job the other day.
I would have laughed at that line, though! 
I saw this in a comment field here, at “Faith in Public Life”::
I don’t think slamming community organizers is really the way they should have gone.