Posted: Monday, September 8, 2008 12:00 am
What this country may need more than anything else is people in politics with a thicker skin.
After Sarah Palin spoke to the Republican convention last week, the Obama supporters criticized her. That's fine, but why take umbrage at the wrong remark?
"Governor Palin's statement last night dismissing the work of community organizers suggests that her idea of democracy does not include participation from ordinary citizens," huffed the deputy director of Americans United for Change. "Governor Palin professes to be working for Americans, but apparently she does not want those Americans to get in her way or give her advice."
That's neither what Palin said nor what she wants. What she said was: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."
And she said that only because her opponents have belittled her as a nobody on the grounds that the highest public office she held before becoming Alaska's governor was mayor of small town.
All of us have responsibilities, and if we don't meet them day after day, we are likely to be shown the door. That's not necessarily the case with community organizers. But it's definitely so with people in elective office, even that of mayor in a small town.
Palin's remark was pretty good, considering how much weight Barack Obama has put on his experience as a community organizer in Chicago before being elected to anything.
So what do community organizers do anyway, besides organize communities? In her statement, the deputy director explains:
"Community organizers bring … Americans together to help make government work for them. Thanks to diligence of people who aren't in this line of work for the money or the glory, hundreds of neighborhoods nationwide are safer and more prosperous."
Organizing is a wonderful skill, and nobody has reason to look down on it. But governing is a skill as well, even in a small town where everybody thinks, because of proximity, he knows better than the people elected to be in charge.
Well organized or not, nobody who has not served as a mayor anywhere has any reason to look down on somebody who has. (hh)