Organizing and Governing

For his most fervent acolytes, Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Chicago is at the core of what makes him so special. But Republicans are likely to cast it as a waste of time:

"When I started organizing, I understood the idea of social change in a very abstract way," Obama told me last year. "It was to some extent informed by my years in Indonesia, seeing extreme poverty and disparities of wealth and understanding sort of in a dim way that life wasn’t fair and government had something to do with it. I understood the role that issues like race played and took inspiration from the civil-rights movement and what the student sit-ins had accomplished and the freedom rides.

"But I didn’t come out of a political family, didn’t have a history of activism in my family. So I understood these things in the abstract. When I went to Chicago, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to test out my ideas. And for the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful. The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."

So Obama went to law school and then began a political career during which he has never stopped anywhere long enough to accomplish very much. (It seems he’ll wait until he becomes all-powerful.) Much of the sound and fury emanating from Denver last week was designed to obscure a skimpy resume. He doesn’t need to bring attention to it now by dissing Sarah Palin for being mayor of a small town and governor of a big state. (Size matters. Just look at the map--very impressive on TV.)


And this is just stupid.



Dan Quayle was never taken seriously, but his boss, George H. W. Bush, had no trouble beating Michael Dukakis senseless. Sarah Palin may turn out to have problems, but if the Democrats aren’t careful, they’re going to get blamed for all the increasingly gratuitous piling-on by the media.


Alaskan folk heroes are made, not born.