Sunday 11 April 2010

"Community organizer"

Lately the Republicans, in their desperation, have started whinging about having – gasp! – a community organizer as President. That’s their code language for “angry uppity black man who stirs up trouble in the ghetto and maybe even causing a riot in a neighborhood near you”. Scary black man! Be afraid!

Let’s set aside the stupidity of their implications with respect to what a community organizer actually does – in the real world, Obama worked to train people to get jobs and get into college. Quite the radical. Instead let’s look at the timeline here.

Obama was a community organizer before he even went to Harvard. He was practically a child.

After his work as community organizer, he went to Harvard Law, headed the Law Review, became a professor, a state Senator and a U.S. Senator.

Then he built a brilliant, 15-million-man campaign with new, ground-breaking innovations seemingly every week, on everything from fundraising to communication to caucus strategy. He destroyed the invincible Clinton machine and then John McCain, got votes in places that had scarcely seen Democratic candidates in decades, like Indiana, and won in a landslide.

As president, he saved the economy, saved a million jobs with the stimulus package, saved the auto industry, saved the financial industry, got the bailout money back from the banks, turned America around on jobs and GDP and housing prices and the Dow, cut taxes, cut the deficit, helped the unemployed, helped small businesses, punished corporations who send our jobs overseas, punished dishonest credit card companies, threw lobbyists out of Washington, stopped crooked defense contracts, helped our troops with pay and benefits and housing and health care and body armor and jobs for wives, passed a landmark health care plan, stopped the torture, closed the secret prisons, started getting us out of Guantanamo, fixed our policy in Afghanistan, signed a nuclear treaty with Russia, improved relations with Muslims, persuaded the Pakistanis to hunt down the Taliban, freed prisoners in Korea and Myanmar, killed Somali pirates, and won a little thing called the Nobel Prize.

And he’s only been president a little over a year.

The Republicans want you to ignore everything he’s accomplished since his Chicago days. They want to freeze him in your minds, like a fly in amber, as the “angry black man” in Chicago, and ignore everything he’s done since. Because they just can’t accept that their 2001 dream of a thousand-year-Reich permanent-GOP-majority is over, and that they not only got crushed in two consecutive elections – they got beat by a black guy. A black guy, beat them in Virginia, Carolina, Florida, Indiana.


"Community organizer" is one of their substitutes for the N-word, when they're not using "ACORN!".

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