Another irresponsible "community organizer"
It should come as no surprise that cosmopolitan mayor Rudy Giuliani (hard to tout "small-town values" when you're on your third wife there, champ) has a mad-on for community organizers. After all, they're the ones who do the difficult work of helping real people petition government to address their needs and concerns, and while Giuliani was mayor of New York one of those concerns was his administration's refusal to be held accountable. But then, he's not the first right-winger to hate community organizers. It's not hard to remember the contempt the right once showed for a young community organizer named Martin Luther King Jr., and the contempt they show today by pretending his dream has anything to do with what they believe.
But as my friend Jay Smooth points out, community organizers aren't just those rabble-rousers who help keep people from getting evicted or protest police brutality -- they're basically the ordinary people across the political spectrum who to try hold government accountable to its citizens. Mocking that really shows how much contempt the party has for ordinary people. Republicans look down their noses at alleged "elites" while directing their anger at community organizers, who actually live and work among the people politicians only pay attention to when they're looking for votes. But it's not surprising that a party that has spent the last eight years running government into the ground would be irritated by an active citizenry demanding that government actually do its job, rather than simply letting incompetent pols go about their business. If there's any takeaway from this theme, it's that the right would rather Americans shut up and fall in line.
If I had spent my mayoralty subjecting people to loyalty tests and trying to ban books, a community organizer might make me nervous, too. If I had been mayor of a town that was left with 20 million dollars in debt after my tenure, I wouldn't be on TV talking about how well I had handled my responsibilities and how awful community organizers are. Because, after all, community organizers have the responsibility of helping regular people cope with the messes irresponsible politicians leave behind.
--A. Serwer
