The International House of Bacon

A lot is made about Joe Biden’s middle-class heritage, how he’s relatively pedestrian when it comes to his wealth compared to Obama or McCain. Meanwhile, the guy is spending thousands on Amtrak tickets every year. For what? To get to the Senate by Amtrak? Seriously?

the guy is considered “the poorest man in the Senate.” It’s no wonder…

So it seems, interestingly enough, that Obama is suddenly taking offense at the suggestion that community organizers don’t do much. Maybe this explains him a bit more for me.

Just kind of going off the top of my head here - a community organizer like the type Obama served as has a very narrow constituency, thus creating a very narrow (if not narrower) role - advocacy for that community’s perceived needs on the group’s behalf, giving an extra hand where it may be necessary, etc. It’s a very useful role, and I don’t think anyone is saying that the role itself is useless, but rather that it’s nothing incredibly special - many people “organize communities” on a regular basis, and do so with no accolades or special anything. A librarian friend might consider her and I “community organizers,” but it’s not providing me with any experience that might, say, help me run a country. There are no significant responsibilities that can even begin to match up to the more overarching real work city manager types do - having to juggle all the constituents of a community, for instance.

I think this might account for Obama’s major policy failings - he approaches the campaign the same way a community organizer might. He’s got his pet issues, he knows where he thinks we need improvement, he listens to his “constituents,” and then goes after those who might stand in the way of that. Thus, when he hears someone like Phil Gramm talk about the “mental recession,” it doesn’t register with him because it doesn’t register with his constituent base. If - and this is only a theoretical example - he’s working for a group in Chicago that needs a new place to meet, and the city returns to him saying “the place you have is fine because of X, Y, and Z,” Obama would probably keep fighting that example, as his advocacy is simply toward the group he’s representing, not the larger population.

Obama’s campaign is the same way - few *dislike* the community organizer, but he can still be a bit of a pain, and you really wish he’d listen to more than one side. It’s up to Obama to start thinking less like a “community organizer” and more like a national politician who is representing multiple point of views. The problem is that, like one can assume when he was a community organizer, the minute he starts listening to anyone else, he’ll lose that constituency.