Organizers bristle at Republican remarks

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Angry community organizers defended their work — and that of former organizer Barack Obama — as they fought back Thursday against a series of insulting remarks by speakers at the Republican National Convention.

Organizers described themselves as the antidote to big-money lobbyists who wield so much influence. They talked about helping powerless people join forces to demand better schools and safer streets, often by working through churches.

"If people in office were doing their jobs, perhaps we wouldn't need community organizers," said John Baumann, executive director of PICO National Network, whose name derives from "People Improving Communities through Organizing."

"I don't like seeing the really hard work that goes on in really poor communities being demeaned by cheap politicians," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "Community organizing is as American as democracy. It believes that ordinary people can do extraordinary things."

Obama, the Democratic nominee, often talks about his three years as a community organizer in Chicago. He uses it to demonstrate he understands the problems of people losing their jobs and stuck in crumbling neighborhoods.

Republicans belittled his organizing experience Wednesday night.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani began summing up Obama's experience by noting he had worked as a community organizer. "What?" he said, with a tone of disbelief. "Maybe this is the first problem on the résumé," Giuliani said.

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin touted her credentials as mayor of an Alaskan town. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," she told the cheering crowd.

"I was shocked the way they were disparaging honorable work," said Michael Leo Owens, an Emory University political-science professor who specializes in urban politics and community building. "Martin Luther King Jr. was a community organizer, and all the other foot soldiers in the civil-rights movement were community organizers. In every decade, we can point to community organizers. We can go biblical and say Moses was a community organizer."

John Raskin, who works to make low-income housing available in Manhattan, quickly launched a Web site to respond to the attacks. It attracted scores of responses Thursday from organizers upset by the criticism.

"I just think it's adding insult to injury," Raskin said of the Republican comments. "First, to create an economy that leaves out so many people and then to insult people who are trying to help."

Organizers describe their work as identifying potential leaders in a community and then helping those people tackle local problems. They research possible solutions, teach people how to figure out who can help and how to explain their concerns, then try to pressure the powerful into taking action.

Some organizations set up their own community groups, but most work with existing institutions, often churches.

Baumann said their concerns might be as basic as getting rid of a drug house or having more police patrol their neighborhood. Organizers also help set up job-training programs, push for better parks and streets, and press for school improvements.

In arguing that Obama lacked the credentials to be president, Giuliani and Palin compared the Democratic presidential candidate's job as a community organizer to the Republican vice presidential candidate's job as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

Obama worked as a community organizer from 1985 to 1988 for a church-funded group on Chicago's South Side. His focus was organizing workers in black neighborhoods displaced by steel-mill closings. That included outreach to politicians and pressing for things such as job training, child care and public safety.

Ahmad Daniels, a longtime Charlotte, N.C., organizer, said that trying to help communities that feel hopeless or helpless is "more difficult that running a big state like Alaska."

"To minimize Barack's work in the community is almost sacrilegious," he said. "She forgets the history of the United States — people touching hands, having a cup of coffee and talking about their visions."

Information from McClatchy Newspapers is included in this report.