More Community Organizer Thoughts

Byron York has an actual history of what Obama did. Jim Geraghty has some related thoughts:

…note that Obama and his supporters speak a great deal about Obama’s choice to be a community organizer, and not so much on what he actually did. We’re continually expected to applaud the decision to try instead of asking about the results. We never hear, “because of his work, Factory X reopened,” or “because of Obama’s creation of job retraining program Y, the community’s unemployment rate reduced from A to B.”

Yes, with so-called “liberals,” it’s always about the good intentions, and we’re not supposed to pay any attention to actual results.

Lileks has some thoughts as well:

We’re having a block party tonight – yes, another block party; damned community can’t stop organizing itself (if I may repeat something I said over at Tim Blair’s place – successful communities, or those on track to becoming successful, organize themselves; if you need someone to come in and do your organizing for you, he might as well call himself Mollusk Wrangler or Sloth Herder. I say this as a former community organizer myself, but that’s another story) so we’ll all stand outside and chat and eat pot luck.

If your community needs an “organizer” it’s probably not much of a community. It’s just a lot of people living in close proximity.

And just a hint for some in comments: given Obama’s image problem with his messiah complex, it’s probably not politically helpful to compare him to Jesus…

Building Character

Jessica Gavora, native Alaskan (and aka better half of Jonah Goldberg) has some thoughts on basketball and Sarah Palin:

We didn’t play basketball to pad our college applications or fulfill some bureaucrat’s notion of “gender equity.” We played because the winters were long and cold and dark. There was nothing else to do. Maybe as a result, basketball was deadly serious business. Away games were played at the end of eight-hour bus rides or
harrowing plane landings in frozen, remote villages. Our opponents were tough, and the fans were unforgiving. And even though the law that feminists like to credit with all female athletic success, Title IX, was then unenforced in high school sports, we girls wouldn’t have dreamed of taking second place to the boys–nor did we.

Palin earned her now-famous nickname on the hardcourt–“Sarah Barracuda.” Her enemies have tried to belittle her by pointing to her stint as a beauty queen, but it is clear that Palin’s background in sports, more than any other experience, is what has made her the existential threat to liberal feminism (and possibly the Democratic ticket) that she is today.

I wonder how she’d do one on one with Senator Obama? Did he ever win a state championship for his team? Perhaps it’s another comparison that his campaign should avoid.

Off Guard

Here’s a Time article on how the Obama campaign plans to deal with Sarah. I was struck by the very first graf.

Nobody was more surprised by John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate than the people who run Barack Obama’s campaign. “I can honestly say that we weren’t prepared for that,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. “I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list. It was a surprise to a lot of Republicans as well.”

Well, why weren’t they prepared for it? A lot of the non-left blogs have been speculating about her for months. Rush reportedly was talking her up months ago, and there have been threads at Free Republic about her. She had come to Arizona to visit McCain’s house there. It was no big intellectual challenge to figure out that she was on the list, if not the short one.

Is this kind of intelligence cluelessness the way they plan to run the country?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!