Weekend edition: organizers fight back!

Yo! Props to Jay Smooth from the hip-hop video blog Ill Doctrine for this chill clip. In fact, community organizers have been - well, organizing - since the Republican National Committee dumped on us Wednesday night with not one, not two, but three slams against Barack Obama's early career choice. Here are some of the best reactions, other than the one above:

Community Organizers Fight Back - the website

We Are All Community Organizers - one of several Facebook groups taking it to Palin

Obama's reaction yesterday

This excellent diary at dKos, in which the author asks whether the GOP's coordinated attacks were coded, racist propaganda.

So, are you thinking you might like to do some organizing of your own this weekend? Here are some ideas:

The LaRocco for Senate campaign is opening its seventh statewide office in Coeur d'Alene from 6 to 8 Pacific tonight. Stop by 408 Sherman Avenue if you're in CdA or nearby. Larry also did a short interview with HBO this afternoon.

A big canvass is planned Saturday morning for Ada County Commissioner candidates Dave Langhorst and Paul Woods. It starts at 9:30 a.m., with a meeting at 12451 W. Abram Dr., Boise, off Cloverdale Road. Contact T.J. Thomson you're interested in helping, contact District 20 chair T.J. Thomson at 559-6010 if you can help.

District 19 door-knocking happens every Sunday (4:15 p.m.), Monday (5:15 p.m.), and Wednesday (5:15 p.m.) Meet at Parilla Grill on 13th Street in Hyde Park.

Idaho for Obama will be registering voters at Art in the Park on Saturday. Click the link for info. Also, Women for Obama are phone banking every Tuesday at state HQ (9th and Jefferson, downtown Boise). Contact chryssa_marie at yahoo dot com if you'd like to help.

More money than time? Congratulations! You can help by donating via ActBlue to a host of Idaho Democratic candidates and causes, including the Idaho Democratic Party and the county parties in Ada, Bonneville, Canyon, Latah, and Twin Falls (all accessible on this page). You can give once or make a monthly pledge. Watch Red State Rebels for a one-stop shopping ActBlue page coming soon to a blog near you.

If you're a Democratic candidate and have upcoming activities or volunteer needs, put 'em in the comments ... and add RSR to your email list to have future events included in these weekend digests.

Comments

[theresa]

Well I can say speaking as a person who has been a community organizer for a long time...it made me realize not only does sarah not know what a vp does, she also does not know what a community organizer does. Left me wondering what she DOES know about people, issue, gov't etc.

Also left me wondering why her party would allow her to poke a stick at the people that work across the country who specialize in helping bring people together, who specialize in knowing more then one side of an issue, who specialize in getting out the vote, who specialize in the stuff that matters ....

I mean really are they so confident that they can piss off not only women, and minorities, the working people, those who want some answers about Iraq, those that organize door to door .... well it's a long list for a little blog from Idaho .....

shakes head

t

[Julie in Boise]

Yes indeed, t, but the upside is that people are fired up and ready to work hard these next two months to ensure that this backfires on the GOP.

[theresa]

nods, just sent my letter to the statesman ...

t

[Bubblehead]

"Coded, racist propaganda"? Seriously? I thought they were mentioning it because, to a lot of people, it probably doesn't sound like a "real" job, but more something people would do on a volunteer basis. Having learned about Sen. Obama's personal history, I know that he did a lot of good work as a community organizer, but isn't it more likely that it was meant for people who maybe weren't as familiar with that particular career? Is every "attack" on Sen. (and eventually President) Obama going to be twisted into something "racist"? Is this like questioning a Democrat's national security priorities a "coded" attack on their patriotism? Where do we get the decoder ring?

[Julie in Boise]

Bubblehead, I was listening for dog whistles in Palin's speech on Wednesday, and this one escaped me, even though I spend my days working with community organizers. So if there's a decoder ring, I need it, too. (And since Republicans are perfectly blatant in questioning Dems' patriotism, there's no need for a decoder there.)

But then I read the diary, and I have no doubt - especially since THREE people slammed community organizers - that there *could* be some coordination here, and that (especially given the overwhelmingly white nature of the GOP) it was targeted at the base, plus the hundreds of thousands of Reagan Dem voters who can no longer stomach the GOP but won't vote for Obama because he's black. (Of course, they won't admit this.)

That's what's so insidious about language like this: our white privilege means it just slides by even those of us who ARE attuned to such talk. Palin's comment instantly upset me, but I didn't immediately suspect racist intent ... this despite five years of extensive training on racial equity and white privilege.

I'll add that I also see the argument - made in the comments at that diary - that this isn't so much racism as an extension of the "Obama as radical" meme that Rush et al are pimping. And yet, as the diarist said, "The two theories (race or radicalism?) aren't incompatible, of course: It looks like the game plan is to keep trying to paint Obama as the scary black radical (which would also fit with the recent round of Weathermen ads). I'm thinking the Rovians may have just tipped their hand to their post-convention attack strategy."

Yeah, I know, as a South Park Republicrat or Democan or whatever you are these days, you'll say I am being too sensitive and PC. Well, that's me. Guilty as charged, the anti-cynic, the woman who would never in a million years name a blog "The Stupid Shall Be Punished."

Or as a famous community organizer once said, "Blessed are the peacemakers."

[Julie in Boise]

I didn't even know about Ill Doctrine until today, and now I am hooked. It's brilliant. Here's another video you might enjoy - and Bubblehead, the take-away here is that Republicans at the RNC *sounded* racist, not that they ARE racists. Even though there were only three dozen black delegates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc&feature=user

[W. Lane Startin]

Sort of on topic, Trevor Dodge, an old friend of mine and a U of I alumnus, had this to say about U of I putting Palin on their main page:

http://trevordodge.com/?p=2253 (nws)

As of tonight, Palin's nowhere to be found at uidaho.edu ...

Side note: circa 1990 Trevor and I were debate partners at Twin Falls High School. We were quite a team.

[ReggieH]

Can you all believe I only just got off work? Yeesh. Anyway, here's my contribution:

http://www.laprogressive.com/2008/09/05/alaskans-speak-in-a-frightened-whisper-palin-is-%E2%80%9Cracist-sexist-vindictive-and-mean%E2%80%9D/

“She’s a bigot, a racist, and a liar,” is the more blunt assessment of Arnold Gerstheimer who lived in Alaska until two years ago and is now a businessman in Idaho.

Bubblehead: Considering the topic here I think the link is incredibly relevant. Check it out please and relay to me your thoughts on racism within the Republican Party.

[Bubblehead]

Stories about that supposed quote were all over Democratic Underground yesterday, so I was already familiar with them. Fortunately or unfortunately, people can say whatever they want on the internet ( http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2004/11/i-saw-it-on-internet.html ), so I'm not likely to believe horrible quotes attributed to a suddenly famous person without a little more evidence. (I'm sure I can find a lot of horrible "quotes" from Sen. and Mrs. Obama were I inclined to look.)

There are racists in the Republican Party; there are racists in the Democratic Party. There seem to be lots of racists who support Ron Paul. There are certainly racists in Idaho -- my wife's family has been especially affected by this -- but I think that as one gets more involved in the community and interact with people of different cultures -- as most politicians do -- they would tend to become less racist. While you could say that Republican Party policies tend to disproportionally harm minorities, the argument could also be made that the better correlation is to the poor. Republicans tend to have a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" philosophy that I don't think is racist, but classist. To be honest, it's Democrats who are much more likely to frame things by race. Republicans, as a whole, would much rather people be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character; they just want to avoid helping those without the "right" kind of character more. Just MHO.

[Bubblehead]

Julie,
With respect to the number of African-American delegates at the Republican convention, it's true they were underrepresented compared to historical African-American support of Republican presidential candidates, but not by much. You reported earlier that 1.5% of the delegates were African-American, compared with 24.3% of African-American delegates to the DNC.

In the last election, the African-American vote split 88%-11% for Sen. Kerry; if we assume that African-American support for Sen. McCain is no better than it was for President Bush in 2004 (a reasonable assumption, for various reasons), we can see what % of the total support for Republicans comes from African-Americans. African-Americans made up 11% of the electorate in 2004 (that % is not likely to go down in 2008, I would guess), so we see that 1.21% (11 x 0.11) of the 2004 electorate was made up of African-Americans; since President Bush got just over 50% of the vote, about 2.43% of his support came from African Americans. So, African-Americans were underrepresented at the RNC, by 0.9% -- assuming Sen. McCain has as much support from African-Americans against Sen. Obama as President Bush did against Sen. Kerry.

Applying the same math to the Democrats, (11 x 0.88 / 0.48), we see that 18.3% of Kerry's support came from African-Americans, so one could say that African-Americans were over-represented at the DNC by 6% -- probably at the expense of some other racial group(s).