Did Obama make racist remarks about community organizers
The New Republic article on Obama’s time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago begins with him telling his mentor why he was quitting. The pay was too low and it didn’t work. “Obama told Kellman that he feared ending up destitute and unhappy like his dad. ‘He wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income,’ Kellman recalls.” Obama, to hear tell, stopped being a community organizer because he didn’t want to be a loser.
But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.” To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” … And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school. Kellman, who was already thinking of leaving organizing himself, found no reason to argue with him. “Organizing,” Kellman tells me, as we sit in a Chicago restaurant down the street from the Catholic church where he now works as a lay minister, “is always a lost cause.” Obama, circa late 1987, might or might not have put it quite that strongly. But he had clearly developed serious doubts about the career he was pursuing. … (Emphasis added.)
Yet, two decades later, to hear Obama the presidential candidate tell it, those years in Chicago as a community organizer shaped the person–and the politician–he has become. Campaigning in Iowa last year, he declared that community organizing was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.”
...What is the substantive difference between what Sarah Palin said about community organizers and what Obama said? Yet, some of his goofy backers are claiming it is racist to say the same thing Obama said when he quit. These guys keep walking into their face in their criticism of Palin.
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