Community organizers were understandably irked by Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin‘s comments last night in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which she mocked Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer thusly: “I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer — except that you have actual responsibilities.” This being the digital age, they’ve quickly created an outlet for their push-back, via this web site.
It’s worth noting that this wasn’t just some off-the-reservation one-liner, either; it was part of a sustained line of scornful Republican attack, with former New York Governor George Pataki saying, “[Barack Obama] was a community organizer — what in God’s name is a community organizer? I don’t even know if that’s a job,” and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani playing to an eager crowd’s laughter, offering up, “[Obama] worked as a community organizer. What? I said, ‘OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the resume.'”
Even before the Internet, this is the sort of mass-agitable detail — wherein a campaign really steps in a big pile of it with a certain constituency, but seeks to move forward and drown out the clamor of disaffection by denying any attack and taking mock-offense at those who raise it as an issue — that even the best films about political campaigns have a hard time cramming in. Watch for it over the next 72 to 96 hours, in particular.