What's so funny about community organizing?

Six minutes into his speech to the Republican convention, Rudolph Giuliani said the following about Barack Obama: “He worked as a ‘community organizer.’ What?” Then he shrugged and laughed. The crowd laughed. The former mayor of New York City, “America’s Mayor,” the hero of Sept. 11, was barely able to fire off his next comment: “This is the first problem on the resume..” Since when is service to one’s community a “problem?” Since when is it something to be laughed at and mocked? Don’t Republicans engage in grass-roots community organizing? Isn’t that how they propelled George Bush back into the White House in 2004 — the same George Bush who has let them down so badly that they are now, finally, demanding change? What Republican voters may not realize is that Senator Obama worked for three years on the South Side of Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization. How is that different — in practice — from the church-based community organizations that propelled George Bush back into the White House in 2004? Republican voters also may not realize that Obama directed Project Vote from Apr. to Oct. 1992, a voter registration drive that registered 150,000 African-Americans in Illinois. How does that differ — in practice — from the mass voter-registration drives that took place, for example, in Ohio from 2004 to 2006, sponsored and underwritten by the state’s right-wing Christian mega-churches? Democrats need to strenuously address the irony of Giuliani’s mockery in their media campaigns: can people who publicly mock their own methods be trusted to pick the next president? If the Democrats fail at this, another election is theirs to lose. Sharon Mesmer Shohola