Hering's not dumb, but he must think his readers are

No, really, I don't think he's dumb. Of course, that makes this bit a little harder to explain:

After Sarah Palin spoke to the Republican convention last week, the Obama supporters criticized her. That’s fine, but why take umbrage at the wrong remark?

“Governor Palin’s statement last night dismissing the work of community organizers suggests that her idea of democracy does not include participation from ordinary citizens,” huffed the deputy director of Americans United for Change. “Governor Palin professes to be working for Americans, but apparently she does not want those Americans to get in her way or give her advice.”

That’s neither what Palin said nor what she wants. What she said was: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

And she said that only because her opponents have belittled her as a nobody on the grounds that the highest public office she held before becoming Alaska’s governor was mayor of small town.

That's not what Palin meant at all, and everyone in the audience and watching it on TV knew it (the laughter and shouting that followed the statement is a pretty good sign). Palin was denigrating community organizers, pure and simple. To pretend otherwise is to treat one's readers as idiots. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's a borderline lie.

Also, this is kind of strange:

All of us have responsibilities, and if we don’t meet them day after day, we are likely to be shown the door. That’s not necessarily the case with community organizers. But it’s definitely so with people in elective office, even that of mayor in a small town.

Yeah? Really? I would humbly suggest that Hering has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. Employees can be fired at any time (Oregon is both an at-will state and many community organizers are not unionized); elections occur periodically, usually at two- or four-year intervals, with recalls being difficult and rare. Does he offer any evidence that community organizers don't have responsibilities, or that elected officials that perform poorly consistently fail to be re-elected? No.

[As an aside, I wonder if one of the reasons journalists look at me askance when I go after Hering is that tradition dictates that editorials are not required to show evidence for the claims they make. If true, that's a tradition that needs to change.]

Hering:

So what do community organizers do anyway, besides organize communities?

That's like asking what newspaper editors do besides edit newspapers. It can be read as trashing the job: "Oh, that's it? All you do is edit the newspaper/organize the community?" Like either is that simple.

Then Hering says:

Organizing is a wonderful skill, and nobody has reason to look down on it.

Really? Not even the opposing party's candidates for President and the hack newspaper editor that supports them? Yeah? Then why did you all just denigrate them? Why did Palin continue to denigrate organizers after the convention?

Hering has no idea what he's talking about - as usual. I do wish someone above his head at Lee would notice that they've got an editor whose editorials lack evidence of any kind of research or effort. I mean, I pen gibberish and post it online all the time, but no one pays me for it. Hering's got, you know, responsibilities. And readers. You would think that accountability would be in there too, but apparently not.

This is a much more plausible explanation for the denigration of community organizers, at least to me.

Making an indie film $1 at a time

Via Boing Boing, something awesome:

Organizing

I had one long day today, but something pretty fun happened at the end of it: I got to have drinks and talk with Mark Rudd, formerly of Students for a Democratic Society.

Plenty of my friends were there, and the conversation was great. I've not the time or energy to rehash things now, but there is thing that is really stuck in my mind that I want to try and get out before I go to bed.

Let me also add that the writing of this post was prompted by this Atrios post.

The larger conversation we were having was around the idea of organizing - what is organizing? How do we define the term? What historical models can we draw on? And - and this came up repeatedly - what's the deal with the kids today? Why are/aren't they organizing? (And I say kids because I am indeed talking about people who are still in high school.)

At one point, the conversation wandered over to electoral politics: What's the deal with that Obama guy? What is he doing to create such a groundswell, especially among youth?

Earlier, Rudd had raised the idea that for many youth, something happened in 2005-2006 that really pierced the usual haze; he suggested it was the combination of Katrina and the mainstreaming of the realization that Iraq was lost. I think he's right.

Putting that together with the Obama phenomenon, I suggested that it's possible the left (broadly and vaguely construed, as always) missed an incredible opportunity by not organizing around that sea change in perspective, by not anticipating and being ready for it, and - frankly - by letting it get sucked into electoral politics and Obama (who, for all his virtues, is not talking about capitalism or imperialism in near the same way he's addressing race and even gender).

The point is - and this is a damn exciting thought for me - that something is going on. Something is piercing the atomized, consumerist haze we normally walk around, at least for a few more people than normal. The potential for change hasn't been this great since, well, before I was an adult - and that means it's time to revive once-common and now-heretic ideas like free education and radical limits on corporate power.

I know this thought is barely coherent and completely undeveloped, but I wanted to get it down and out there before I crash.

Also, Mark had a great question: What is organizing?

Leave your answers in the comments.