As a former community organizer myself, I was intrigued when I saw a couple of different headlines suggesting that the president of the United States has expressed an interest in getting back into that modest line of work when he is no longer president. Of course, the headlines are a bit misleading. There’s no going back to the old job for Barack Obama. In Breitbart’s case, they didn’t even editorialize on the story and basically just used the words “community organizer” as clickbait. It works for them because they’ve turned those words into an epithet…something worthy of contempt.
It probably bends their reader’s minds to contemplate someone who could do almost anything for almost any amount of money deciding to focus on getting good paying jobs and some decent outcomes into our poorer communities. These folks don’t understand what Jimmy Carter did with his post-presidency or why he is so widely admired.
This is what happens when you shrink-wrap your own brain.
For a Breitbart piece, it is actually quite tame. The comment section is enough to make one puke, however.
The country will never value the truly good Presidents we have had. Obama could have been and done so much more good for this country, given the opportunity. Sadly, from the first moment and really, even before he was elected, the Republicans were bent on destroying him.
My son was just in Plains, Georgia as a member of Habitat for Humanity. Jimmy Carter is revered there, in his home town, and still teaches Sunday school three times a week. And he’s still very active with Habitat. He was out of town when my son was there, which was a disappointment for him, as he had hoped to meet President Carter in person.
Whatever Obama chooses to do, I suspect it will be for the greater good. Honestly, he deserves time away from politics to regenerate his spirit and then concentrate on his family and think about what he does next.
Carter may be revered in Plains, GA, but in the state of GA, not so much.
I attribute this to his failure to seize the commanding heights of the Georgia economy — say, Coca Cola — in the name of the workers.
More likely his failure to genuflect before the leading corporations in GA and serve on their boards. That’s how nominal Democrats in red-wing country get ahead.
nice one, Davis!
wow! made my day
It’s really kind of funny. It seems like the entire right-wing world runs on clickbait. There have been more than a few occasions where I’ve had to point out to someone that a story or article they are sharing on social media isn’t saying what they think it says. But they have been lured in by the headline, like a moth to a porch light. And my favorites, by far, are those links which claim some event has happened or a statement was made by some individual that “has caused liberal heads to explode” or “has the White House furious”. People just lap that shit up. But I guess when you live in a Fox News bubble, it all makes sense.
Jimmy Carter was on a chat show like David Letterman, and he commented very directly and softly (his hallmark style) “Rosalynn and I are part of Habitat For Humanity. We build houses for struggling families. The houses are not free giveaways. People have to pay back their housing loans with zero interest because the Bible tells us that it is wrong to charge a poor person interest.” You know, I’m not much of a Christian, but when you encounter a man of conviction like that, it leaves a real nice lasting impression of his character. He sets a benchmark for others to achieve, and no smarmy Breitbart/ Reagan Brat/ Cabbage Patch Kids will ever succeed in taking that from someone like Jimmy Carter.
Voting. Making it accessible. Motivating people to vote. If he did that, the rest would take care of itself. Campaign financing by billionaires wouldn’t work because pols would have to be responsive to the pokes. Which means focus on jobs, schools, crime, etc.
Rightwingers use a grading system to form their opinions of others based on skin color, religion, wealth, and political affiliation. WASP, billionaire, Republicans score the highest, all As. Non-Christian, non-white, poor, Democrats score the lowest. (At one time, political affiliation had more gradations ranging from communist to plutocrat Republican, but they don’t have to bother their pea-brains with such fine distinctions anymore. Democrat-DINO-RINO-Republican suffices.)
They upgraded Bill Clinton after he left office because he became super-wealthy. They will downgrade Obama if he chooses not to do the same. (And they will be vigilant in looking for evidence that Obama’s self-identification as a Christian was false.) It doesn’t compute for them that anyone in a position to accumulate gobs and gobs of money would choose a different path. Therefore, something is seriously wrong with such a person.
Obama’s going to get his money no matter what he decides to do.
Well, he’s not going to be “flat broke” like Harry Truman. Former Presidents since then have lived very well. But they do have a choice between comfortable and the level of wealth that puts silver spoons in the mouths of their descendants for a few generations.
How long will Breitbart last after the Obama presidency. Can they really shift to a Clinton presidency?
President Obama has some handicaps getting back into the community organizing world hands-on. Those Secret Service details are a hindrance but necessary thanks to the GOP establishment. Hyde Park, Woodlawn, and some other areas in Chicago have some issues both with what the Obama administration has accomplished and what Mayor Rahm has done.
Setting up businesses in areas that need them is probably the biggest challenge and one that requires a fairly talented team with entree into investors. And that runs into the reasons why those communities have been decapitalized to begin with. If the President has figured and organizational (as opposed to a movemental way) of getting that done, he will have more than enough to do in “retirement”. And the consequences might, like Carter’s, overshadow a Presidency that was essentially legislatively kneecapped by the opposition party and political corruption in his own party.
He could go back into the senate. He could be an important player, there, and do much good. But so far as I know no president has later sought lesser federal office since John Quincy Adams.
Hoping we can dispense with the words “gonna” and “wanna” – I wrote a comment about this yesterday, but it seems to be lost in cyberspace. Anyway, English textbooks around the world evidently teach that “USA English” for “want to” is wanna, going to is “gonna” i.e. they teach that this is considered correct in the USA. [students from Europe who spoke excellent English showed up in my classes thinking this was the usage expected of them] please take your worldwide readership into account and help them see that we are literate persons via “going to”