What a community organizer does

The best line to come out of all the post-election analysis may be this from a think piece by Todd Gitlin on the Atlantic.com website. Well, it's not quite his line. It's a quote-within-a-quote:

On November 5, the best post mortem line to appear on the Web was this, on a tennis blog: “Do you think Sarah Palin understands what a community organizer does now?“

Gitlin's reference, of course was to Palin's Sept. 4 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. That's when she said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," to what USA Today called an "an eruption of cheers."

Gitlin's point: Community organizers, among other things, win elections.

For Obama there seems never to have been anything wispy or romantic about community organizing. “Issues, action, power, self-interest,” he wrote of his introduction to the endeavor. “I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.” Obama’s account of his organizing years, taking up fully one-third the pages of Dreams from My Father, is extraordinarily vivid and devoid of self-puffery. He learns the limits of community organizing, but also learns that he’s got the knack. He learns how to size up campaigners and opponents, figure out who they are and what they might become. He dissects the rewards and travails. He works out how to splice together coalitions; psyches out what constituents need and will tolerate; convinces them to leverage their strengths, to work in unison and not at cross purposes; and not least, learns from mistakes. He knows that an organizer is not necessarily a barnburner—not necessarily eloquent or quotable, but first of all a listener. He proves himself modest and trustworthy. He educates. He encourages frequently quarrelsome individuals to align their interests in a common direction. He works with the people he has, not the people he wishes he had. He makes deals. He knows he must deliver results— job training, college prep tutoring, a tenants' rights group—to bind people for the next efforts. If you don’t like his direction, you call him calculating and opportunistic. If you approve, you call him strategic and sage. Either way, Obama the organizer never sold out when he went into politics; he was into politics all along.