Taking Umbrage

(Once again written without j's edits)

A few months ago, the Slate Political Gabfest had an abbreviated discussion how campaigning nowadays seemed to be two rival camps fighting over who could take umbrage with what the other was saying. And you scored more points by whoever was dealt the bigger slight. Today, Obama, talking about the McCain repackaging themselves as the change campaign, compared it to putting lipstick on pig (it's still a pig). The McCain campaign came out demanding an apology to Gov. Palen, obviously this is a slight on her due to her pit bull/lipstick comment. Well, come to find out, he wasn't discussing Palin at all, and McCain had already said the exact same thing when discussing Hillary's health care plan. Oops.



On a side note, how do other people feel about all the knocks on community organizers that came out during the RNC? During the Palin speech, I sent the following text to t "I feel like the community organizer is important to black communities. Are the shots at it latent racism?" I have since discussed it with my bro e, and read this article here from the conservative point of view. I wasn't totally convinced that it wasn't.

It's seems to me that 'community organizer' as a (job) title, is more of an urban/minority phenomenon. Their purpose is to work with the community to better its people working with people in power whether they be private or public, so that meant working with landlords, businesses, state and local government. In some ways, I agree that (similar to the article) it is similar to a lobbyist, but isn't it inherently more noble to be a lobbyist for the poor than for for large corporations? They also took exception to his taking a job and declaring himself a C.O. rather than the community selecting him. But that was the jobwe was hired to do by (according to Wikipedia) Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland. So churches pooled together to hire someone who the thought would be most effective for better their members/community, nothing inherently wrong with that (I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with lobbyists, until they get disproportional amounts of power/access and actually start writing law).

Finally, I'm not sold on their argument that we see a racial tone to it just because our preconceived notion of the C.O. is that of an African American, that was just the fault of our own experience. They are declaring that the Chicken definitely came before the egg, hopign that we will not delve deaper into the origins of the chicken. I would argue that they had to same prejudice, and by invoking it knew they were pushing some racial buttons. But maybe I'm just taking umbrage...