Barrel Strength

It seems Palin’s speech was not well received in some segments of the population.  Here is some sample feedback.

Irene Tung: “Everyone I have talked to is absolutely appalled.  It is both naive and offensive.”

Nova Strachan: “They caused a lot of rage in me.  It sounds like they are trying to belittle something that has a lot of meaning.”

Who are these people?  Why they are Community Organizers who took offense to her comments.  The above article ends with a comment by Theo Moore the lead organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, who says “Sometimes I have trouble explaining it to my own mother what I do.”

Update: Obama summarizes his experience as a Community Organizer which is suppose to one of the defining moments of his life as well as providing him with executive experience.

In late October 1987, Barack Obama and Jerry Kellman took a weekend off from their jobs as community organizers in Chicago and traveled to a conference on social justice and the black church at Harvard….Obama told Kellman that he feared ending up destitute and unhappy like his dad. “He wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income,” Kellman recalls.  But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.”  To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. Personally, he might end up like his father; politically, he would fail to improve the lot of those he was trying to help.

Yet, two decades later, to hear Obama the presidential candidate tell it, those years in Chicago as a community organizer shaped the person–and the politician–he has become. Campaigning in Iowa last year, he declared that community organizing was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.” In a video this spring, Obama stated that community organizing is “something I carry with me when I think about politics today–obviously at a different level and in a different place, but the same principles still apply.” “Barack is not a politician first and foremost,” Michelle Obama has said. “He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.”

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said in a 20-minute speech on live television, “I truly know who I am. I truly know where I come from. In Detroit I know who I am. And I know because of that, there’s another day for me, I want to tell you, Detroit, that you done set me up for a comeback.”

This is a nice combination of “I want to tell you,” by OJ Simpson and “Bitch set me up” by Marion Barry.   Kwame has made a synthesis that all oppressed black celebrities will immediately understand.