I’m glad Paul Berton of the London Free Press highlighted the “shameful mocking of community work” by Giuliani and Palin at the Republican convention. The jokes about community organizing stood out as especially disgraceful in what is becoming an increasingly nauseating campaign… Paul Krugman responded to them by insisting that this “politics of resentment” strategy has been used by Republicans since Nixon, citing Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland (see Ross Douthat’s review, which contains a kind of pre-emptive response to Krugman). The notion of pernicious Republican strategy is treated more directly in The Wrecking Crew, by Thomas Frank. (The two books were recently reviewed together in The New Republic — where you can also read more about Obama’s experience as a community organizer, which is also described in this great New Yorker profile.) It’s astounding that any politician would come out against community work, especially when research done by people like Robert Putnam (with whom Obama has participated in seminars) indicates the importance of community-level “social capital” (see this very relevant blog post by one of Putnam’s Harvard colleagues).
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Shawn Michel de Montaigne
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Shawn Michel de Montaigne
