A CBS News outlet in Albany reports that NY Governor David Paterson in essence accused Republicans of making racist overtures in “code”:

"I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a 'community organizer.' They kept saying it, they kept laughing," he said.

Wow, that’s the end for Sen. Obama’s campaign, when all the white trash out there starts listening to Republicans and wake up to discover Obama’s black.

Gov. Paterson went on to clarify:

"I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people's progress with a subtle reference to their race," he said.

"At this point, Americans wouldn't tolerate a racial appeal. What I'm saying is that there are sneaky ways to try to hurt someone," he said.

Geez, Governor. You sound just like the pathetically ingratiating person of pallor trying to talk jive, smack, or gangsta’.

Take it from a Conservative Republican. “Community Organizer” never has been, isn’t, and never will be “code for black.” But you’re right, it is code. Anyone with a fair to middling experience with Marxism or liberal Academia knows that Community Organizing is what Unionists, Communalists, Activists, and demagogic populists do.

I’ll give you another hint. Lenin and Mao were Community Organizers. Castro was a Community Organizer. Venezuela’s increasingly strong-armed dictator Chavez was a Community Organizer, as was Ho Chi Minh. So was Saul Alinsky, a source of some of Sen. Obama’s inspiration (and most of Sen. Clinton’s).

Community Organizers organize and (temporarily) empower communities -- that’s the source of their power. They accomplish what they seek when they have successfully motivated and energized their targeted mass audience. Their stated ends aren’t even important, for in harnessing the means, the collective will of the community, they achieve another end that consumes: their own power and influence. That personal end will always justify their means, and Obama is no different, as his long-abiding Presidential ambitions attest.

Community Organizers are by and large Demagogues. To be successful in their task, they need to enflame, anger, manipulate and motivate communities to action. They tend to exaggerate, and their rhetoric is heavy on hyperbole. They rouse rabbles. They generate mass hysteria, if they are successful. They’re all about the masses, washed or unwashed.

Here’s how Conservatives view the whole concept of the need to Organize. Community Organizers are the Conservative equivalent in all major respects to the Communists, Socialists, and Marxists whose reason for living is organizing communities.

Sure, Union Organizers organize working communities, and partisan political operatives like the infamous ACORN organize voter communities for electoral purposes. But these represent very temporary organizations. Once constructed, their architects are “out of a job,” and on to the next non-union shop or electoral project. Not so the professional Community Organizer.

Presidential Candidate Obama seemingly appeared out of nowhere after the briefest of Senate and state legislative careers, and touted his Community Organizing as a major component of his leadership experience. He served his Community, even if his accomplishments were transitory and their importance tangential to his political ambitions.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska appeared out of nowhere: a woman of real, personal accomplishment who didn’t need to mobilize a community to reach and wield power. And yet, from the moment of Sen. McCain’s announcement of Palin as his Vice Presidential nominee, Obama spokespeople and Obama himself ridiculed her “small town mayor-ship and ignored her Gubernatorial experience.

So Vice Presidential Candidate Palin had the pluck and combativeness to observe that, as the mayor of a small town in one of America’s last frontiers, yes, a mayor was kind of like a Community Organizer, except for having actual responsibilities.

That’s still a really funny line. Here’s why, Gov. Paterson, and it has nothing to do with racism.

Contrary to the idealistic but unfettered by gritty reality Community Organizer, a Mayor (or any other Executive) has specific, distinct responsibilities, which when not satisfied or fulfilled, can generate an awful lot of hell to pay. Community Organizers can keep finding communities (real or virtual, like classes of aggrieved persons) to organize, but a Mayor or Governor has to run one, with all that that entails.

Progressives (Marxist-inspired or otherwise) are really big on organizing communities, getting people to vote “in accordance with their economic interests.” Which itself is code word for “voting for their Class.” Yet, they do not officially or formally represent the communities they manipulate, and overwhelmingly take advantage of those they mobilize as stepping stones for their own personal enrichment or advancement. Sadly, much of what Community Organizers “accomplish” either turns out to be a whole lot less than advertised, evaporates after the Organizer moves on (or steps up), or engenders a whole new level of exploitation and corruption.

That’s why the small-d democratic model creates political constructs in which an individual is elected for a specific term, with a specific set of responsibilities, with a very real accounting at the end if he or she (or their party) seeks re-election. As opposed to Alinsky’s theories of Community Organizing, or similar Manifestos, which all too often in the real world create a tyranny imposed by the masses, but run by a chosen few.

Absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, however much that power started out “of the people.”

That’s just some of why Republicans laughed so heartily with Gov. Palin, when she contrasted her executive experience with a boastful, self-proclaimed Community Organizer.

(Via Drudge Report)

Etcetera

For added insight into Obama’s time as a Community Organizer in Chicago, the ideas of Alinsky, and other nuances of progressive history in Chicago, see John Judis’s fascinating history in the The New Republic.

(Via Online Journal)