[tptacek]

Barack Obama was a community organizer working with the Catholic church for like a minute and a half in the mid-1980s.

You didn't live here at the time (also, you were like 2 years old), but you went to NWU and so you're still probably aware of what was happening on the south side in the '80s: the steel industry collapsed, gutting the south side economy. If anything, organizing in the 1980s was distinctively class-based, not race-based. It was a big story. The nuns taught it to us at St. Barnabas.

Meanwhile, Obama's "job" before "politics" was as a well-regarded full-time law teacher at the University of Chicago, a job he held 3x longer than his brief stint as an organizer 20 years prior.

[rayiner]

2008 was a spell ago, but it seems my recollection is correct that Obama was the one who emphasized his experience as a community organizer: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/us/politics/07community.h... (“Mr. Obama’s three-year stretch as a grass-roots organizer has figured prominently, if not profoundly, in his own narrative of his life. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it ‘the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,’ an education that he said was ‘seared into my brain.’ He devoted about one-third of the 442 pages in his memoir, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ to chronicling that Chicago organizing period.”). Certainly, Obama was steeped in racial politics prior to his becoming president. And racial activism has flourished in the aftermath of his presidency—though it’s unclear whether he’s a cause of that or a symptom of it.

I’m not blaming Obama for these things—it’s not clear that politics in the US could be otherwise given the facts of history. But it’s certainly not conducive to good government.

[tptacek]

I don't know what you're trying to say here. Obama's work history is knowable. We don't need to reconstruct it from the gists of his speeches. He was a community organizer in the mid-1980s, working with the Catholic church, when he was 22-24 years old, in the wake of the collapse of the steel industry in southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana --- a series of events that were not, as you would have had it in your previous comments, racialized. But his job immediately prior to his career in politics was adjacent to yours: he worked in the field of law.

[rayiner]

My comment isn’t about Obama’s job history. It’s about what drives politics in the Democratic Party. When he ran for President and wrote his autobiography, community organizing was what he emphasized because that’s what plays to Democrats.

[tptacek]

Respectfully, that's not what you said, and what you said was false.