[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.