The Organizer Man: Lots of Talk, Few Achievements For Obama In Chicago

"The Organizer" by Byron York at National Review gives voters a glimpse into Barack Obama's vaunted "community organizer" experience.  York actually went to Chicago to find out more about Obama's service as an organizer in which he implies that he literally remade Chicago from 1985 to 1988 - the definition of organizer is in italics at the end of this post. 

Among some of York's findings:

• All those steel jobs didn't come back to Chicago as much as Obama and followers fought for them.
• His allegedly small salary wasn't such a pittance for the time as it was for being in training - which many people get nothing for- and ramped up.
• Fellow organizers point to only two ventures that he achieved something at: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area’s oldest housing projects. Those, they say, were his biggest victories.
  
  

  Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that “direct action.”