So, James Taranto wrote in the WSJ’s Best of the Web that…

TNR’s John Judis tracked down Jerry Kellman, who in 1985 “hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago’s South Side.” Kellman describes a conversation the two “community organizers” had at a conference on “social justice” in October 1987:

“[Obama] wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income,” Kellman recalls.

But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.” To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. . . .

And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school.

I don’t have any issues with the above — with the exception that Obama believes that politicians and people manipulating politicians can make major changes to poverty. Look, the only thing that can make a major change to poverty is raising someone’s income. How do you do that? Well not by the tried-and-true political method of removing someone else (a productive, tax-paying citizen) and just giving it to the person in poverty. Now all you’ve done is penalized the hard working taxpayer and removed the incentive for the person in poverty to try and raise their income on their own. But that’s what politicians do. What about “community organizers?”

What they do, [Judis] writes, is “unite people of different backgrounds around common goals and use their collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be.”

In other words, community organizers teach people to complain until someone greases their squeeky palms wheels. Instead of complainers, they are taught to be professional complainers.

Excuse me if I’m not impressed by such a resumé.

To help illuminate this rather vague description, Judis also enumerates some of the tasks Obama and his colleagues undertook.

Before Obama’s arrival in Chicago, Kellman and his “partner,” Mike Kruglik, set out “to revive the region’s manufacturing base–and preserve what remained of its steel industry–by working with unions and church groups to pressure companies and the city; but those hopes were quickly dashed.” Apparently the presence of “community organizers” is not a strong selling point for companies making location decisions. Go figure.

Money talks, but bullshit people and they walk. Any “evil corporation” that doesn’t keep it’s eye on the bottom line will soon drown in red ink. Small wonder that they met with little success. Maybe if they’d offered some low-interest financing and tax breaks to locate (or remain located) in the area, some of those manufacturing jobs would have hung around. Sounds like they were pressuring the city for the wrong things.

Obama set his sights lower, but still missed the mark. He “got community members to demand a job center that would provide job referrals, but there were few jobs to distribute.”

Well. Duh.

Then “he tried to create what he called a ‘second-level consumer economy’ . . . consisting of shops, restaurants, and theaters. This, too, went nowhere.”

Small wonder. Exactly where were the customers supposed to come from? More importantly, where was their money supposed to come from, if there weren’t any jobs?

These efforts at economic development having failed, Obama “began to focus on providing social services for Altgeld Gardens,” a government-owned and -operated apartment complex:

“We didn’t yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools,” [Obama] wrote. “But what we could do was begin to improve basic services at Altgeld–get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired.” Obama helped the residents wage a successful campaign to get the Chicago Housing Authority to promise to remove asbestos from the units; but, after an initial burst of activity, the city failed to keep its promise. (As of last year, some residences still had not been cleared of asbestos.)

Wow, they’re even worse than the Houston Housing and Community Development Department!

It is both funny and scary that one of America’s major political parties would offer this record of sheer futility as its nominee’s chief qualification to be president of the United States. Even more striking, though, is how alien the world in which Obama operated was by comparison with the world in which normal Americans live.

Reader, when your toilet breaks, do you wait around for some Ivy League hotshot to show up and organize a meeting so that you can use your collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be?

Or do you call a plumber?

As a “community organizer,” Obama toiled within a subculture of such abject dependency that even home repairs were “social services,” provided by government (or, in Obama’s Chicago, not provided). It was an utterly bizarre intersection between the cultural elite and the underclass. By Judis’s account, Obama’s Columbia degree was useless. He would have been more helpful if he’d gone to vocational school instead.

Recruiting some people with plumbing skills to do the work and some sponsors to donate the needed materials (ala’ Habitat for Humanity) might have accomplished more, but to be fair, the property was owned and operated by a government agency, so major upkeep was its responsibility. Still, this is an indictment of the politicians that create these programs and the bureaucracy that runs them; creating huge, expensive monuments to their “caring” (built with our tax money), and then failing to budget enough for oversight, maintenance, and repair. This speaks poorly for the pols, but I’m sure the companies responsible for building these monuments to futility made out well.

Not that certain sort-of private sector landlords do much better without a little embarrassment to goad them.

In closing, let me add this stunning quote from one of the Altgeld residents:

“Ain’t nothing gonna change. . . . We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can.”

There is a person who “gets it,” despite the culture of dependency that surrounds them. Don’t wait on the government, for the government doesn’t care and won’t really change anything. If you desire change, do for yourself.