This morning Governor Paterson questioned whether there was a racial element to Sarah Palin’s derision, during her RNC acceptance speech, of Barack Obama’s days as a “community organizer.” From the Daily News:
“I think that there are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign,” Paterson said during the Crain’s Business Forum breakfast. “…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, like, ‘What does this mean?’ It means that an individual — who could have gone to Wall Street and made a lot of money and then run for office because he could buy media time — chose to go back and work in programs in a neighborhood where he thought he could make a difference, and became an elected official based on his involvement right in his own community.”
Go Go Gadget Governor! Have you been reading the writing of our esteemed colleague John Heileman? He made the same point this week about the racial associations that come with a term like “community organizer” for white, Republican voters. But the Lovable Guv should have known what he was getting into — it was mere hours before McCain’s attack machine set its sights on him. “These comments by Governor Patterson [sic] are a sure sign of a flailing campaign that is bordering on desperation,” said campaign spokesman Peter Feldman. “This is a tactic that the Obama Campaign has used before, and which McCain Campaign manager Rick Davis correctly called ‘divisive, shameful, and wrong.’” Isn’t it fun when white McCain allies don’t let black Obama allies talk about race?
Also, wouldn’t it be more fun if Barack Obama were half as feisty as Governor Paterson is?
