According to Cohen Palin and Giuliani took Obama’s strength as a community organizer and maligned it (that’s the left’s redefinition of Swift-boating). Cohen makes a valiant effort to demonstrate that being a community organizer is just as noble as being a prisoner of war:

In the biographies of both presidential candidates are episodes of pure wonderment. No man can read about McCain’s time in a Vietnamese prison and not wonder, “Could I do that?” For most of us, the answer — the truthful answer — is no.
For Obama, that episode has nothing to do with physical courage, but of moral commitment. At the age of 22 — a graduate of Columbia University and already making good money as a financial researcher, he walked away to work with the unemployed and alienated in Chicago. Obama, who later went on to Harvard Law School, knew precisely what a valuable commodity he was and how much money he could have made. He turned away from all that — or, at least postponed it, and not because community organizing was the route to political success. (Just name one.) Once again, ask yourself if you would have done it.

Sorry but Cohen’s column just underscores the scarcity of experience at the top of the Democrat ticket. How does does doing this type of job prepare Obama to be president?

Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer’s goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.

And was he even successful at it? Not in helping the steel workers he was hired to organize:

The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; Kellman took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. “The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries,” Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. “Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That’s all he did. And he made big bucks doing it.”
That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn’t be coming back.

So having failed at helping the steel workers he moved on to try helping the community in other ways:

Obama got the ministers involved in several projects, without great success. There was a push to get more city money for South Side parks after the Justice Department told the Chicago Park District it had to spend more on minority neighborhoods. There were plans for after-school programs, and job retraining for adults. But if you ask Obama’s fellow organizers what his most significant accomplishments were, they point to two ventures: 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.

Even with these two successes Obama realized it was not a very effective way to get things done. So, he went into politics.
Now, it was helpful to the community to get a jobs program and to have asbestos removed from a residential building but how does this qualify him for the presidency? How does this skill set make him qualified to be commander in chief? Did he learn anything during that time that prepared him to lead the nation?

Certainly no one should live in an apartment contaminated by asbestos, but Obama did not seem to question, or at least question very strongly, the notion that the people he wanted to organize should be living in Altgeld at all. The place was, after all, one of the nation’s capitals of dysfunction. “Every ten years I would work on the census,” Yvonne Lloyd told me. “I always had Altgeld. When you look at those forms from the census, you had three or four generations in one apartment — the grandmother, the mother, the daughter, and then her baby. It was supposed to be a stepping stone, but you’ve got people that are never going to leave.”
No doubt Obama would agree that that is a bad thing, but when a real attempt to break through that culture of dysfunction — the landmark 1996 welfare-reform bill, now widely accepted as one of the most successful domestic-policy initiatives in a generation — came up, Obama vowed to use all the resources at his disposal to undo it. “I made sure our new welfare system didn’t punish people by kicking them off the rolls,” he said in 1999. Two years earlier, he had declared: “We want to make sure that there is health care, child care, job training, and transportation vouchers — everything that is needed to ensure that those who need it will have support.” Obama applied his considerable organizational skills to perpetuating the old, failed way of doing things.

Obama believes that the government can fix problems facing the nation’s poor and middle class but they haven’t done so in the past and he’s lived with the results of failed governmental policies. You’d think that with three years experience trying to help the people of this little community struggle to get their government to help, he would understand that the government is more of a hindrance than a help. His community organizing days didn’t seem to teach him the one lesson that would be helpful for leading this nation.