Expect to hear a lot over the next week about Mitt Romney’s supposed “community leadership”. The Republican presidential candidate’s campaign confirmed that running mate Paul Ryan will be hammering that point as he tries to convince voters that the multi-millionaire businessman is just one of the guys. According to leaked excerpts of stump speeches, Ryan will say, “[Romney is] a man who could easily have contented himself with giving donations to needy causes, but everyone who knows him will tell you that Mitt has always given his time and attention to those around him who are hurting.”
“He not only understands the importance of community – he’s lived it,” Ryan is speculated to declare. “He’s a guy who, at the height of a successful business, took the time to serve as a lay pastor for his church for fourteen years, counseling people in Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods, especially when they lost a job.”
The campaign is well aware they’re walking on unsteady ground here. As CNN notes, the bulk of Romney’s community work was within a rather insular population: his own Mormon church–one whose service-oriented dogma renders Romney more of a loyal follower than an altruistic community leader. Noble as his work may have been, Romney’s community service kept him just as isolated from the community at large as his business experience kept him from huddling with the unwashed masses. President Obama, however, spent three years after college working as a community organizer, some of which was spent registering people, particularly minorities, to vote. And though the groups Obama aided were congregation-based, they were far more inclusive than the LDS and addressed more issues than just spiritual counseling or setting up exclusionary home schooling, two of Romney’s areas of expertise while acting as a lay clergy within his church.
The frantic push to portray Mitt Romney as a man of the people and an exemplar of “community leadership” is also peculiar given all the criticism conservatives have steadily unleashed on President Obama since 2007 for his own professional background as a Chicago-based community organizer. Many on the right have presented his grassroots work as evidence for their own outlandish theories, ranging from Obama’s supposed socialist desire wants to erect a centralized government to his alleged lack of foreign policy savoir-faire. As Liz Cheney said in a 2009 speech at a conference sponsored by the conservative website Red State, “to survive as a nation, our president can’t function as a disinterested international arbitrator. He can’t attempt to stand above America and our enemies. In other words, America needs a commander in chief, not a global community organizer.”
Jim Huffman, a Lewis and Clark University law professor whose failed 2010 senate campaign received a Romney endorsement, offered a concise summation of the right’s argument about the relationship between Obama’s community organizing and the so-called welfare state. “[Obama] speaks of rights and freedom, but usually in the form of freedom from want and rights granted by government to overcome misfortune and deprivation.”
He went on: “But what can we expect of a president whose preparation for office was community organizing and legislating. The role of the community organizer is to lobby government for services and benefits.” Resident conservative crank Rush Limbaugh used “community organizer” as a stand-in for “ineffective” when he criticized President Obama’s foreign policy debate performance: “We saw Obama the community organizer last night; we saw a panicked, I think, Barack Obama.” And it should come as no surprise that Paul Ryan’s congressional website promoted an article that sneered at “the former community organizer now in the White House”. By the way, this “community organizer” smear and its associated connotations helped feed the right’s attacks on the community organizing group ACORN.
Romney himself has used Obama’s community organizing as both an attack and a punchline. Speaking at the religious right’s Values Voter Summit in October of 2011, Romney said, “[Obama is] the conservative movement’s top recruiter. Turns out, he really is a great community organizer. Although, I don’t think we were the community he had in mind.”
There’s a very clear, telling distinction in Ryan’s description of Romney as a “community leader” and the reality of Obama’s community organizing. Businessman Romney’s entire presidential campaign has been built on the myth that he can lead, that he alone has the answers and that his pinstriped expertise is what’s best. It’s a narcissistic platform, one that’s antithetical to the “yes we can” mantra of President Obama. Understanding the power and influence of mass action, Obama has built his political career around incorporating people–those on and more importantly off Wall Street–into the fold. Romney, on the other hand, has built his career by building (and bankrupting) corporations, entities he considers people. One perspective is based on cut-throat individualism, the other on uniting. One “leader” celebrates the elite, the other United States.
