Jesus Was a Carpenter

Our buddy Steve Cohen is on Hardball to defend/apologize for repeating a joke about Jesus being a community organizer and Pontius Pilate being a Governor.

Chris Matthews retorted that "I thought Jesus was a carpenter?"

Yes, perhaps at one time he was...but eventually, he became a Rabbi. He was a traveling preacher. He's more comparable to Jerry Garcia than he is a community organizer. He had some groupies that liked to follow him around and pick up nuggets of wisdom, and along the way he got some free food, helped some sick people, and made some killer wine out of water.

A better, yet still offensive, example of the community organizer/Governor analogy would be that MLK Jr. was a community organizer, George Wallace was a Governor.

Oh, and it also seemed to be that Cohen was tacitly agreeing with Matthews that "community organizer" is code for black urbanite. I think most people, especially rural and suburban voters, just don't know what the hell a community organizer is, and the Republicans think its funny. And really, that is not exactly their fault, because "community organizer" is such a broad term that just about anyone who gathers more than one person together to get something accomplished is a "community organizer". The head of the PTO or a Cub Scout leader could be defined as such.

Obama was a faith-based community organizer who acted as the secular go between for a variety of predominately African-American churches in Chicago. He did various projects, including voter registration and issues based activism, and it wouldn't be all that inaccurate to call him a political activist.

Here's my take. It's cool that he decided to do this job instead of go to Wall Street or some other high paying job. Was it selfless? No, not entirely, I'm sure there was a long term plan towards his future political ambitions...but it was still somewhat admirable.

Video of Cohen via Kleinheider: