The jibes at Barack Obama’s stint as a community organizer taken by Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani last night continue to rankle Democrats, both in the Obama campaign and in various allied groups. In a distinct contrast to the way he has cited his community-organizing experience at hundreds of campaign appearances, this afternoon Obama seemed to downplay his experience in a talk with reporters, saying it was a long time ago:

[Republicans] haven’t talked about the fact that I was a civil rights lawyer. They haven’t talked about the fact that I taught constitutional law. They haven’t talked about my work in the state legislature or the United States Senate. They’re talking about the three years of work that I did right out of college, as if I’m making the leap from 2 or 3 years out of college into the presidency.

Perhaps to set a good example for Republicans, Obama will now refer to Palin as the governor of Alaska, rather than a former small-town mayor. Anyway, a few minutes ago, I got a statement from Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who I’ve covered many times in his role as a mainstay of liberal efforts to stop Bush judicial nominees:

The United States has had a long and proud history of contributions made by community organizers, from Benjamin Franklin who organized the first volunteer fire department in this country to Clara Barton, who organized assistance for soldiers during the Civil War, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped our great nation correct a historic wrong…

And then there’s Time’s Joe Klein, who writes:

Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed–job training, help with housing and so forth–from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work–the sort of mission Jesus preached…

My sense is that Republicans weren’t mocking community organizing itself as much as Obama’s constant claims that it is one of his qualifications to run the executive branch. There are, after all, lots of good things you can do that do not qualify you to be commander-in-chief. And in any event, Obama’s vision of “the Lord’s work” was always fundamentally political. From his memoir, Dreams From My Father:

When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

After all this, it will be interesting to see if the Obama campaign continues to stress his past as a community organizer as prominently as it has to this point.