It appears the Obama campaign is still smarting from the shots Sarah Palin and others took at the idea that Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Chicago is one of his prime qualifications to be president. (Prime? For months Obama certainly listed it high among his qualifications.) After Palin’s speech, a lot of people were asking just what Obama did when he was an organizer. As it happens, I went to Chicago and wrote an NR cover story in June on that very question. The article was unfortunately never available on the web — but now, happily, it is up on the homepage. From its conclusion:

We look to formative experiences to help us understand presidential candidates. Visit an aircraft carrier in wartime and you’ll learn something about John McCain. Pilots fly off the deck, and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t. One day, McCain didn’t, and began the time as a prisoner of war that both revealed his character and launched his political career. No matter what he has done since, the U.S. Navy is the culture that made McCain, with his heavy emphasis on duty, honor, and country.
Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?
The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a “Camp Obama” program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama’s opponents admit is a very impressive operation.
But Obama’s time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for.
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 [the Chicago housing project Altgeld Gardens] 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.