"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities."

- Sarah Palin

Joe Klein :

So here is what Palin didn't know: 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.

This is what Palin was mocking. She was making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. She was, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service--the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other--as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.