Guest Post - Baldy in a Battleground - Episode 8

Highly Organized Suburban Women are Dangerous (or The Unfathomable Arrogance of the Obama Campaign)

So the Obama Campaign states that one of its goals is to create community organizations that will last beyond the campaign. The idea is to empower people in their communities and connect them with like-minded people who can work to make a difference in their neighborhoods, no matter the cause.

That's the official idea, and one that I am sure Senator Obama feels very strongly about. As with most ideas, however, the further away this one gets from its originator, the more the execution of this lovely idea goes haywire.

One of the paid campaign staffers said to me, while we were having a discussion about how best to use an existing community organization here in this battleground, that "highly organized suburban women are dangerous."

Dangerous? Like terrorists? I don't understand.

It was explained to me that since they were already organized, they didn't follow the direction of the 22-year-olds on how best to organize themselves.

Right, I said, they're already organized, you see. We don't have to come in and get them organized - they already are. All we have to do is give them tasks, and they will use their existing organization, intelligence, and hard work to git 'er done. They clearly don't need you to tell them how to do it.

Makes sense. Unless you're under 25 and paid by the Obama campaign, and this is your first job out of college, and you have no other job experience, not even from high school, and you seem to have fallen on your head and forgotten that your mother is or was, very likely, a highly organized suburban woman.

But they don't follow the rules, he says.

The rules. Hmmm. The rules of the campaign are to get organized and get Barack Obama elected. Both of these things seem to be important to this particular group of women. It was important to them during the Kerry campaign (for which they are all now snubbed by the Obama campaigners - even though most of the paid Obama staff wasn't old enough to vote in the last election) and they delivered this county to Kerry last election.

So, again I'll ask, what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that highly organized suburban women are dangerous. They have their own ideas about how this should be done, ideas that differ from our ideas.

And who are these women anyway? They're just accomplished career women, who have raised families, whose kids are all in college, who live in the most affluent part of town, who are well connected and pretty much successful in every area of their lives. They can't just decide how to organize themselves without consulting us, The Children's Crusade, first.

But you know they're already organized, right? You know they have done what Senator Obama did right out of college, which is form successful and lasting community organizations, with the best interests of their neighbors at heart?

And so it goes. Round and round. It's a bit like talking to a wall. A brick wall. With acne. Sometimes I just want to smash my head into that brick wall, but then I think about how gross and oily their foreheads are. So instead I just sigh and walk away.

Sigggggghhhhh .......arrgggghghhhhhhhh....siiiiiiiiggghhhh ...arrrggghhhh!