Obama didn't work to help the poor - he gave up three years of his life to help the middle class!

"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."

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/what_a_community_organizer_doe.html

I'm not saying that Obama never helped the poor or that he won't be helping the poor once elected. But before we can lift the poor into the middle class, we have to ensure that a middle class exists!

Here's the thing: the assumption has always been that if you work hard, do the right things, you'll make it to the middle class. When I hear the phrase "working with the poor", the image that comes to mind is getting immediate help for people (food bank, medical clinics)combined with teaching them the skills they need to get a leg up. It might be literacy training, it might be teaching people to show up for work every day, it might be drug re-hab.

The people that Obama worked with weren't poor. Working in a steel mill back meant that you had a solid piece of the middle class: a decent house, college for the kids, good health care, good pension, an occasional trip to Florida, maybe a boat to take out on Lake Michigan if you pulled a lot of overtime. That's what went away when the steel mills closed, as devastating as any hurricane for the people involved. Obama was working to help people who did all the right things; got up and went to work, made sure the kids went to school, took care of their homes and neighborhoods. I think he entered politics when he saw that he couldn't solve protect the middle class working at the community organizer level, that the entire system was flawed and needed to change.

A lot of middle class people think that "it'll never happen to me". They think of "the poor" as other people. It's not true. I've seen people in my own family slip off the ladder. I think this election may be our last chance to preserve a middle class in this country.

maybe you mean he didn't ONLY work to help the poor, etc, etc

what difference it makes is above my pay grade though

what I think was a lot of coded talk that went on at the RNC.

I think the message of the Republicans is that the poor are "those people" and that they also believe that "those people" are poor because "they don't work hard like us". Obama wasn't working for "those people", he was working for people like us who were hit by a man made disaster and ignored by their government. When Sarah and Walnuts denigrate "community organizer", they are labeling Obama as one of those soft-hearted woo-woos that's always trying to spread liberal guilt and "spend your hard-earned money on people who are too lazy to work". If the Republicans are successful as depicting Obama as working for "those people" and living in a Hyde Park mansion, we're in trouble. We have to make people understand that he's working for us!

What do you think happens to you when you lose all means of income? Seriously, it doesn't take long at all to fall in the abyss.

as poor. I think 95% of the people in this country would call themselves middle class regardless of whether they're at the poverty line or making $500,000 a year.