Personally, I think this is a good example of real community organizers:

In the early '90s, Wasilla was little more than half as big as it is today, and much more loosely confederated. The main issue then, says longtime resident Chas St. George, was public safety. "We needed a police department," he says. "So we set up a group to make it happen." That group -- Watch on Wasilla -- included a handful of the town's most influential figures: St. George; the town's mayor, John Stein; and [Sarah] Palin, who wasn't in elected office yet. Her father-in-law Jim Palin and his wife Faye were also in the group.

The attack on community organizers was as equivalently insulting as 'bitter' but it was done in primetime on national TV, and in an exceedingly mean-spirited way.  For many voters, it was their first introduction to Gov. Palin..

There are more than 6000 people in a city block of Chicago.

I love the notion of a municipal mayor as authoritarian.  Small town mayors primarily are cat herders.

And if you don't think that Rudy and Palin were snide and dismissive of community organizer, then you weren't watching their speeches.  

They deserved everything they got from her.  Clearly, her words were answering their attacks on her.  YOu'd only see dismissal of "community organizers" as a group if you wanted to.

In fact, the program's web site says in its mission a "volunteer driven community impact projects annually around the country. We are unleashing the power of people to solve problems and build communities. We are generating ideas, telling the story and creating new tools for change-making."  

Some community organizers do good work, some don't. I don't see a useful argument as to whether they are more or less qualified to be President than a large-town Mayor (in some places 10000 enables you to get a charter to incorporate to be a city) but the Democrats decided they were going to to try to compare their Presidential candidate to the Republicans Vice Presidential one, and managed to be all snarky and dismissive about it.

Just consider community organizer Chrystal Hutchison from our Florida affiliate. Chrystal grew up as the middle child of two blue-collar parents; her older brother is a Marine and her younger brother is a firefighter. After living in Florida her whole life, she now organizes communities for the Florida Consumer Action Network just a few towns away from where she grew up.

Last fall, Chrystal was working with community members to protect health care for children when she met a little girl named Bethany Wilkerson, whose life had been saved by heart surgery paid for with the government program George Bush wanted to cut. She took Bethany's story to the press, introduced her to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and although she's only 26, Chrystal was a key leader in the successful fight to save the kids' health care program.

Governor Palin just doesn't get that community organizers like Chrystal have led the fight and taken responsibility for fixing the upside-down priorities of right wing dominance in Washington for the last eight years.