DETROIT — The elementary school moms didn't ask a lot of questions about this man Bill. They were too eager to tell him -- to tell anybody -- about the loose and snarling pit bulls, the gun-toting gangsters, and the dogcatchers and police who always seemed to come too late.
The principal, Helena Lazo, had introduced him simply: "Bill nos va a ayudar." Bill is going to help us.
When Bill O'Brien faced the five women at Roberto Clemente Learning Academy, he encouraged them to enumerate the problems plaguing their Southwest Detroit neighborhood. He propped an elbow on a table and listened.
When they had finished, he asked, with an impish grin: "So what else do kids do after school around here, besides shoot guns and let dogs loose on you?"
O'Brien, 60, stands out in this tough industrial neighborhood of working-class blacks, Appalachian whites and Latino immigrants. He is balding and tall, with the pinkish hue of an Irishman who has spent too much time in the sun. This morning, his open-collared dress shirt was tucked into a pair of gray slacks. He looked like a priest, perhaps, or a kindly English teacher.
He has, in fact, been both of those things, but for the last 30 years O'Brien has mostly been a professional community organizer. As job titles go, he is aware it is a nebulous one: For years, he said, he struggled to explain his work to his own mother.
These days, however, it isn't just his mother who is asking. Because Barack Obama spent a few years after college as a community organizer, the nation is weighing whether this little-understood job is a suitable prelude to the presidency.
Obama, the Democratic nominee, holds up his three years of organizing on Chicago's South Side, along with his stints in the U.S. Senate and Illinois Legislature, as proof of his commitment to public service.
Republicans have taken a harsher view: At the GOP convention this month, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani drew a big laugh by simply uttering the phrase "community organizer" -- then adding, after a stand-up comedian's pause, "What?"
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee and former mayor of Wasilla, said that a small-town mayor is "sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."
Some liberals contended that the attacks carried racial undertones because Obama, like many other community organizers, worked largely with poor minorities.
