“There are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign,” “The Republican party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative,” “But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican convention. A ‘community organizer,’ they kept saying it, they kept laughing, like what does this mean?

Paterson added:

“It means that an individual who could have gone to Wall Street and made a lot of money, and then run for office because he could buy media time, chose to go back and work in programs in a neighborhood where he thought he could make a difference and became an elected official based on his involvement right in his own community.”

At the Republican National Convention, Palin said:

“Since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,”