In a basement conference room at the Codman Square Health Center yesterday morning, Lew Finfer did what he's been doing for almost four decades: community organizing. This time that meant leading a meeting of 20 representatives of grass-roots and nonprofit organizations from Dorchester and Mattapan to mobilize city residents against a ballot question that would abolish the state's personal income tax.

Finfer's profession took center stage at the Republican convention in St. Paul this week when Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani mocked Democrat Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Chicago. "Community organizer," Guiliani shrugged. "What?" Palin likened her former job as mayor of an Anchorage suburb to being "sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

With that, Palin and Giuliani ridiculed a tradition whose roots in this country reach back to the Boston Tea Party and organizers' successful efforts to persuade colonists to boycott tea to protest taxation without representation. ACORN, a nationwide network of community organizations, issued a statement condemning the GOP's "condescending remarks." Anti-Palin T-shirts emblazoned with "Jesus was a community organizer; Pontius Pilate was a governor" appeared for sale online almost immediately.

Community organizers in Boston and beyond have taken offense at the barbs from St. Paul.

"You get angry that somebody is disrespectful of what you've done all your life," said Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Community Action Network. "Community organizing is what the civil rights movement was. The key people were community organizers who worked for Martin Luther King Jr. and with him. Sarah Palin held up that her husband was a union member. Unions have organizers."

"Without organizers things don't happen," said Marvin Martin, 54, director of Dorchester's Greater Four Corners Action Coalition. "Ideas often come from the community. People who organize bring ideas to the legislators and work with them to pass it. If they don't understand that, I'm concerned with how they make decisions."

Marshall Ganz, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sees an irony in Palin's remark. "The very politics that Palin and McCain have rooted their appeal in are the result of a social movement on the right, the conservative movement, which was organized by organizers, too," he said.

For Finfer, 57, the comments conjured memories. In 1991 a former intern recommended that Finfer recruit a Harvard Law School classmate who had been a community organizer in Chicago. The classmate's name was Barack Obama. The young law student came for an interview.

"He said, 'I learned a lot about organizing, but I'm interested in going back to Chicago and getting into politics,' " Finfer said. "I joke that I'm glad that I wasn't successful."