So let’s say we give way to our gullible side and take Bob Johnson at his word -- that he didn’t mean anything when he hinted to a South Carolina crowd this past Sunday that maybe Barack Obama’s neighborhood involvement was the kind in which he followed his nose and not his heart.

Either way, it still smells like an insult -- tinged with whiffs of elitism.

Said the Black Entertainment Television founder: “To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign (he earlier criticized it for trying to distort Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Martin Luther King Jr.) would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues -- when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book -- when they have been involved."

Of course, when people began denouncing Johnson’s comments as a sarcastic reference to Obama’s past drug use that he acknowledges in his memoir, “Dreams for My Father,” and demanding that the Clintons distance themselves from him, Johnson flipped that script faster than one of the video vixens on his former network flips her hair weave. He said that his comments were a reference to Obama’s past as a community organizer and nothing else.

But even if one were to let Johnson go with that explanation, the insult remains.

It remains because what it implies is that for one to lead the people of the United States, one should never sully himself with actually working alongside those who are struggling to survive in it. It implies that community involvement is all about frivolity, not following a passion that can shape one’s worldview.

The good thing, though, is that more people -- especially black people -- are, unlike out-of-touch billionaire Johnson, bound to see Obama’s “doing something in the neighborhood” as a plus, rather than a minus.

And there are a lot of plusses there.

In 1985, according to The Nation magazine, Obama, after graduating with a degree in political science from Columbia University in New York City, became an organizer for the Developing Communities Project to help black people in Chicago’s far south side whose lives had been upended because of the steel mill closings. He was just 24 then, made $13,000 a year, and trolled around the area in a second-hand Honda Civic getting congregations involved in transforming their neighborhoods.

“Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks,” Obama wrote in 1990 in Illinois Issues, a publication out of Springfield, Ill. “Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.

“’Listen, Obama,’” she began. “’You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?’

“I nodded.

“’I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.’

“Why's that?

“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you." She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.

“I've thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I've organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago's far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven't been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.”

That dialogue speaks volumes about Obama. It probably explains a lot about his appeal; as someone who chooses not to use his educational experience and privilege to look down on others, but to lift them up.

And while I certainly won’t deny the fact that the Clintons have been a friend to the civil rights struggle by dint of being much older than Obama and spending most of their lives being in a legislative position to foster such progress, the point is that except for the drug experimentation, Obama wasn’t exactly following the Paris Hilton model of young adulthood. Based on what I’ve read, he was consumed not just with living his own life, but learning about the lives of others.

In a country in which so many politicians are out of touch with struggling black folks, it’s a relief to know at least one candidate spent time working among them. The neighborhoods are, after all, the places where candidates ought to build the trust and to see the people; to build the empathy needed to get people to see government as being a part of them and not a part of some machine.

Obama’s community involvement shouldn’t be knocked. It should be celebrated. And if he manages to become president I hope that he, unlike Johnson, won’t let success make him forget the faces he saw during his time in the ‘hood.