Thoughts on a Bernie Sanders Run

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via Black Commentator

To the Point

I first met Bernie Sanders in the late 1980s. He was contemplating a run for Congress and had chosen to take time to study and teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We went out to lunch one afternoon.

Sanders was already a legend. An avowed socialist who had served as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he struck me as someone who was quite thoughtful and prepared to listen to views other than his own. We chatted about a matter that has preoccupied me for much of the last thirty years: How to build a national electoral project that is truly progressive and also focused on the fight for power.

Sanders went on to win election to Congress and, ultimately, the U.S. Senate. He has been outspoken on virtually every issue that matters to working people and is unapologetic in his critique of capitalism. At the same time, he works to build unity among progressives rather than simply staking out his claim and expecting people to rally to his flag.

I don’t live in Vermont, but without question, Bernie Sanders is my Senator.

For the last few months, the word on the street has been that Sanders is contemplating a run for the Presidency. Sanders has hinted at the possibility but has not confirmed or denied that he may take the plunge.

Excitement around a possible Sanders run is palpable. After more than one term of the complicated, neoliberal Presidency of Barack Obama—combined with the relentless assaults by the political right on all that for more than sixty years appeared sacred—there is a deep and clear desire among many for a different direction.

Yet a Sanders run brings its own complications.

One issue is whether Sanders should run as a Democrat or as an independent.

There are many progressives and leftists who will automatically suggest, out of disgust with the Democrats, that Sanders should make a “pure” run as an independent. Yet this raises an even more fundamental question: Why should Sanders run at all?

It only makes sense to run for the Presidency of the United States—as a progressive or leftist—if the person is both running to win and running as part of a broader electoral project. A run just to “show the colors” or make a statement is a waste of time. Running for President is both too expensive and time-consuming for that.

On the other hand, if the candidate has a real mass base, is building a broad progressive front around a clear, transformational program, and sees the candidacy as one step in a multitiered process, then it might be worth going for it.

But in suggesting this, I do so with qualifiers. Too many candidates who suggested that they were interested in building a grassroots movement that would transcend their campaigns only to see such candidates close up shop afterwards. A Sanders run as part of a longer-term effort at movement-building and energizing a progressive front only makes sense if there is a demonstrable commitment by the candidate to do the right thing after the election.

Let’s take an example of what not to do. After Obama’s successful 2008 run, there were many people who assumed he was going to keep his campaign organization together as a sort of independent force. But Obama moved it into the Democratic Party instead.

Then there was the choice that Jesse Jackson made in March 1989 when, following the 1988 elections, he completely reorganized the National Rainbow Coalition into an organization that he totally controlled rather than the mass democratic organization that many of its members had thought that they were building.

If a run makes sense, and I think Sanders might be the candidate who would turn his campaign into something lasting, the question is how to do it. I believe that Sanders needs to make a strategic decision to run within the Democratic primary system for the nomination. Despite the discontent with the electoral system among so many people in the United States of America, it is not likely that an independent candidacy at this moment can win. Should the Republican Party fracture, which is a real possibility over the next few years, all bets would be off. But as long as the Republicans stand firm as a hard, rightwing party, it is unlikely that at the national level an independent candidacy can win.

Quite explicitly, I am suggesting that winning must be a major objective of the campaign. The campaign needs to be organized in such a way that it aims to build an electoral coalition that is interested in gaining power, is committed to winning, and has a plan for governing.

Contrary to the contention of some of my friends on the left, there is no contradiction between running as a socialist and running as a Democrat—with the real intention of taking office. Former Massachusetts state representative and two-time mayoral candidate Mel King was an independent socialist, yet ran for state office as a Democrat. Former Congressman Ron Dellums of California was also a socialist and a Democrat. Sanders could run as a Democrat yet be very clear and open about his socialist politics. Such a candidacy would send a bolt of lightning throughout the Democratic Party and change the discourse within it. An independent candidacy would not have anywhere near that impact.

A Sanders candidacy would need to also take on race. We live in a moment that is reminiscent of the period of the Southern coups in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when white supremacists usurped the franchise from African Americans and poor whites, and when Chicanos (in the Southwest) were treated to de facto segregation and voter exclusion. The political right, fearing the future, is moving to exclude millions of voters and ensure the ongoing supremacy of a quite xenophobic Tea Party-esque Republican Party. This is being orchestrated through the brilliant usage of racial symbols, all at a time when people of color have been suffering from the worst effects of the transformation of U.S. capitalism.

For Sanders to run and to make a real difference, he will need to tap into the African American, Latino, and Asian electorate and inspire them with a vision. This has to be far more than a “rising tide lifts all boats,” but must acknowledge race and class as integrally connected. Sanders would need to speak out on the anti-immigrant hysteria of our times, as well as address the manner in which so many workers, particularly workers of color, are being rendered redundant in today’s economy.

He would also need to be a candidate who denounces the misogyny that has pervaded U.S. politics. This is more than the question of abortion. It really goes to women’s control over their own bodies, expectations of women in today’s economy, who is to blame—and not to blame—for the declining living standard of male workers, and basic issues of equality.

I have no worry that Sanders will speak out on behalf of workers. Yet doing so will be insufficient for a campaign to gain traction. Sanders would need to be a spokesperson for a different path, one that addresses not only the issues mentioned above, but also a non-imperial foreign policy and an environmental policy that brings us back from the cliff of climate change. His voice would need to be the voice of the future—the voice of the progressive bloc that seems to be assembling to prevent a dystopian future.

A primary challenge is worth it, even if he just pushes the victor to the left.

The last thing we need is another symbolic candidacy that, while touching our hearts and minds, brings us no closer to clobbering the political right and winning power for the dispossessed and the disengaged.

It can be done.

This commentary originally appeared in The Progressive

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” - And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He is also the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Other Bill Fletcher, Jr. writing can be found at billfletcherjr.com.

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What to Do in November, and Beyond

The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama's Record … Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him

The 2012 election will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Carl Davidson
Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org

August 9, 2012 - Let’s cut to the chase. The November 2012 elections will be unlike anything that any of us can remember.  It is not just that this will be a close election.  It is also not just that the direction of Congress hangs in the balance.  Rather, this will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

Unfortunately what too few leftists and progressives have been prepared to accept is that the polarization is to a great extent centered on a revenge-seeking white supremacy; on race and the racial implications of the moves to the right in the US political system. It is also focused on a re-subjugation of women, harsh burdens on youth and the elderly, increased war dangers, and reaction all along the line for labor and the working class. No one on the left with any good sense should remain indifferent or stand idly by in the critical need to defeat Republicans this year.

U.S. Presidential elections are not what progressives want them to be.

A large segment of what we will call the ‘progressive forces’ in US politics approach US elections generally, and Presidential elections in particular, as if: (1) we have more power on the ground than we actually possess, and (2) the elections are about expressing our political outrage at the system. Both get us off on the wrong foot.

The US electoral system is among the most undemocratic on the planet.  Constructed in a manner so as to guarantee an ongoing dominance of a two party duopoly, the US electoral universe largely aims at reducing so-called legitimate discussion to certain restricted parameters acceptable to the ruling circles of the country. Almost all progressive measures, such as Medicare for All or Full Employment, are simply declared ‘off the table.’ In that sense there is no surprise that the Democratic and Republican parties are both parties of the ruling circles, even though they are quite distinct within that sphere.

The nature of the US electoral system--and specifically the ballot restrictions and ‘winner-take-all’ rules within it--encourages or pressures various class fractions and demographic constituency groups to establish elite-dominated electoral coalitions.  The Democratic and Republican parties are, in effect, electoral coalitions or party-blocs of this sort, unrecognizable in most of the known universe as political parties united around a program and a degree of discipline to be accountable to it. We may want and fight for another kind of system, but it would be foolish to develop strategy and tactics not based on the one we actually have.

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Politics as Strategy, and as Self-Expression

Bill Fletcher: My Frustration with the

Left when It Comes to Electoral Politics

By Bill Fletcher
Progressive America Rising via Organizing Upgrade

I was recently asked to participate on a panel regarding the Left and electoral politics. I declined.  For many people this may seem strange since I have been a very strong proponent of the Left looking at electoral politics strategically.  Well, that is all true but I have encountered a problem and maybe you can help me resolve it.

Most Left “debates” on electoral politics take a very predictable route.  It looks something like this:

Electoral politics will not bring about socialism and freedom. The Democrats have consistently sold us out. They are the party of the rich. The Republicans and the Democrats are two wings of the same evil bird of prey. We need an alternative. Therefore, either:

Abstain from electoral politics and wait till the masses, in their millions rise up against capitalism, or… Create a pure, anti-corporate (if not anti-capitalist) third party right now and start running in elections even if we do not have a snow-ball’s chance in hell of winning.

What I have found striking about this line of thought, and the so-called debates that unfold around it, is that they are actually un-political and lack any sort of concrete analysis.

Let’s be clear so that we do not have a needless exchange.  Electoral politics under democratic capitalism will not result in our freedom.  Second, the Democrats are not the party of the working class.  So, now that we have that out of the way, what do we do?

Electoral politics is a field of struggle.  It is an arena.  On that arena, however, we on the Left can do two things: participate in the struggle for popular power and raise issues that have the possibility of gaining greater attention.  Much of the Left focuses on the latter and ignores the former.  Many who focus on the struggle for power, however, abdicate being Left altogether.  Therein exists the challenge.

Given the undemocratic nature of the US electoral system, a concrete analysis of the USA (rather than other countries) means that we have to grapple with what it means that in most elections independent, third party candidacies fail and are viewed as spoilers.  There are certainly historical exceptions, but those exceptions prove the general rule.  This means that a concrete examination of US electoral politics must focus on the notion that a third party movement on the Left will more than likely result from an “insurrection” within the Democratic Party and a major section of its base (with the character of such an “insurrection” being more of a united front rather than a pure, Left challenge).  This is to be counterposed with the idea that such a party arises out of nothing, or to put it in its best case, out of generalized popular discontent.

So, if we on the Left really want to discuss electoral politics we must examine a concrete question: what do we do in the USA given the nature of the electoral system? If your answer is to simply raise the red flag of radicalism to see who salutes, with all due respect, you are not serious about politics; you are stuck in the world of pure ideology.

The larger challenge for the Left in electoral politics is conducting the fight, in and through our mass organizations, for the recognition of the need for an independent, progressive program that represents the interests of the downtrodden and the dispossessed.  We should not start with organization in the abstract, but with program.  We then need to figure out under what conditions we run people within Democratic Party primaries and under what circumstances we run independently.  Always, I should add, recognizing that this is a fight within the context of democratic capitalism for structural reforms, thereby laying the basis for the longer-term struggle for socialism...

…That is, if we are interested in the fight for power rather than just being ‘correct.’ But, alas, it will mean that we will need to get a bit untidy in the alliances we will need to build.

Show me a ‘purist’ revolution and I will show you a bridge that you can buy for almost nothing.

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OWS: Demanding Another World

Occupy Wall Street is A Seed,

an Expression of What We Need

By Carole Travis
Progressive America Rising

I have been to Liberty Plaza (Zucotti Park, NYC) every day for almost a week now.  Immediately I loved it.  An early favorite sign read: For the first time in my life, I feel at home. 

I have never seen anything like this.  I am almost 70; I have organized all kinds of things and been to all kinds of places.  I was on the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in VietNam (MOBE) staff in NY for about a year, the Demonstration staff for the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Conspiracy Trial staff, President of a United Auto Worker General Motors local (UAW Local 719, we built locomotives) and then was picked up by SEIU and worked for them 13 years in various capacities. I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was in Haight Ashbury for a few moments here and there.  Occupy Wall Street is unique. 

Many love it and others are perplexed.  What are the demands? It's like a be-in, no politics no direction. I got bored there, there was nothing to do.  How long can it last? …and so forth.  Again, as I said, me, I loved it, instantly.  But it took time to digest the meaning of this vibrant community Occupy Wall Street.

Wednesday, the day of the 'big march', I marched from Liberty Plaza to Foley Square and back.  At Foley Square was not possible to tell how many people were there.  It is a spread out segmented space.  I couldn't see where the speakers were and could not hear them in any of the places I was able to get to.  I walked around quite a bit. Packed crowds were in every corner stretching back and winding around. The front of the place I am sure had no idea how many thousands of us were in the various back places.  I don't like over estimates of crowds, because then you never know what you represent or when things are getting bigger.  But there was no less than 15,000 people.  Two guys from NY who I ran into over and over in the course of the day thought there were 50,000 people there, probably not, maybe 30,000?

That day was a 'labor day' and each day some labor people visit the plaza; hundreds of people every day visit, some days, thousands.  But, obviously, the people who live there have no jobs.  In coming there and living there, they have created a community.  There are rules, food (donated, much by unions), music, a library, a comfort station with donated clothes and blankets.  Somebody donates laundry services.  Some are college educated, some aren't.  It is racially diverse and people are mostly at least 20, some quite a bit older.  A few who I noticed regularly were physically disabled.  Mostly white people go to the morning organization meetings. 

Friday night there was a passionate speech by 2 visiting Greeks with many political insights. Greece is, after all, on the verge of General Strike, France too.  They spoke to a small crowd at the southeast corner of the park, through, of course, the peoples mike.  While I was listening, suddenly I understood my sense of this place, I too then spoke, my words sprang from my bones, I don't remember what I actually said.  People picked up my last words as a chant for a few rounds.  Later 2 people, at different times, found me, came up to me and said they loved what I said.  I don't remember what I said, but I do, finally, know what I think about as a result of Occupy Wall Street.  It is not what they are saying, but what they are doing that strikes chords of hope in me. 

They are doing what we all must do, live a different way, a way that is not part of the system and situations we find ourselves, those ways are killing us and the planet.  In having no demands, in some way they embody all demands, a different world. 

The people who are there did not stop participating because they chose to, they were excluded from participation, there are not enough jobs, even while there is plenty of work.  Yet, whatever their individual intentions might have been, they have made a place for themselves, taking care of each other, listening, learning, being human beings.  In some fundamental way, they are free; that is the attraction I feel.

It is a scary time, without dramatic drastic changes in how we live, we will not survive.  The scientists tell us that. Our planet is, at best, on the verge of dying.  The way we have organized society is unsustainable not only for those who are suffering now, but for everyone.  Currently, the military/industrial/prison/anti-privacy complex, the banks and financial speculators, the oil cartels, the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies are running our country, our world leaving death, misery, starvation, hopeless in their wake.  And their natural…and ruthless practices have endangered even their own system. 

To me, Occupy Wall Street represents is a seed, a lesson, an expression of what is needed.  Non- complicity, a community outside the normal.  However small, it is a grain of hope, a spark of a different fire.

With General Strike looming in Greece, in France, having occurred in Egypt, the notion of General Strike is spreading.  Those situations are much different than Occupy Wall Street, yet the appearance of the concept in the world along with the encampment in NY, the speakers from Greece raising the concept, is part of a dramatically changing conversation. 

What struck me as I listened to the Greek speakers was the dream of an International General Strike.  Not for a day or a week or until our demands our met, but rather until we figure out how we should run things.  How can a 'they' make the world we need? We need to create, not demand.

Will we get there? I don't know, but for the first time it seems to me, at least, conceivable. 

[Carole Travis, Liberty Plaza, 10/8/11 I live in California after a lifetime in Chicago, but am loving New York]

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Obama, 2012 and Focusing Hope

How Do We Bring Obama Home?

How to Respond to Obama

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via BlackCommentator.com

Rather than dwell on the question of whether we can bring Obama home, whether he ever was home, etc., I want to refocus on this question of how to respond to him, particularly as we start to think about 2012.

First, what do we now say about 2008? Contrary to those who have thrown up their hands and feel betrayed by what the Obama administration has not done, I start in a different place. I continue to assert that Obama was knowable in 2008. He was a charismatic, smart candidate who made the right call on the Iraq War and stepped out on the issue when it was necessary. He was also, as I said at the time, someone who could appear to be different things to different people. The problem was that too many of his supporters saw what they wanted to see rather than what existed.

What existed? Well, from the beginning he was a corporate candidate. We knew that. The question was not whether he was one but the extent to which his views could be shifted in order to take progressive, non-corporate stands. Second, he was a candidate who was going to avoid race as you or I would avoid a plague ship. He went out of his way to prove that he was not an ‘angry black man’ and that race was not going to be an issue that he would harp on. Third, he was clear that he wanted to change the image of the USA around the world, but it was not clear to what extent he wanted to change the substance of the relationship of the USA to the rest of the world.

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Obama Campaign & the ‘Politics of Ubuntu’

Book Review: Horace Campbell’s  Barack

Obama and Twenty-First Century Politics:

A Revolutionary Moment in the USA

New York: Pluto Press, 2010

319 pps. $29 paperback, $95 hardback.

Reviewed by Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via BlackCommentator.com

Horace Campbell has produced a rigorous, thought-provoking look at the political moment in which we find ourselves. Barack Obama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA presents challenges to a reviewer because it is three books in one. This is not to be taken literally. But content-wise, there are three very distinct components to this book such that each could have been a book in its own right. One ‘book’ deals with how Campbell understands the moment; the second ‘book’ concerns the nature of the Obama campaign; and the third ‘book’ is a post-election analysis.

The first ‘book’ is a provocative examination of the uniqueness of the moment. It opens, interestingly, with a discussion of revolution. Campbell challenges what he sees as outmoded and/or problematic 20th century notions of revolution which often had at their cores the assertion of the necessity for a vanguard political party and, in most cases armed struggle. In fact, Campbell, though grounded in Marxism, offers something called Ubuntu as a philosophical construct that he suggests is necessary for a 21st century revolutionary project. He defines Ubuntu as a Southern African-originated philosophy of communalism that represents a means for cooperation, forgiveness, healing and a willingness to share. The definition is a bit vague but seems more than anything else to reflect the need to get away from both political militarism and patriarchal politics which have often arisen in the context of revolutionary projects. Additionally, Campbell is very concerned with the question of democracy in a post-revolutionary society, a point about which he has had great courage in espousing, particularly in controversial contexts (such as his criticisms of the authoritarian regime of Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe).

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Instant Runoff Shows Its Stuff: Progressive Victory in Oakland

Jean Quan Wins Oakland Mayoral Race

In major upset, winner will be Oakland's first female and first Asian-American mayor

By Zusha Elinson

Progressive America Rising via BayCitizen.org

Nov 14, 2010 - In an enormous upset, Jean Quan won the race to be Oakland’s next mayor.

The hard-working but less-than-exciting City Council member defeated former state Sen. Don Perata and his costly campaign to win over Oakland’s voters. In the final tally released Wednesday at 6 p.m., Quan captured 50.98 percent of the vote, while Perata received 49.02 percent — a difference of 2,058 votes — in the city’s first experience with ranked-choice voting.

Quan becomes the first woman and first Asian-American to serve as mayor of Oakland, succeeding Ron Dellums, who opted not to run for re-election.

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Setting Aside Despair: Time for the Left to Get Serious About Itself

Van Jones: We Must Prepare for Battle

By Adele M. Stan

Progressive America Rising via AlterNet, Nov. 9, 2010

In a darkened space bedecked with impressionistic portraits of the progressive movement's great heroes, Van Jones -- community organizer, environmental activist and erstwhile presidential adviser -- steps onto a tiny stage that has just been warmed up by two local teenage poets and graced by Amy Goodman, the voice of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now!" The audience is filled with Washington activists, including the comedian and civil rights leader Dick Gregory, CodePink founder Medea Benjamin and Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip-Hop Caucus.

The room is packed, and a line snakes along the sidewalk outside Busboys and Poets, a restaurant designed as a gathering place for progressives, even as the event begins.

In a passionate speech focused mainly on the costs and horrors of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Goodman sets the stage for Jones' talk by imploring activists to organize. While a portrait of Rosa Parks by Anna Rose Soevik glimmers behind her, Goodman debunks the mythology surrounding the woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus sparked the civil rights movement. "Yes, she was a tired seamstress," Goodman says, "but Rosa Parks was an organizer."

It's the evening after the big Rally to Restore Sanity hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and an odd mixture of exhilaration and anxiety fills the room -- the thrill of having been part of a gathering of like-minded people who flooded the National Mall in a repudiation of the harsh rhetoric of the Tea Party and cable news media, and anxiety about the Republican tide about to come crashing into the nation's capital in the midterm elections.

Jones has taken the temperature; he knows the score. But he's not about to let anybody off the hook.

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Youth Vote: Now to Turn More of Them Out

 

Youth Vote Against GOP

Tsunami by 19 Points

By Billy Wimsatt

Progressive America Rising

via Huffington Post

Nov. 3, 2010 - National exit polls of more than 17,000 voters show a remarkable trend: Adults age 18-29 voted against the Republican Tsunami by 16 points (56-40). Younger adults age 18-24 were even more progressive, voting against Republicans by 19 points (58-39). The exit polls, conducted by Edison Research in association with AP and CNN found that:

    * 18-29-year-olds voted for Democrats over Republicans by 16 points (56-40) with 4% responding: "Other/No answer"
    * 18-24-year-olds voted for Democrats over Republicans by 19 points (58-39) with 3% responding: "Other/No answer"

These are remarkable numbers for a couple of reasons. First, the sample size of the poll was 17,506 respondents, chosen based on scientifically-randomized methodology, so the numbers are likely to be fairly robust.

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Tea Party Organizing Tactics, But from the Left

Learning from the Tea Party

By Ted Glick

Ted Glick's ZSpace Page

Nov. 1, 2010

“Ultimately, many of the sentiments expressed by the tea-baggers are deeply dishonest, deeply un-American. We need to keep them in their rightful place as a distinct, if sometimes loud, sometimes dangerous, political minority. We will do that to the extent that we out-organize them at the grassroots, engage in creative and significant mass action, and pressure the federal government to pass genuinely progressive legislation. That’s the way we’ll keep down the supporters of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.”

This is how I concluded a Future Hope column on September 12^th of last year reporting on the first major demonstration of what has become the Tea Party. I spent several hours at this 2009 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., listening to the speakers, checking out the signs and feeling the crowd vibes. My overall assessment was that although the politics were very different, their action had a lot of similarities to the massive peace and justice demonstrations our side organized during the early years of the George W. Bush administration. These demonstrations, many of them much bigger than the one organized by the Tea Party, took place from 2002-2006, when the rightist-led Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Being out of power, we back then and the tea baggers in 2009 both felt the need to demonstrate in the streets.

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A Organizing Tool to Win the Democracy Battle

If We Had A Bell:

The Democracy Charter

CIO Poster: The Campaign for FDR's Second Bill of Rights.

By Zach Robinson

CCDS Mobilzer

December’s National Coordinating Committee (NCC) meeting opened December 4, 2009, by taking up Jack O’Dell’s essay “Democracy Charter." O’Dell, a member of the CCDS National Advisory Board, participated by tele-conference. The following day, the NCC considered a resolution outlining a plan of work around the Democracy Charter. It generated strong support and was adopted by the body.

In his NCC presentation, O’Dell pointed out that these times of multiple crises are pregnant with hopes as well as fears. He characterized the 2008 elections as a “moment of promise,” and said that the strategic goal of the Democracy Charter is “to enable the coalition that achieved that moment to become a movement… to transform the electoral victory into a movement of direct action inseparable from electoral activity.”

Segmentation developed in the progressive movement under conditions when focused, issue-based activity yielded tangible results. In today’s conditions, however, a segmented structure can reduce the effectiveness of movement campaigns. For example, facing expansion of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, the peace movement would seem naturally allied with organizations seeking better funding for public schools. Yet fears that their constituency might not understand the classic guns-vs-butter problem can make leaders in the education movement shy of taking an anti-war stance. And some in the peace movement may not be sufficiently aware of how lack of real educational opportunity creates people who can be treated as cannon fodder by the military.

 

Pamphlet to populate the South African Freedom Charter.

The various activities of the progressive movement have always had something in common: the democratic aspirations of diverse constituencies. Yet it requires special conditions for that general commonality to take on an organized character greater than the temporary alliances of numerous electoral campaigns over the last few decades. In his historic speech at the 1963 march on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of “the fierce urgency of now.” That is the urgency of today. Deep economic and environmental crises reach all aspects of human society and by so doing, provide the material connections and the psychological basis for organizing a realignment. The Democracy Charter is a touchstone.

By bringing the many struggles together under the banner of expanding democracy from a formal to a substantive level, the strategic concept of the Democracy Charter opens a way to organize the greater unity that is needed. O’Dell writes, “The Charter proposal is designed to acknowledge and enhance the effective work that is already being done in many areas of Movement activity. When harnessed to the grassroots organizing tradition, the Democracy Charter can bring new energy that is transformational in its possibilities for social change in our nation.”

President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” is a key point of historical reference for O'Dell, as it is for Michael Moore in his documentary film “Capitalism: A Love Story.” O'Dell related Moore’s answer to the reporter who asked, in light of his blistering critique of capitalism, what it was that he wanted: a higher form of democracy.
At the end of World War II, labor unions led a massive mobilization in favor of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. But after his death, that promise was buried by the Cold War’s nuclear-armed military alliances and McCarthyist pressure toward political conformity. The Cold War stifled the hope for progress that was embodied in the diplomatic alliances and popular movements that brought victory against fascism in the 1940s.

Chartist mass meeting, Kennington Common, London,

1848. The Chartists were a British working class-based

organization that backed the six-point People's Charter.

Chartists met with Frederick Douglass during his European

tour of the 1840s. Rising political consciousness in the

Chartist movement prompted Marx and Engels to write the

Communist Manifesto in 1848. This movement laid the

foundation for mass opposition to British intervention on

behalf of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War.

 

Yet, as O’Dell writes in his essay, three signal events of 1955 made a breakthrough: (i) the Montgomery bus boycott in the U.S., which, through direct action, put realization of the Reconstruction-era Constitutional amendments on the agenda, (ii) the Congress of the People in South Africa, which ratified the Freedom Charter that guided the anti-apartheid movement, and (iii) the Bandung Conference, in which representatives of 29 African and Asian countries articulated a 7-point manifesto that gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement, establishing the prospect of a victorious struggle to abolish colonialism. This history shows that united action behind a people's agenda can change the balance of forces.

The NCC resolution cites views of several panelists at the July, 2009 symposium “Building the Progressive Majority” in San Francisco. Bill Fletcher, co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal and the Black Radical Congress, characterized the Democracy Charter as a polemic against post-modernism, the notion that there is no over-arching way of linking struggles. He urged us to integrate the Democracy Charter into discussions with our constituencies, and to develop working people’s assemblies and working people’s agendas. Steve Williams, executive co-director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), said that the Democracy Charter can build a core of people active in working class communities, in communities of color, and gay and lesbian communities who will build a progressive majority. Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the nuclear disarmament group Western States Legal Foundation, noted that the Democracy Charter contributes to a causal analysis of the levers of social change, and to a comprehensive vision that allows people to see the interconnectedness of issues in a way that undermines neo-liberalism, individualism and privatization.

The NCC resolution projects a role for the CCDS in launching the Democracy Charter into a national conversation in such a way that it can be owned and acted upon by a much broader array of social forces, building connections among the progressive majority. The resolution outlines a plan of work on two tracks. One track is based on winning endorsement by noted figures. The other, primary track is based on a step-by-step organizing process of outreach to local activists in labor, the human rights movements, peace and multi-issue formations. The grassroots organizing proceeds from developing a cadre of activists who can promote work around the Democracy Charter, offering the Democracy Charter to their local organizations for study. The goal is to organize across the country 500 educational meetings of 5 people each. Building on this framework, regional conferences can be held with the Democracy Charter as a central organizing document. This work would culminate in national meetings. For example, the Democracy Charter can be brought to the People's Assemblies being organized in preparation for the meeting of the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, and then to the Detroit national meeting in June, 2010.

We have a bell to ring all over this land!

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Need to Push Obama? Use His Tools On Him

New Film Tells
Unreported Story
of the Tools
Obama Used to Win

By Danny Schechter

The election of Barack Obama may be long over but the campaign for change is still underway. For the first time in American history, a president is using the techniques he deployed in running for office in pushing for deeper change. Those who want him to go even further might want to master the approach he used.

It is no surprise that this significant political development is barely being covered in a media that loves to punditize, poll public opinion, and debate policy options in a top-down way. (Some like Fox are even trying to become community organizers) Yet by "covering" politics in this way, our mass media is missing the most innovative bottom-up grassrooots effort in recent memory.

I know about this because as a journalist and filmmaker, I set out to document just how Obama won the election. That story, told in the film Barack Obama, People's President (slated for DVD release this month by Choicesvideo.net) documents the online and on the ground techniques that were used to win the highest office in the land.

The President is now using those same techniques, built around an impressive thirteen million-name email list to keep his organizers and supporters involved in backing his legislative agenda. This is the biggest mass lobbying effort of all time.

While his principal campaign advisor David Axelrod joined the White House staff at a high level, his campaign manager David Plouffe set about converting a campaign apparatus into a legislative army. As MoveOn.Org advisor David Fenton explains in our film, "It's an institutionalized mass level automated technological community organizing that has never existed before and it is very, very powerful force."

They have transformed the campaign website, BarackObama.com into Organizing for America. It encourages visitors to call Congress to support the President's budget. And like the campaign, it sends out emails, text messages and uses social networking technologies. It organizes volunteers to canvass door like they did in the campaign. The first time out, they garnered nearly a quarter million signatures.

Andrew Rasiej of the personal Democracy Forum elaborates:

"He knows who is giving him money, who's voted for him. He can now reach out to these people and ask them to help him to pass his legislative agenda. Those same people can call their congressmen and say we'll support you for reelection if you vote for Obama's legislation. We will give you money if you support Obama's legislation. It's a very powerful group that is actually the most powerful grassroots organization ever built in American history."

The film People's President shows how all of this-including the campaign's use of Meet-up technologies including how FaceBook. My Space and twittering were used as organizing tools by the campaign.

Rasiej cites the ongoing potential:

"It's a citizens lobby! And not only can Obama as president go over the heads of congress to speak to the American public, he can go now between their legs and go underneath Congress to the American public and the American public can do the same back and that's created a new power structure in the American politics, where the citizens can actually participate and not rely on the old (abstract) system of lobbyists, special interests and only those who have money."

There is also the possibility, as political theorist Benjamin Barber told us, the young people who backed Obama can use these same techniques and web platforms to challenge him to stay on track:

"There are websites of young people who are deeply involved in the campaign who talk to one another, and now it would be very interesting because now that Obama's President, they will find that websites and some horizontal campaigns of young people involved with him, now looking at him critically. And using the web to challenge him, to live up to what these young people believed he promised them and so on."

This is significant. The progressive critics of Obama, disappointed by his appointments and some of his cautious policies, have to go beyond railing in print or crying in their beer. They have to reach out to the grass roots army that assured his election. This means being willing to dialogue with liberals and younger people who don't label their politics. Reminding them of the role they played in a historic election may be one way to do that---to appeal to the instincts that led them to engage in the campaign for "change." There's no need to deify Obama---but there is an imperative to reenergize his base,

It is hard to remember that two years earlier, Obama was barely known, registering on the radar screen for just 10% of voters. He was also hardly a brand name as a first term Senator who spent more time in state politics in Illinois than on the national stage. Moreover he was young, and a man of color---not qualities that usually prevail in the presidential arena which tends to draw far older, far whiter, and far more centrist candidates. The thought that he would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the primaries was, quite frankly, unthinkable to most of the elite.

And yet he prevailed. As he used a phrase appropriated from labor organizer and Latino legend Caesar Chavez. Obama turned the farm workers Spanish language slogan "Si Se Puede" into "Yes We Can." Rather than focus on specific political issues, he built a campaign on the promise of "Hope." Rather than just rely on traditional fundraising-although by the end, he was plush with it-he reached out over the Internet for smaller donations from millions of donors.

Few in the major media gave him a chance but he was not discouraged because he had created his own grass roots media operation using sophisticated organizing and social networking techniques to build a bottom up movement, not the usual top-down apparatus. While his campaign ran the show, he encouraged independent initiatives including citizen-generated media, music videos, personalized websites, twittering and texting etc.

This is the new direction our politics has taken. It is a story that may be somewhat threatening to old media -and older activists-who prefer a one to many approach to communication as opposed to forging a more interactive empowering platform. There is no question that young people---especially those mobilized by Obama prefer online media and that choice is making it harder and harder for traditional outlets to sustain their influence and, in some cases, even their organizations. Old media may be on the way out.

This is why our film is, my mind, important, not just as a record of how Obama won and what happened in 2008, but in what will happen, can happen---and is happening in the future. This is why I believe its critical for Americans to see it-as well as others in the world as well ---to recognize how Obama represents more than just another politician but a whole new approach to politics. That old adage is worth remembering: "Its not the ship that makes the wave, it's the motion on the ocean."

Obama, for all his shortcomings which are becoming more obvious by the day has pioneered the way change must be won ---not by people on the top, but by all of us. It remains for "us" to hold him accountable. We live in a culture of amnesia-it is important to learn the lessons of the recent past.

Emmy-Award Winning producer Danny Schechter blogs for Mediachannel.org. He's made 30 documentaries mostly on issues of change. His film Barack Obama, People's President, produced by South Africa's Anant Singh, is available on DVD from ChoicesVideo.net. Comments to Dissector @Mediachannel.org

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Day One: Organize For What Needs To Be Done

Photo: Team Obama, with David Axelrod, left.

Obama's Team
And The Return
of Triangulation

By Norman Solomon
CommonDreams.org

Jan 18, 2009 - The mosaic of Barack Obama’s cabinet picks and top White House staff gives us an overview of what the new president sees as political symmetry for his administration. While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, it’s not too soon to understand that “triangulation” is back.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was adept at placing himself midway between the base of his own party and Republican leaders. As he triangulated from the Oval Office -- often polarizing with liberal Democrats on such issues as “free trade,” deregulation, “welfare reform” and military spending -- Clinton did well for himself. But not for his party.


During Clinton’s presidency, with his repeated accommodations to corporate agendas, a progressive base became frustrated and demobilized. Democrats lost majorities in the House and Senate after just two years and didn’t get them back. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, numerous left-leaning causes fell by the wayside -- victims of a Democratic president’s too-clever-by-half triangulation.

Now, looking at Obama’s choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to “end the mindset that got us into war.” On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it’s hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.”

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There’s little point in progressives’ faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that “one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base.”

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama’s campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew -- from the bottom up.

As his administration gets underway, disappointed progressives shouldn’t blame Barack Obama for their own projection or naivete. He is a highly pragmatic leader who seeks and occupies the center of political gravity. Those who don’t like where he’s standing will need to move the center in their direction.

Obama has often said that his presidential quest isn’t about him nearly as much as it is about us -- the people yearning for real change and willing to work for it. If there’s ever a time to take Obama up on his word, this is it.

Crucial issues must be reframed. The national healthcare reform debate, for instance, still lacks the clarity to distinguish between guaranteeing healthcare for all and mandating loophole-ridden insurance coverage for all. With the exception of Rep. John Conyers’ single-payer bill to provide “enhanced Medicare” for everyone in the United States, each major congressional proposal keeps the for-profit insurance industry at the core of the country’s medical-care system.

As for foreign policy, the paradigm of a “war on terror,” more than seven years on, remains nearly sacrosanct. Among its most stultifying effects is the widely held assumption that many more U.S. troops should go to Afghanistan. Rhetoric to the contrary, Obama’s policy focus appears to be fixated on finding a military solution for an Afghan conflict that cannot be resolved by military means. The escalation is set for a centrist disaster.

During his race for the White House, ironically, Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about “the fierce urgency of now.” But King uttered the phrase in the same speech (on April 4, 1967) that spoke of “a society gone mad on war,” condemned “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and declared: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now.”

Barack Obama never promised progressives a rose garden. His campaign inspired tens of millions of Americans, raised the level of public discourse and ousted the right wing from the White House. And he has pledged to encourage civic engagement and respectful debate. The rest is up to us.

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The Beginning of a New 'New Left'!

Photo: Victory in Chicago

Main Lesson:
Everything
Really Counted

By Tom Hayden

Friends, the lesson I draw from tonight's election returns is that everything really counts.

Look at the results at this point: Obama gets a huge electoral college victory because that's where he threw his resources [for example, $40 million into Florida, outspending McCain 4-to-1 in Virginia, etc]. He wins a bunch of battleground states by two percent, losing none. His popular vote is 51-48 percent. The best presidential campaign ever run, the Wall Street collapse in the foreground, and Barack sweeps – by two and three percent margins.

I think of Jessica Levy, a grad school dropout in North Carolina who took on the reddest part of the state, raised her own money, opened an office, set voter registration records, established a goal of running up Barack's numbers in an area still influenced by the KKK tradition.

Type rest of the post herePeople like Jessica made North Carolina 50-50 and, collectively, they made the difference for Barack in the key states. They are the foundation of our movement now and in the future.

It was everything they did - the 23,000 people who went through Obama's training, the millions poured in from MoveOn.org, AFSCME and SEIU, the quiet volunteers who worked the phones 24/7, and of course, the presence of an incredible candidate and superior campaign team.

Unfortunately, many of our progressive friends did little or nothing for the Obama campaign while spending so much of their time on his shortcomings. Many of them seemed more comfortable with a scenario where they could blame him for losing than credit him for winning.

I heard one of our friends tonight actually claiming that the election protection movement forced Karl Rove's minions to "throw in the towel" just this week rather than risk rigging another national election.

What a strange idea! The election protection movement was definitely an important factor in making theft more difficult, but the point is that there was an election worth protecting, and that's what made thousands of lawyers and ordinary citizens drop everything and become observers and litigators at sites around the country.

In my experience, only good things happen when 96 percent of the African American community is united, when two-thirds of Latinos are united, when unprecedented numbers of young voters are turning out, when thousands of activists are becoming a new generation of organizers. I am more interested in what these energized throngs of people throw themselves into next than what the sidelined Left proposes that they do.

I haven't heard any of the Obama grass-roots supporters proposing that we expand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extend NAFTA or tinker around with global warming. They are our newest best hope for creating the climate and the pressure necessary to achieve social change, and we need to listen, follow and work with them. A new New Left is at hand, and we need to avoid the irony of becoming the Old Left.

Great job fighting against racism, the war and for green jobs out there in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, Carl! You are one of the most practical theoreticians I know.

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BattleGround Report: Volunteers in NE Ohio

Photo: Michelle in Parma, 'Run All the Way And Through the Tape!'

We're Changing the
World, Small Step
By Small Step...

By Katie Hogan
Heartland Cafe

Oct. 8, 2008, Parma, Ohio - Volunteering for Obama in Northwest Ohio is a truly amazing campaign. It's be real honor to be present for it. The campaign office I'm working from, on Ridge Road at Virginia Ave, next to the Rudy's bakery & pierogi joint, covers Parma and Seven Hills. Located some 25 miles south southwest of downtown Cleveland, Parma has 80,000 residents, mostly white ethnic, quite Catholic, with smattering of diversity.

But it's a suburb - never met a strip mall it didn't love - and they don't quite have sidewalks figured out. From some hilltops - you see all of Cleveland to the north. I arrived Sunday, Sept. 28th, was greeted happily - and hungrily I now recognize, by the members of campaign staff - all twenty-somethings who've been on the campaign trail months up to over a year. They have devoured me ever since. I work about 14 - 16 hours a day average - due to my advanced years; the others are average 18 - 19 hours a day.

On any given day - we have a good number of scheduled volunteers working out of the office (much more on the weekend), and increasing numbers of folks walking in, because they've heard they can get a yard sign by signing in.


And that's just the locals' traffic. There are now six out of state volunteers, most working through Election Day. (Chicago is well represented in this group!) Most of us are staying with a 'supporter host family'. These families are often active volunteers in their own right in this sprawling machine of a campaign.

My family is in Strongsville - another 15 miles south west of Parma. They're incredibly gracious - Magaly is losing sleep staying up 'til I get home to watch her TIVO'd Daily Show together and talk about the campaign.

In my first nine days, I knocked over 400 doors, making face to face contact probably 150 times. I took part in Voter Registration at Tri-C, the city college in Cleveland, convened a coffee held in an apartment complex, and helped organize and run two team-building meetings for northwest Parma and Seven Hills. I've begun to learn and use the Vote Builder software tool, used by the campaign to keep impressive and up to date daily track of all knocks, contacts, phone calls and their results.

There are nightly conference calls. These get under way about 10pm, in which every district reports totals, they're tallied and celebrated - through a handheld Blackberry, with lots of people in on each call, across the state in 23 other offices simultaneously.

The big news was Monday nights' registration numbers - on the final day alone, the campaign registered a very large number of voters. I'll wait for the final numbers, but it is my understanding an overwhelming 94% of Ohio's adults over 18 are now registered to vote!

We're now pushing early voting and continued neighborhood team building, for the massive GOTV ( 'Get Out The Vote' ) efforts we'll be mounting. The bottom line: I can't write enough down; I am so grateful to have this opportunity. Because what we are doing is changing the world. Probably sounds a bit ostentatious.
But it's quite the opposite; it is specifically very small.

Small, simple direct actions. Motivated by serving the greater good. Conversations with individual fellow citizens at their front door - I am filled with the sensation of serving the unconscious mind of greater American people drawn toward ownership of their citizenship - on a broader, bigger scale than previously witnessed. The sense is of a culmination of all the earlier great movements toward civil rights, equality, justice.

You know I've been pointed toward this experience my whole life. And it's happening.
I know I'm sending this to many who have and are participating - ain't it grand? I also want to emphasize that all receiving this can still take meaningful, significant part in this momentous shift of American political consciousness.

The only way I had the time to write this, is I took a quick 48 hour trip home - to tend to business matters at the cafe and deal with the students I've sorta run out on. I'm back in Parma Friday to rejoin the troops for the final assault.
We currently have the potential to win Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana and Michigan as well as Ohio and other 'battleground' states. Despite good margins as I write, never doubt our campaign will need to run 'all the way to the through the tape', as Michelle Obama put it last night.

Obama must win by a landslide. Do not let poll numbers make you over confident!
Remember our opponents get more vicious as their grip on power is pried loose - let's pray they don't hurt the world population even more seriously than they already have.

Your practice right now makes a huge difference and is needed.
Travel to canvass in one of the neighboring states is by far the biggest gift - face to face being the most impacting practice. But making phone calls and planning to help GOTV right here in Chicago is also really needed - a slew of us that normally do that are out of town! Also important - keeping pressure on the Congress through this financial crisis, ever more loudly joining fellow citizens in taking back our government - always a good habit to develop, and something our next President will rely upon like none previous.

Every single action you take has an effect. So, please, go forth and take action - do yourself a favor and be a part of something truly wonderful and as my campaign colleagues would say "awesome"!

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America's New 'Many-to-Many' Politics

Photo: Harlem for Obama

Obama,
Organization
and the Future

By Micah L. Sifry
Techpresident.com

June 8, 2008 - Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I've written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big Money and Big Media pre-selecting the nominee of the Democratic party may well be over, in no small part because of the affordances brought by the internet: lower costs of communication and collaboration, and less allowances for hypocrisy and dishonesty in campaigns.

But there's another big reason why Obama's victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He's probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking platform.



What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For us here at techPresident, a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question.

This isn't the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss." It's just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer.

The Movement or the Man?

In almost every presidential election, one or more of the campaigns, sometimes that of the winner, and often that of a powerful but ultimately unsuccessful insurgent, has the effect of drawing thousands or tens of thousands of new political activists into the process.

There are three campaigns that I've spent a lot of my life in journalism writing about: Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988; Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996; and Howard Dean in 2004. In each case, a charismatic candidate with a powerful message drew a ton of new activist energy into the process. And in each case, the movement and the man faced a moment of truth: is this about you, or the larger movement?

If Obama wins in November, the question will loom larger for one critical reason: because his supporters have the capacity to self-organize on a scale never seen before in our lifetimes. (If you question that, go read Clay Shirky's great new book, Here Comes Everybody.) To see what I mean by this, allow me to take you on a short history lesson.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson went to the Democratic convention in Atlanta with about a third of the delegates and enough energy to force Michael Dukakis to give him a starring moment on the stage, side-by-side with Dukakis' far more conservative running-mate Lloyd Bentsen. At the time, there were Rainbow Coalition chapters in many states, and some activists were talking about converting those chapters into a formal ongoing structure for progressive activism inside and outside the Democratic party. This was not to be. Dukakis bought Jackson off with a campaign plane, salving the Reverend's personal ego, and Jackson himself didn't want the Rainbow Coalition to develop into an independent, bottom-up organization.

So while his candidacy helped seed a number of successful bids for power by African-America politicians in 1989 and 1990 (like David Dinkins' campaign for mayor of New York City), the Jesse Jackson movement of 1988 never was allowed to become an ongoing people-powered movement from below. I'll have to dig out my files to flesh out the picture, but you can take my word for it: Jackson only wanted to maintain a "campaign-in-waiting" organizational structure that would be totally controlled by him. He and his minions actively worked to snuff out independent Rainbow Coalition chapters in the states. And thus, for all the popular mobilization that Jesse Jackson galvanized in 1988, there was little to speak of a year or two later beyond a shell organization using the name Rainbow Coalition under Jackson's control. It would hold meetings (like the one in 1992 where candidate Bill Clinton attacked rapper "Sista Souljah"), but the base was gone, back into the woodwork.

Ross Was Boss In Perot's case, the story is even worse. After the tiny Texan got 20 million votes in the 1992 election, he called on his followers to push for his reform agenda by joining United We Stand America, promising them, "I'm Ross, You're the Boss." More than two million people joined UWSA in 1993, each paying annual dues of $15 a year. If you know anything about the hollowing out of civic organization (read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone), you know that a membership organization with 2-million-plus dues-paying members is a rare beast in American politics.

But Perot, as we all know, was a control freak. His candidacy may have inspired millions of reform-minded Americans to come out of the woodwork, put their own "skin in the game" to get him on the ballot, but Ross didn't know any other way but to be the Boss. He hired ex-military men to take over his state petition drives, and once UWSA got going, tried to impose strict controls on its volunteer state directors. I put out a little newsletter during those years called The Perot Periodical, and we reported chapter and verse on how Perot and his "white shirts" put the boot down on his grassroots. By the summer of 1995, when Perot decided to form a third party, the Reform Party, much of his grassroots movement was decimated. Again, the man won out over the movement.

It's not insignificant, I think, that the 1988-90 snuffing of the Rainbow Coalition movement and the 1992-95 snuffing of the Perot movement both happened before the mass participation internet. Yes, there were email lists in existence, and indeed I watched the Perot movement struggle to maintain its independence from Ross's lieutenants in part by reading the Usenet group alt.politics.perot. But not enough people were using these tools, and the tools weren't robust enough to defeat the centralized and well-financed Dallas operation run by Perot.

Dean 2004: Networked Politics on the Rise Fast forward to February 2004. The Howard Dean campaign has collapsed in the wake of its failure in Iowa. Joe Trippi comes to speak at the Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego, a day before the annual ETech conference. I stand up to ask Joe, "Who owns the list, Joe? What is going to happen to Dean for America?" Six hundred thousand people had come together to propel Vermont's governor to front-runner status, and now it was all about to go away. Trippi answered that he didn't know what would happen to the list. But he was already thinking about the possibilities, and had registered the url "changeforamerica.com" in the hopes of keeping the Dean movement going.

Well, we all know what happened afterwards. The Dean campaign list was used to spawn DemocracyforAmerica, and Howard gave the reigns to his brother Jim once he became DNC chair. DfA has kept going, with active chapters around the country, and a respectable amount of organizing and fundraising on behalf of Dean-like candidates for various levels of political office. It's not a game changer, but it is definitely something a bit more like an ongoing, people-powered organization than either the Jackson or Perot successor groups.

So, with all this history in mind, let's return to the billion-dollar question: What happens with the Obama organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? What is Obama thinking about 2009? And what are the tens of thousands of volunteer activists thinking? Which way will power flow?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but clues abound. Take two videos from inside the Obama campaign, one that was just posted yesterday, and one from a few months ago that got little attention.

"Creating the best organization"

The first video shows the candidate talking to something like 300 staffers in his Chicago headquarters on Saturday, a kind of victory lap with the people who made his nomination a fact. It's mostly a pep talk, and a window into the very youthful workforce at the core of his juggernaut. But the video also offers confirmation of something that has been becoming clearer and clearer over the last year: how much Obama, the former community organizer, has situated organizing at the heart of his campaign.

http://tinyurl.com/5ogvl3

Obama starts out his pep talk noting, "When I started this campaign, I wasn't sure I was going to be the best of candidates, but I was absolutely sure there was the possibility of creating the best organization." He then describes his "old organizing mindset" as the idea that "when people submerge their egos for a "larger goal" they can achieve enormous things.

"Even if we had lost," he tells the crowd,"I would be proud of what we've built....Collectively all of you, most of you whom are, I'm not sure, of drinking age (people laugh), you've created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we've seen in the last 30 40 years. That's a pretty big deal." [Emphasis added] We don't have a choice. Now, If we screw this up, and all those people who really need help, they not going to get help. Those of you who care about global warming, I don't care what John McCain says, he's not going to push that agenda hard. Those of you qho care about Darfur, I guarantee you, they're not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service, and then more of the same. Those of you who are concerned that there's a sense of fairness in our economy, it will be less fair. So, now everybody's counting on you, not just me. But what a magnificent position to be in: the whole country is counting on you to change it for the better...Here you are five months away from changing the country.

And add internet-powered transparency...

While looking at the post on DailyKos by kid oakland (Paul Delehanty) that led me to this first video, I noticed another video posted by someone in the comments thread that's even more interesting for what it tells us about Obama's plans for his organization after the election is over.

Here's what Obama says about his thinking: "One of the things that I'm really proud about this campaign," he told an audience in Indianapolis on April 30, "is that we've built a structure that can sustain itself after the campaign." He then talks about how he won so many states, including states like Idaho. It was because of volunteers, he says, "they built the campaign." We didn't originally have big plans for Idaho, he tells his listeners, "but people made this structure."

Our database, it has a couple of million people on there, who are activated and inspired. And they know each other and they're communicating to each other on the internet with all kinds of different groups. And we want to continue that after the election.

He then describes that as President, he envisions continuing town hall meetings where he listens to the concerns of voters as one piece of that strategy. This isn't that new an idea, of course.

Then he adds, "I want to open up transparency in government, so that you guys know what is happening. I want to revamp our White House website. I know it's nice to take the virtual tour of the China Room," he notes sarcastically, "but I want people to be able to know, 'today, this issue is going on...today's President Obama talked about his proposal for $4000 student college tuition credits, it's going to be going into this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate that are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that are involved that are supporting it, you should contact your Congressman. Just creating the situation that if people want to get involved and it's easy. The information is out there, but trying to track it down isn't...The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that's the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That's how we are going to counteract the special interests."

He also talks about not taking lobbyist or PAC money and passing ethics reform, but he suggests that passing his agenda in Congress is only likely if the public is paying attention. "I need you," he tells the audience.

This video ends before Obama returns to his original comments about the structure he has built, but you can see the outlines of his logic clearly. By building the "best political organization in America," one in which millions of people are in touch with each other online, activated and inspired, and then by putting more information out there about what the government is trying to do (and who is opposing it), Obama seems to envision working with his organization, as well as internet-powered transparency, to overcome the institutional special-interest chokehold paralyzing Washington.

Personally, I find this vision pretty breathtaking, even if we don't know all the details yet. It is challenging my hard-earned cynicism about leaders and political movements. Will it work? And will Obama's activists follow him wherever he leads? (When his campaign tried to weed out some of the more independent activists in his California operation earlier this spring, that boneheaded move led to an instant web-based rebellion that caused Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to reverse the decision within 24 hours.) These could be the most important questions facing what is already the most audacious and successful insurgency to arise in American electoral politics in my lifetime. I can't wait to see what happens.

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