Needed: Metro Strategy and Policy

Obama, McCain
and Our Cities
and Suburbs

By Peter Dreier
Huffington Post

Barack Obama will be addressing the U.S. Conference of Mayors at the group's annual meeting on June 21 in Miami. John McCain is likely to be a no-show; he hasn't accepted the group's invitation.

On the face of it, it appears that the two presidential candidates recognize the reality that urban voters tend to vote for Democrats. For Obama to beat McCain, he not only needs to match or exceed John Kerry's 54% margin in cities in 2004, he also needs to increase the urban voter turnout, especially in key swing states. Equally important, he needs to improve on Kerry's 47% showing among suburban voters, who account for about half of all voters nationwide.

The changing economics and demographics of suburbia give Obama a good chance to win the swing suburban voters. That's because, increasingly, the challenges facing suburbs are the same ones facing cities. In this election year, suburban voters -- working class and middle-class residents of both older suburbs and outer exurbs -- are up for grabs.



Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a lock on suburbanites, in large part because they are now as economically, racially, and ideologically diverse as the rest of America.

In fact, as a report issued this week by the Brookings Institution, "MetroPolicy," explains, the fate of cities and suburbs are increasingly intertwined. The 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" stereotype of American suburbia -- the white middle class family with the working dad who commutes to and from the city, the stay-at-home mom, with two kids who attend well-funded schools -- is no longer true, if it ever was.

In the last two decades, the lines between cities and suburbs have blurred. The mayors and residents of many suburbs, like their city counterparts, are dealing with similar problems -- not only poverty, homelessness, crime, and underfunded schools, but also rising gas prices, traffic congestion and pollution, accelerating foreclosures and abandoned homes, crumbling infrastructure, widening wage inequality, escalating health care and food costs, a wave a new immigrants, and the export of jobs to China and Mexico.

Suburbanites are not immune to the mega-trends and policy disasters that challenge the country. We face a new Gilded Age -- a frenzy of corporate mergers, widening economic disparities, and deteriorating social conditions. America today has the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. Meanwhile, the American Dream -- the ability to buy a home, pay for college tuition and health insurance, take a yearly vacation, and save for retirement-has become increasingly elusive. A growing number of working families are in debt, while the number facing foreclosure has spiraled. American workers face declining job security as companies downsize, move overseas, and shift more jobs to part-time workers. The cost of basic necessities is rising faster than incomes. These problems are certainly not confined to big cities.

But America has yet to come to grips with what the Brookings report calls MetroAmerica. More than 80% of all Americans live in metropolitan areas -- 65% in the largest 100 of them - which include central cities, older suburbs, and former small towns gobbled up by metro sprawl. These 100 metros account for two-thirds of the nation's jobs and three-quarters of its economic output. Most of the nation's major universities, medical centers, research enterprises, museums, and skilled workforce are located in these metro areas.

These metro areas are the engines of the nation's economic prosperity, but we treat them like used cars ready to be junked. As the Brookings report reveals, we have failed to re-tune the engine to address the nation's new challenges. Our federal policies are out of sync with the reality of MetroAmerica, ignoring its centrality to our national well-being. According to the report, "Washington is often absent when it should be present" and "Washington is too often present when it ought to be absent."

For example, alone among the world's major nations, the U.S. has no national energy policy to deal with the harmful consequences of global warning, our over-dependence on cars, our ridiculous low level of spending on public transit, and our failure to invest in research to develop more energy-efficient industries, jobs and housing. Led by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, more than 500 U.S. cities have signed an agreement to help reduce energy consumption, but they need leadership from Washington to truly address the problems of greenhouse gases, global warming, and the dangerous health consequences of pollution from cars, factories, and ports. The federal government must put resources behind what the Apollo Alliance (a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community groups) is calling for -- significant investment to put put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of well-paid "green" jobs, and clean energy products and services, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and cut the carbon emissions.

The U.S. also stands alone, and behind, other nations in our approach to education and job training. In most affluent countries, the national government provides most of the funding for schools and job training. In contrast, the U.S. forces local and state governments to address these problems. This results in wide disparities in per-student spending between wealthy states and suburbs and their poorer counterparts, which handicaps millions of young people from reaching their full potential. No wonder we're decades behind other nations in terms of training the 21st century workforce to compete the global economy.

Likewise, in other wealthy nations, national governments take major responsibility for funding public transportation, public safety, parks, housing, social services, and infrastructure, while encouraging localities to cooperate and innovate in administering these key functions of government.

The U.S. does it backwards. Washington typically requires cities to deal with issues such as homeland security, clean air and water, and schools, without providing the necessary funding. (The No Child Left Behind act, which requires local school districts to raise student test scores but doesn't provide the funding needed to hire more teachers, is an obvious example). Cities have to tax residents and businesses to raise the billions of dollars a year to comply with these unfunded mandates. Not surprisingly, our bridges, water systems, dams, and highways, as well as many school buildings, are crumbling, symbolized by the levies in New Orleans that left the city defenseless in the wake of Katrina, and the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed last August, killing 13 people.

Similarly, immigration policy is supposed to be a federal responsibility. But because immigrants wind up living in America's cities and suburbs, it is local governments that are compelled to deal with housing and educating them. Washington provides no "help" except to send federal agents to workplaces looking for illegal immigrants.

Federal tax and highway policies promote costly, energy-wasteful sprawl, which encourages developers and companies to invest in the urban fringes while allowing existing buildings and infrastructure in cities and older suburbs to deteriorate. Federal transportation policy is mostly about building, and repairing, highways, rather than funding public transit and requiring automakers to make energy-efficient cars. Making matters worse, American cities and suburbs are forced to compete against each other for private investment and jobs, from shopping malls and office parks, to Wal-Marts, and sports franchises, which undermines the fiscal health of cities and suburbs alike.

Equally absurd, the U.S. has the most fragmented crazy-quilt of local governments. Within just the 100 largest metropolitan areas, there are 9,000 layers of government -- municipalities, school districts, counties, water districts, park districts, and others -- making it almost impossible to coordinate.

Unlike other major countries, we have no federal policies that encourage, must less require, regional planning. We permit private industry and local governments to determine where housing will be built, and where jobs will be located, without thinking about how people will get to and from where they live, work, attend school, and shop. As gasoline approaches $5 per gallon, we can't continue to operate this way.

No other major industrial nation has allowed the level of sheer destitution that we have in the United States. We accept as "normal" levels of poverty, hunger, crime and homelessness that would cause national alarm in Canada, Western Europe or Australia.

The U.S. has many serious problems that are disproportionately located in cities and older suburbs, these are national problems. A good example is the current mortgage meltdown -- caused by the greedy practices of banks and mortgage companies and the failure of the federal government to regulate the financial services industry. According to a report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the weak housing market, and the large inventory of unsold homes, will reduce home values by $1.2 trillion in 2008 alone. About half of that decline is attributable to the sharp increase in foreclosures. In January, the city of Baltimore sued Wells Fargo Bank for targeting minority neighborhoods for predatory loans leading to high foreclosure rates, costing the city millions of dollars in lost tax revenues, added fire and police costs, court administrative costs, and social programs to maintain healthy neighborhoods.

But Baltimore, nor any of the many other cities and suburbs facing a wave of foreclosures and abandoned homes, can't fix these problems on its own. This is why we have a federal government. But a few weeks ago, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against a bill, sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, to strengthen regulations on banks and brokers and to provide relief to families at risk of losing their homes. Obama endorsed the Democrats' proposal, while McCain remained conspicuously silent.

The Brookings report reveals that metro areas differ in terms of their productivity, wage inequality, and carbon emissions, but these differences are due to factors mostly outside the control of local governments. To guarantee that metro areas are profit centers for the U.S. economy, we need the federal government - including our candidates for president and Congress -- to make a commitment to be their partner. The federal government needs to invest in the metro-based industries, research centers, universities, and workforce that are the engines of prosperity. Washington also needs to provide more funding for public transit, mixed-income housing, public schools, universal health care, child care, and cleaning up urban brownfields and reducing urban pollution that results in high rates of asthma and other diseases, especially among children.

A good example is the earned-income tax credit (EITC), a wage supplement for the working poor. It effectively lifts millions of families out of poverty, with slightly more living in inner-ring suburbs than in cities. The additional income to these low-wage families helps improve local economic conditions, since the poor spend almost all of their money on necessities in local private businesses. Washington could also reward cities and suburbs that work cooperatively to promote job growth, mixed-income housing, and sensible transportation policies on a regional basis rather than competing with each other.

For years, the symbol of America's attitude toward cities has been the tin cup. We viewed cities like beggars -- hungry, homeless, and broke -- and considered "urban policy" a form of charity. But, based on the Brookings report findings, perhaps the new symbol should be a boat, sailing on the dangerous waters of the 21st century global economy. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in the urban or the suburban section of the vessel; if it springs a leak, everyone will drown. But if they work together to fix it, all the passengers will not only survive, but thrive.

[Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century.]

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On to November - The New Battle Plans

Photo: Campaign Volunteers

Voting for Peace,
Justice and
Barack Obama

By Tom Hayden

Now that the long primary is over, it becomes urgent for progressives to shift gears to our role between now and November. Millions of dollars will be spent for voter outreach on issues from womens' rights to workers' needs to environmental protection. Considerable resources are expected to go to independent campaigning against Iraq and its economic impact. Here is a sketch of the possibilities.

The role of 'Progressives for Obama'

It is clear that we are a network, as Bill Fletcher says, and not an organization. Still, we serve as an effective rallying point for progressives through the November election and, if Obama is elected president, into the early phase of 2009. So what are our tasks?



1. Providing a forum for discussion among progressives. We are a forum for analysis and discussion with those progressives still skeptical about Obama, the Democratic Party, and/or the whole electoral process. We create space for maintaining differences with Obama - on Iraq, trade, etc. - while persuading skeptics to fully support him as the best option for progressives this year. Making this case is an important priority in what appears to be a very close election. As Obama moves toward the center-right, making the case could become more difficult.

2. Making the progressive community a factor Obama must keep in mind. Without an independent critical progressive force there will be little to slow the candidate's rightward direction through November. The worry is that Obama will be able to take the entire left-of-center vote for granted with McCain the Republican nominee.

Progressives should try to persuade the Obama campaign that they depend on aroused progressive voters in certain states and districts, among other constituencies. [Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, even parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania.] In addition, Obama will need to push up his vote in safe Democratic states to ensure a popular majority.

The most important immediate tool is the anti-war plank being proposed for the Denver convention, supported by 50 members of Congress, saying: withdraw all combat troops, leaving no permanent bases, conduct a diplomatic surge including negotiations with Iran, end the use of torture, and the closure of Guantanamo. [See details below]. There may also be amendments proposed by a fair trade coalition, and others.


3. Taking the progressive message beyond the progressive base. Soon there will exist independent organizational channels to reach voters around the war, the economy and trade, and global warming. These will be deployed through the internet, phone banking, direct contact at the door and other voter mobilization approaches. Progressives should see this as a unique chance for base-building. There's no rule that says one has to only build the organization of the Democratic Party. One can work independently at the grassroots, so be sure to retain the lists and contacts to build the progressive infrastructure.


4. Helping win this election at every level. In addition to electing Obama, progressives should welcome the political surge among African-Americans and young people of all backgrounds as a trend that might change the electorate for years to come. There are progressive pockets all over the country where trend-setting candidates can and should be elected this November. Money, phone banking, internet messaging and door to door work can be targeted to these many progressive pockets.

Our Timeline

Here is a tentative list of dates and anti-war events being considered. Stay in touch with progressivesforobama.blogspot.com for daily updates!

NOW: Support the antiwar plank proposed for the Democratic convention by Reps. Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern, and Sam Farr. Go to www.winwithoutwar.com , Nation 6/23.

JUNE - Decentralized actions at gas stations to drive the message about Iraq, the economy, and the power of Big Oil. Ads and actions against Republican priorities.

JULY - Roundtables [perhaps like the Dean or MoveOn meetups] to bring attention to Iraq's devastating impact on the economy, emphasizing costs like veteran's health care.

AUGUST - An intense local mass action and education campaign directed towards convention delegates, Democratic and Republican, about the costs of Iraq, from budget crises to torture's stain on our reputation.

LATE AUGUST - Forums and mass action at both conventions, including a possible meeting of progressivesforobama.com in Denver.

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER - "A Million Doors for Peace" campaign. A national effort to identify voters according to the war/peace/economy/trade issues, with an emphasis on swing states and districts. Activists will be able to download a walk list of voters in their neighborhoods, knock on doors and seek voter pledges to vote against Iraq War. Also likely: phone banking straight from your home to persuadable voters, allies, friends and family in another state.

There's more, and we'll keep this list growing.

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Slime and Sleaze from the Bankrupt GOP Right

[Note from CarlD: This is only the milder stuff. The Fox-GOP Slime-Sleaze machine is calling Michelle "Obama's Baby Momma" (See Photo)using 'Terrorist Fist Jabs', and worse is on the way. Time for a firm stand and counter-attack.]

Michelle
in the
Hot Seat

By Robin Abcarian
LA Times Staff Writer

June 11, 2008 - They loved to hate Hillary Rodham Clinton. They loved to hate Teresa Heinz Kerry. And now, it appears, conservative voices are energetically taking on Michelle Obama.


"Mrs. Grievance" bellowed the cover of a recent National Review, which featured a photo of a fierce-looking Obama. The magazine's online edition titled an essay about her stump speech "America's Unhappiest Millionaire."


Michelle Malkin, the popular conservative blogger, called her "Obama's bitter half."




Even the relatively liberal online magazine Slate piled on. In a piece subtitled "Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?" the contrarian Christopher Hitchens blamed her for her husband's pastor troubles since she was a member of the church first.


The would-be first lady does not make pronouncements about policy and has insisted that her priority in the White House would be her two young daughters. But Obama has an earthy sense of humor that sometimes gets her in trouble. And in speeches, she shares her belief that the country's spirit is broken and in need of repair -- by her husband, whom she often describes as "special."


It was an unscripted remark as she spoke in February about the enthusiastic response to his message of hope that set off conservatives: "And let me tell you something," she told a Wisconsin crowd. "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."


The Obama campaign clarified her remarks right away: "What she meant is that she's really proud at this moment because for the first time in a long time, thousands of Americans who've never participated in politics before are coming out in record numbers to build a grass-roots movement for change."


But conservatives pressed the attack. John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, wrote that she had inadvertently revealed "the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy."


The issue has shown no signs of going away.


In what could be seen as a test run for future attacks, the Tennessee Republican Party last month posted a Web video crosscutting her gaffe with declarations from average folks about how they've always been proud of their country.


Bill Hobbs, spokesman for the Tennessee GOP, said the party was stunned and delighted by the national publicity garnered by the cheaply made video, which coincided with a fundraising visit to the state by Michelle Obama.


"Our goal was to get the local media to play that clip of what she said back in February," Hobbs said. "The amazing thing was this thing blew up nationally before any local media even covered it."


A few days later, the candidate took umbrage.


"These folks should lay off my wife," said Sen. Barack Obama, as she sat beside him on ABC's "Good Morning America." "She loves this country, and for them to try to distort or play snippets of her remarks in ways unflattering to her I think is just low-class."


With Obama's complaint came a torrent of opinion about whether Michelle Obama was "fair game." Most commentators agreed that the 44-year-old Harvard Law School graduate -- a powerful surrogate for her husband who has made many high-profile solo appearances -- should not be immune. But the harsh tone has bothered many, even some who don't support her spouse.


"It's exactly why I hate politics," said Republican pollster Frank Luntz. "It's wrong. It's attempting to demonize someone who is very smart, very accomplished, but not totally tuned to the dangers of political discourse."


Mark Mellman, who was Sen. John F. Kerry's pollster when he ran for president in 2004, agreed: "I think it's despicable on one hand, but to be expected on the other."


Michelle Obama's antagonists ignore her when she says: "We have overcome so much in this country: racism, sexism, civil wars." Instead, they focus on: "Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime." Or: "Our souls are broken. . . . The problem is us." Or: "We're too cynical. And we are still a nation that is too mean -- just downright mean to one another. We don't talk to each other in civil tones."


In the current climate -- where sound bites are recycled endlessly and context is ignored in favor of impact -- her more dour pronouncements have paved the way for brutal critiques.


"This is a huge debate among Republicans," said Malkin, who noted that until Obama's "proud" remark, "she was the new, glamorous Jackie O, and most stories focused on her pearls and wardrobe." But, Malkin added, "from what I've seen, despite her husband's admonition to lay off of her, she's not stopping what she's doing, and I don't think the rest of us should ignore her and treat her with kid gloves."


Picking on potential first ladies is nothing new.


In this campaign, Judith Giuliani, the third wife of former Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, was the subject of merciless profiles that depicted her as a husband-stealing social climber.


Hillary Clinton was derided in 1992 after saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life."


In 2004, Heinz Kerry was a target. Sometimes, the outspoken heiress brought it on herself, as when she told a reporter to "shove it" and said -- incorrectly -- that Laura Bush had never held a "real job."


John Kerry, who has campaigned with Michelle Obama, said the attacks could backfire. "She's a mother of two young daughters, and her self-made story is America's story," the Massachusetts senator said. "I think a lot of people will be repelled by the attacks on her, because it'll feel like an attack on their own family. Republicans smear her at their peril."


Some Republicans, notably Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, denounced the anti-Michelle Obama video, but Kerry predicted that future attacks would be made by groups unaffiliated with political parties. "They won't launch these vicious attacks through Sen. McCain," Kerry said. "They'll use proxies and surrogates."


Indeed, in a Washington studio, a conservative outfit called Citizens United is scrambling to finish a 90-minute anti-Obama documentary. According to the group's president, David Bossie, it will probably include the Michelle Obama "proud of my country" clip.


Bossie, a longtime Republican operative, bridled at the charge that singling her out is uncivil. "Nobody's picking on her; nobody's being unfair to her," he said. "She needs to be mindful that those types of statements will be used against her husband."


Recently, rumors about divisive comments allegedly made by Michelle Obama have swirled about the Web. Although unsubstantiated, they were appearing so often that a newspaper reporter asked her husband about them.


"There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it," Obama said. "That gives legs to the story. . . . Frankly, my hope is people don't play this game."


It's unclear, however, how much difference a spouse makes in a campaign.


Voters will say they discount the spouse, Mellman said. But "beneath the surface, it can help in forming an overall impression of a person," he said. "People assume if they don't like the spouse, they don't like the candidate."


In the current campaign, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, Bill Clinton's heated remarks alienated many black voters. (The former president implied that Obama's win in South Carolina was unimportant since Jesse Jackson had also won the state in 1988, and accused the Obama campaign of "playing the race card" on him.)


"That's a really good example of a candidate paying the price for the things a spouse said and did," Walsh said.


She regards the Tennessee GOP video as a warning to the Obama campaign. "This is the kind of thing that's coming," she said, "so it's time to be careful."


robin.abcarian@latimes.com

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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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Iraq War Is Obama's 'Montrous' Problem

Photo: Harvard's Kilson Receiving Award

What Obama's
Victory Means

By Dr. Martin Kilson, Phd
BlackCommentator Editoral Board

Prologue

It’s mid-day Wednesday June 4, 2008, and as I write these brief reflections on "What Obama’s Democratic Party Nomination Victory Means," the first thing I can think of is that this extraordinary achievement ranks alongside "Juneteenth" - the news of the victory of the Union over the Confederacy, news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox.

That awesome Civil War-ending news reached thousands of Negro communities around the country at varying times during the month of June 1865, and as that awesome God-inspired news fell on the trembling ears of the former slaves - children, mothers, fathers, grandparents - they cried glorious tears and uttered glorious prayer, and these culminated eventually in "Juneteenth Celebrations" across Black America.




In announcing the extraordinary Barack Obama achievement to the nation, the New York Times front-page headline read: "After Grueling Battle, Obama Claims Nomination". Here in Boston where I reside, the front-page headline of the Boston Globe read: "Obama Clinches Nomination: Clinton Not Conceding Defeat."

The Boston Globe was, I felt, bold to inform the nation graphically of the "dark side" of what that New York Times headline dubbed a "Grueling Battle" - namely, that Hillary Clinton couldn’t muster enough "basic class-and-decency," let’s call it, to extend a simple welcoming congratulation to Senator Barack Obama, a simple welcoming congratulation to America’s first African-American presidential candidate of a major political party. What makes this instance of Clintonian power-obsessive pettiness-and-rudeness so awful is that the African-American voter-bloc provided the predictable and consistent electoral support that facilitated Bill Clinton’s election as president both in 1992 and 1996.

Interface of Barack Obama & Martin Luther King

Be that as it may, with the announcement of Senator Barack Obama’s nomination victory on Tuesday evening June 3, 2008, we can all ascent to Obama’s comment at a massive victory rally of 32,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota, that his achievement enables liberal and progressive Americans to fashion "a better future" for our country. Obama continued:

"Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another, a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. ...I face this challenge...with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals."

With these keen revitalizing characterizations regarding what his achievement of the Democratic nomination can mean for the country, Senator Obama was treading in the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, so to speak. And few scholars of King’s era have characterized the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. King as cogently as his greatest biographer Taylor Branch:

[Dr. King’s] appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. ‘We will win our freedom’, he said many times, ‘because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of god are embodied in our echoing demands.’ To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy - even as racial healers and reconcilers - is to diminish them under the spell of myth. Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. (Taylor Branch, "The Last Wish of Martin Luther King", The New York Times (April 6, 2008)) [Emphasis Added]

Accordingly, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination is a special proclamation to the millions-on-millions of us Americans who grasp the fullness of Martin Luther King as a "modern founder of democracy." A proclamation for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy in order, as Obama put it Tuesday evening, "to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals."

Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (I) Iraq War

Of course, the steps and avenues to this end will be various and debatable, as they should be. Yet I feel certain that with the election of Senator Obama in November to the presidency of the United States, the road to a revitalized America must address straightaway two enormous problem-areas in American life. One problem-area is, of course, the monstrous Iraq War. The second problem-area is the horrific incarceration-crisis facing African-American males. An Obama presidency can, I believe, lay the groundwork for a broad revitalization of American democracy by tackling these two systemically crippling, morally crippling, and American citizens’ life-cycle crippling problem-areas.

Still today, too many of our American countrymen and countrywomen lack full understanding of just how monstrous the Iraq War has been, for us and for Iraq’s citizens. For starters, the Iraq War is the second longest war the country has experienced, save the Vietnam War. Not only have nearly 2 million soldiers served in Iraq but 30% have two-plus years of service there. Over 4000 have bravely given the ultimate service - their lives - some 60,000 wounded, injured, etc., many with horrendous injuries.

Beyond the massive loss of life and damage to thousands of American soldiers, the Iraq War’s damage to America’s economic life and well-being is extraordinary. First of all, it is hard to believe that after World War II the Iraq War is our country’s most costly war. As of March 2008, the Iraq War has claimed $600 billion of our country’s wealth. And as a data-rich article by Professor Linda Bilmes of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government ("Another Year - Another $300 Billion" Boston Globe (March 16, 2008)) points out:

That $600 billion figure ignores four major costs. First, there are additional war-related costs buried in places such as the non-Iraq defense budget. That budget has grown by $500 billion cumulatively since the beginning of the war. ...Second, the $600 billion excludes the cost of providing medical care and disability compensation for veterans. ...Third, the $600 billion does not take into account the cost to "reset" the military - to replace equipment and restore personnel to prewar levels of readiness.

Thus, with the election of Senator Barack Obama as president in November there’s something equivalent to certainty that, I think, an end to the monstrous Iraq War will occur. A monstrous war that, according to Linda Blimes, "the cash cost of each month we continue in Iraq is $12 billion...." And, of course, what’s worse are the long-range systemic costs and costs to life-cycle well-being of American citizens. Here, too, Linda Blimes’ informs us candidly:

...The war has weakened our economy, increased oil prices, and made it more difficult for us to fund road projects, schools, medical research, and other vital needs. Apart from the oil companies and a handful of defense contractors, the war has not stimulated the economy. Perhaps most painful to consider is the opportunity cost: the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American children.

No doubt, ending the monstrous Iraq War will be an uphill battle for an Obama presidency, given the numerous establishmentarian systemic power-blocs intertwined with and dependent upon this war. As the Kennedy School of Government’s Linda Blimes points out in her study of the Iraq War: "The [Boston] Globe reported recently that the largest private contractor in Iraq, KBR [a company Vice President Cheney once headed] has dodged paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by employing its workers through a shell company in the Cayman Islands." Can you image such power-class skulduggery?

Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (II) Black Imprisonment

Just as the Iraq war must be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency, so too must the horrifically devastating and debased plight of nearly one million incarcerated African-Americans, mainly Black males, be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency. I was inspired to read in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 29, 2008) that the new executive secretary of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous - former director of the leading African-American newspaper association, the National Newspaper Publishers Association - places the plight of incarcerated African-Americans at the top of the NAACP’s new agenda. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, "Jealous indicated that the most pressing issues for him [as new executive of NAACP] include the country’s incarceration rate, particularly of African-American men and boys, which far outpaces the rest of the world. Less than 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, yet the nation has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners."

If a new head of the NAACP can get this great warhorse of African-American rights and progress to place the country’s horrific incarceration rate for Blacks at the top of its agenda, surely an Obama presidency can and must do the same. Today our country has 2.2 million souls in prisons - far beyond any other democratic nation and some authoritarian ones too, such as Russia, China, etc. - some 800,000-plus are African-Americans, Black males.

Research by BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University reported that by 2000 in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, Black males comprised on average between 50% and 80% of inmates in state and federal prisons. Professor Marable also reported that research by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights revealed the following:

...That while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offences. (See BlackCommentator.com, September 27, 2007)

Viewed from another vantage point, a Black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime, compared with a White male who has a 1 in 7 chance. What is worse - if that’s possible - the incarceration rates in this country are directly correlated with education performance, a finding reported this year by the Children Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The Fund’s research uncovered that Black children are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than White children, and such children, in turn, disproportionately enter the vicious cycle of crime and imprisonment. As a study of this vicious cycle faced by our African-American youth published in the Boston Globe observed:

This "school-to-prison pipeline" begins in the nation’s neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country’s expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons. ...More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. (See Daniel Meyer, "Problem Students in Pipeline to Prison," Boston Globe (May 28, 2008))

Concluding Note

As I remarked earlier in this article, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination might be considered a special proclamation to millions-on-millions of Americans who understanding our country’s dire need for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy. A new activism that, as Obama put it in his victory address in St. Paul, will enable us "to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals." I, for one among progressive Americans, believe that to achieve this under an Obama presidency, the two major problems-areas facing the country today of the Iraq War and the massive incarceration of African-American males must gain a top place in the public-policy agenda of an Obama presidency. Anything less than this will render an Obama presidency a disappointment from where I sit.

Meanwhile, we must still recognize that even with the most optimistic public-policy outcomes by an Obama presidency, there will remain many barriers to the revitalized American society and culture that the great Martin Luther King entertained. The tale of one such barrier can be found in the following report in the current issue of Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Spring 2008):

A 55 year-old black woman named Ruth Simmons came to New York on an autumn shopping trip in the first year of the twentieth-first century and chose to examine the finery at Saks Fifth Avenue, one of the city’s premier emporiums. She soon became aware that her movements were being followed by the store’s security people, evidently fearful that she was a potential, if not likely, shoplifter. "And I greatly resented that," she said in recounting the incident. To add to her distress that day, a taxi driver locked his door as Simmons neared so that she could not get in. What made these slights, endured daily and disproportionately by black Americans, worth noting is that Ruth Simmons is president of Brown University.

Even so, I and many millions of other Americans wish the best of good luck to a future Barack Obama presidency.

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Martin Kilson, PhD hails from an African Methodist background and clergy: From a great-great grandfather who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in the 1840s; from a great-grandfather AME clergyman; from a Civil War veteran great-grandfather who founded an African Union Methodist Protestant church in Pennsylvania in 1885; and from an African Methodist clergyman father who pastored in an Eastern Pennsylvania mill town - Ambler, PA. He attended Lincoln University (PA), 1949-1953, and Harvard graduate school. Appointed in 1962 as the first African-American to teach in Harvard College, in 1969 he was the first African-American tenured at Harvard. He retired in 2003 as a Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His publications include: Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Harvard University Press, 1966); Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); New States in the Modern World (Center for International Affairs) (Harvard University Press, 1975); The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976); The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming. University of Missouri Press)]

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DLC Consultant Class - Wrong on the 1960s

Hillary's
Winning
Speech

By Tom Hayden

Hillary Clinton’s moving and brilliant speech today cemented an independent place for herself and feminists in general in the unfolding historical drama of the 2008 presidential election.

The speech, which situated her more firmly than ever in women’s history, provided a powerful endorsement for Barack Obama while at the same time reinforcing her position as virtually his equal in the Democratic primary race.

Clinton essentially empowered her audience by implying they, more than anyone, could make the historic difference by electing an African-American president on the rising, tide of the women’s vote. She assured them that the two candidacies had shattered all gender and racial barriers to democracy’s highest office.



Hers was not the surrender pose traditionally expected of “losers” but a redefinition of what winning ultimately means. It suggested that she will be treated as a full partner in the process, and it was a victory speech for the power of social movements.

She bravely rejected the bitter destructiveness that gnaws within all campaigns that lose closely, and held the high ground.

Characterizing her decision as a “suspension”, however, still left open the prospect of hard bargaining with Obama over a range of issues, but apparently in a greater atmosphere of unity.

One wonders if she would be the nominee if she had pursued the tone of today’s speech more and the advice of her [male] advisors less. It took a year, and a string of campaign disasters, before she threw out Mark Penn, though still leaving in place a cast of male operatives like Lanny Davis who only blighted her image as an experienced, pragmatic representative of the Sixties student, antiwar and women’s movements.

Her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq War, which opened the door for Obama’s candidacy, was advised as the way to prove that a woman could be commander-in-chief. So were her later comments about obliterating Iran. Her male advisers incessantly pressured the media to play up Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, race-baiting and red-baiting positions she never would have adopted in the late Sixties.

This wasn’t a problem unique to Clinton alone, of course. If Bill Clinton had not promoted NAFTA and the WTO, there would have been no space for Ralph Nader to run in 2000. Had John Kerry followed his 1970 anti-war, anti-establishment instincts in 2004, he probably would have been president today. The Democratic Party consultant class has been counseling retreat from the Sixties ever since…the Sixties. It has been a risk for Obama’s centrist campaign as well, although his 2002 antiwar stance and the unified enthusiasm of the black community position him firmly within a progressive history.

This basic identity confusion at the center of the Clinton strategy was the crucial reason, next to Obama’s superlative campaign, for her narrow defeat. The irony is that her resurrection can now begin.

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Obama and the Open and Unexpected Future

Bobby
And
Barack

By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post

For one who has experienced both eras, the current movement for Barack Obama has achieved a living remembrance of Bobby Kennedy's campaign in the week when RFK's murder is painfully remembered.

On June 4, 1968, I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick's Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision -- a movement-driven progressive government -- was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.



"Dad, don't you recognize anything of yourself in this movement?", asked an angry email from my son Troy, nearly forty years later. He was working 24/7 with his [now] wife Simone, for Barack Obama, spreading the boundless energy of the young and an artist's flair for silk-screens. How could I share your giddy utopianism, I wanted to respond, after the murders of the Sixties icons -- John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, all of whom I had known as a young man? If those killings were not enough, we suffered the Nixon and Reagan eras of counter-revolution aimed at what our generation had achieved. Then the war and sanctions and war again for control of the Persian Gulf. During the coming decades, I was limited every day by the sordid realities, as well as the occasional modest achievements, of electoral politics.

I didn't see him coming. When I heard of the young state senator with a background in community organizing who wanted to be president, I was at least sentient enough to be interested. When I read Dreams of My Father, I was taken aback by its depth. This young man apparently gave his first public speech, against South African apartheid, at an Occidental College rally organized by Students for Economic Democracy, the student branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy [CED] which I chaired in 1979-82. The buds of curiosity quickened. Soon I was receiving emails from David Peck, an organizer of the Occidental rally, who now is coordinating Americans in Spain for Barack Obama.

One of Bobby Kennedy's qualities, or perhaps it was a quality of the times, was an easy and growing familiarity with the New Left. He evolved from 1961 to 1963 from viewing the Freedom Riders as a dangerous nuisance to a prophetic minority. By 1967, he even wanted to copy SDS community organizing projects -- a forerunner of Barack Obama's path -- as a template for a national war on poverty.

He had a talent for engaging outsiders while trying to remain presidential. When Staughton Lynd and I met with him in late 1967, we sparred with RFK over his still-forming position on the madness of Vietnam. He mocked the Vietnamese communist position on free elections, for example, but realized there was no answer to the evidence that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the national vote in 1956 -- in elections which France and the United States prevented. He wanted to be the anti-war candidate, but hoped for peace through negotiations, not a unilateral withdrawal. Yet his thoughts seemed free-floating, driven by curiosity.

I sensed there was no fixed version of Robert Kennedy. He was evolving, improvising, feeling his way, from former counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, to his brother's attorney general, to a dissenter from the Democratic establishment...It was unclear where he was headed, perhaps even to himself, but it was my sense that he was on some deep level, astonishingly, on our side.

For this intuition I was sharply criticized from all directions. FBI memos suggested that I was a Kennedy "agent" in the movement, though our formal positions were quite different. Many in the revolutionized [and fragmenting] SDS held the same suspicions. The Yippies considered calling off the Chicago protests for fear that Bobby Kennedy might co-opt them with his lengthening hair. The McCarthy volunteers were livid that he was stealing their dream.

But he was the only one who could bridge the chasm between the traditional Democrats and the disaffected young, the striking farmworkers, the rebellious blacks, even the utterly disenfranchised native Americans. I learned from that experience that, like it or not, a charismatic and willing candidate, not just a linear program, is needed to mold a diverse majority.

So it was with great interest that I attended a Robert Kennedy human rights event in Washington early last year, featuring Barack Obama as the honored speaker. I sat in a small audience that included Sen. Ted Kennedy, Bobby's widow Ethel, and several of her grown sons and daughters. Obama's written remarks were heartfelt, thoughtful, but not especially inspiring, at least as I recall. What struck me was how enthralled the Kennedys were, especially Ethel. He definitely was the one they had been waiting for.

There are vast differences between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, owing to circumstance, though both have followed hero's journeys of the classic sort. Kennedy was shaped by his brother's murder and the climate of his times, which drove all but the most robotic towards alienation. Barack is a product of globalization, immigration, even slavery, but nonetheless a privileged inheritor of the movements for which Bobby Kennedy stood. Both have believed, with Camus, that greatness lies in touching and uniting both ends of the arc of experience. Both were painfully cautious in formulating policy positions that seemed to placate everyone while leaving little solid ground for their core beliefs. It was hard to believe this was their Way, not just calculated opportunism.

My hopes for Robert Kennedy might have been dashed by his subsequent policies if he had lived to be president, but I don't think so. The best evidence is the progressive course consistently pursued by those closest to him, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, to this day. It is hard to imagine him abandoning all those poor people, fervent anti-war activists, and early environmentalists who swarmed his rallies -- and who, like the farmworkers, carried him to victory on the ground in California.

The most impressive parallel between Bobby and Barack is the reappearance of a unified African-American community along with an inspired new generation of activists and voters. Win or lose, the Obama movement will shape progressive politics, and our racial climate, for a generation to come.

Those who denounce Obama -- and the possibilities of all electoral politics- - should ponder the effectiveness of sitting judgmentally on the sidelines while an Unexpected Future arrives through the sheer will of a new generation. They should consider whether politics and history can be reduced to a fixed determinism that is endlessly repeated, as if there are no surprises. We can have our differences with Obama's specific policies, as I certainly do, but those should be measured against the prospect that a movement might transform him even as his very rise continues to transform the rest of us.

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A Major Break in the Color Line

Photo" Bill Fletcher and Danny Glover in Venezuela

A Challenge
and Milestone
in Our History

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com

I watched Senator Obama's speech last night and thought to myself how, despite every reservation I have had about Senator Obama's politics, I was moved by the moment. Deep inside me I had always expected that a conservative Black candidate could emerge at some point, but I thought that it was very unlikely that a liberal-to-progressive could, in the near future, emerge and win the nomination.


The color line has not been shattered. It has been further bent. It has been rendered more complex by the rise of a nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America who is of African descent.


His emergence challenges the history of the USA, even if his politics are not on the Left. The fact that he was forced, through events, to articulate the clearest and most eloquent analysis on race in the USA by a mainstream politician, made this campaign particularly significant. What is even more significant is that Senator Obama is correct: this campaign is not actually about him, but it is about a very deep desire on the part of millions of people in the USA for change.





How that 'change' will be defined is not primarily a question for who gets elected in November. It is a question for those of us in the field who have contending visions for what the USA and the world should look like.


I sat in front of the TV transfixed, knowing that this was an historic moment, irrespective of whether Senator Obama wins or loses in November. I, for one, will continue to critically support him. This means that I do think that there is a VERY significant different between Senators Obama and McCain. This is not a tweedle-dee / tweedle-dumb juxtaposition, even given my differences with Senator Obama.


Senator McCain wishes to continue the direction of George Bush and to advance the process of the consolidation of a neo-liberal authoritarian state. Senator Obama is looking for a politically liberal solution to the current crisis. I do not think that such a solution exists, but I do think that there is an opening for progressives to push for genuine alternative political and economic solutions to the crises afflicting the USA and the planet as a whole.


This will inevitably mean challenging and pushing Senator Obama on matters such as foreign policy and healthcare. This is the essence of critical support; actively supporting his candidacy while at the same time not being shy concerning expressing our differences


Yes, this was and is an historic moment. There is, however, little time to relish in this moment because it will soon pass. If we are not thinking both about building for an Obama victory, but more importantly, laying the foundation for stronger social movements and a mass political organization that can advance a progressive direction, we will have misunderstood our challenge and fallen prey to illusions.


Taking nothing away from Senator Obama's own brilliance, he stands today as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party because of a groundswell of anger and hope that exists across the USA. It is up to progressives to do more than simply acknowledge this; we must help to gel it into a wave."


[Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of BlackCommentator.com, an intitator of 'Progressives for Obama', and Co-author of "Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice" See: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11121.html]

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Prepare for More Mud Slinging

Why is Clinton
in Denial of
Obama's Nomination?


By Tom Hayden

There's a cleft, perhaps even a political schizophrenia, within Hillary Clinton that explains her refusal on election night to recognize defeat.

In the soothing scenario offered by James Carville, it will take a few days for the Clintons and her supporters to bring her campaign to a smooth landing after a long nasty ride. Another view from the CNN pundits is that she is leveraging Obama for an unknown agenda, including consideration as the vice presidential nominee.

In both scenarios, Clinton is expected to do "what's right for the party and what's right for the country", which is interpreted to mean campaigning all-out for the Democratic ticket. Maybe.



But there is still another dimension to Clinton that is unspoken, unspeakable, deniable, demonic, harbored among a few Clinton operatives [like Sidney Blumenthal] and perhaps in a hidden recess of her own persona, the destructive id she seems to share with FOX News.

Clinton still wants Obama defeated if possible, and knows there is a way, however horrifying to some. As long as she doesn't concede and endorse, she can wait for someone to produce something that renders Obama less electable. The superdelegates, in this desperate scenario, then could be forced to switch by the convention.

The latest tapes about the Chicago priest are a case in point. More is coming on the alleged statements and writings of Michelle Obama. Claims of connections to the Palestinians are in the wings. Obama's winning streak has noticably declined in the past several weeks, including losses in two of the last three primaries. If he cannot be defeated for the nomination, in this Shakespearian plot, he can be defeated in November if damaged enough during the primaries.

Insane? Perhaps. Time and events are not on her side. The Obama followers have been reserved and polite thus far, but their potential reaction is something superdelegates are deeply aware of, especially as the Denver convention looms.

Clinton astonishingly refused to acknowledge that Obama, the first African American nominee, came from behind to win a majority of primaries and caucuses, a majority of delegates, and a majority of votes, while Clinton continues to claim that the entirely bogus Florida and Michigan primaries should be treated as expressions of freedom.

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Battleground in the Suites

Photo: Clinton Trying to Change the Rules

Dems, the Rules
And The Audacity
Of "Nope!"

By Christopher Hayes

The first person I encounter after crossing the Duke Ellington bridge from my apartment in Northwest DC to the Marriott Hotel, the location of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee Meeting, is Helen Bradley.

A Clinton supporter who's flown in from Northern California, Bradley is standing in a red shirt with a sticker that says "Count Michigan and Florida" and a sign that says "Count Every Vote." When I ask her why she's there, she's sunny, earnest and on-message. She points at her sign and says. "For me, it's not about winning. Florida and Michigan should have a right to vote."

The Clinton supporters sitting in a coffee shop a block away are far less politic:

"I saw a picture of Michelle Obama in someone's office the other day and it made me nauseous," says one woman.

"My whole family is Republican so now we're all united around John McCain," adds another.

"I don't want a leader who wants to sit down with leaders of Muslim countries," offers a third. "He scares me."

This level of bitterness probably isn't particularly representative of Clinton supporters at large but it's sentiments like these that haunt the nightmares of Howard Dean and the DNC. Dean addresses it head-on in his opening remarks the Rules and Bylaws Committee, recalling a midnight call he received from Al Gore in the waning days of the 2004 primary, when it was clear Dean would not be the nominee. "I was very, very angry at my party for some of the things that had been done," he said. "I remember getting a call from Al Gore, pacing up and down in the hallway. Ranting and raving: what do I owe the Democratic party after the way I've been treated!?! Tell me! After twenty minutes, Al Gore said: 'Howard this is not about you. This is about your country.' At that point not even my wife could have said that to me. But whatever I had been through, he had the presidency snatched from him forty days after the election by five intellectually bankrupt Supreme Court judges. This is not about candidates. This is a story about Americans and its greatness."

High-flown rhetoric--"America and its greatness!"--is in no short supply. After all, the entire media industrial complex is here, chasing an elusive plot point in a campaign narrative that has been awkwardly stalled since the Indiana primary. And few of the assembled politicians resist the urge to righteously fulminate about the "fundamental human rights" at stake. You'd think they were on the battlefield at Lexington or on the bridge in Selma, not a meeting of party bureaucrats in a Washington hotel.


(Covering this is not what most political reporters got into the game for. The reporters in the overflow room check their Blackberries and when a meager lunch buffet is wheeled out mid-way through the meeting they descend on it like a colony of ravenous vultures.)

First on the agenda is Florida. For all the heated rhetoric, there's actually something very close to consensus on how it should be handled. The four witnesses from Florida--party official Jon Ausman, Sen. Bill Nelson, State Sen. Arthenia Joyner and Rep. Robert Wexler-- all stress that the timing of the Florida primary was largely the doing of a Republican legislature, and that the voters of the state shouldn't be completely disenfranchised, since the error was not theirs. Some on the committee point out, quite rightly, that as high as turnout was, it might have been even higher had the voters not been told their vote wouldn't count.

Even Joyner, Clinton's most impassioned supporter, who invokes the struggles against apartheid in advocating for a full seating of delegates, concedes that had voters not been told the primary wouldn't count, turnout might have been as high as 3 million. The point is that enfranchising those who did vote would in a sense, disenfranchise as many as million or more voters who didn't.

The Solomonic proposal on the table, offered by Ausman, is to cut the voting power of the delegation in half, which would result in a net gain of 19 delegates for Clinton. (Ausman also wants the state's superdelegates to be seated and given full votes). Sen. Bill Nelson, a Clinton supporter, endorses this proposal, as does the Obama campaign's surrogate, Rep. Wexler. (though they want the super-d's votes also to be halved.) Joyner, however, wants the whole kit and kaboodle. "I've been told that you ask for what you want," she says.

"In life you don't get everything you want, but I want it all." The audience applauds, the press room cracks up. This is the Clinton campaign's M.O. of maximalism on full display. Call it the audacity of "Nope!".

But Florida's just the warm-up for the far, far thornier issue of Michigan. In 2007, when Michigan jumped ahead in the primary calendar, and was stripped of its delegates, Edwards and Obama removed their names from the ballot out of deference to the decision. Clinton did not. The result was a bizarre primary in which Clinton, as the only major candidate on the ballot, won 55 percent of the vote, while supporters of other candidates (in what should be noted was a very low-turnout election) were left to write in their candidates or vote uncommitted. Outside of the US, there's a fairly long pedigree of elections being held in which prominent opponents are left off the ballot: Castro's Cuba and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to name just two examples. By those standards, Clinton underperformed, but if the results were to stand, she would be awarded 73 delegates, with 55 delegates elected as uncommitted.

The bigwigs of Michigan Democratic politics--including DNC state chair Mark Brewer and Senator Carl Levin--have jury-rigged a solution. Using the results from the actual primary, the exit-polling which put Clinton's support at around 45 percent and Obama's around 35 percent and the 30,000 write-in votes that under Michigan law cannot count but most likely went overwhelmingly to Obama, they propose seating the full delegation with a 69-59 delegate split favoring Clinton. This would approximate an 8-point Clinton victory in the state.
Unlike the Florida compromise, though, nobody seems to be buying it.

Long-time Clinton loyalist Harold Ickes, who's the most aggressively partisan of the committee members, tells Carl Levin that simply hatching some rough allocation of the delegates in a compromise deal "does violence" to the DNC charter's call for the nominating delegations to represent a "fair reflection" of the voter's preferences. Why stop at giving Obama a net 8 delegates? he asks bitingly. Why not 10 or 20? (He expresses no opinion on the "violence" to the concept of "fair reflection" done by an election in which the leading candidate's name is not on the ballot.)

Obama surrogate and former John Edwards campaign manager David Bonior also rejects the Levin-Brewer compromise. Calling the allocation "arbitrary," he basically says that divining the actual preference of the state's voters is impossible given the circumstances and advocates simply seating the delegation at 50/50. That way the party activists from the state can attend the convention, but the hollow exercise in ersatz democracy in Michigan would have no effect on the nomination battle.

Clinton's folks, of course, find this unacceptable and for an hour everyone in the witness chair and the committee tread over the same ground: what to do with a screwy election result that wasn't supposed to count in the first place? What, under these circumstances, counts as a "fair reflection" of the voters' preferences?

The obsession with this question (combined with wireless access to the Internet and a mind that's starting to wander after nearly six hours in the overflow room) puts me in mind of Kenneth Arrow. The Nobel Prize-winning economist (and life-long Democrat) published his famous Impossibility Theorem in 1951, in which he mathematically proved that transmitting an electorate's ordinal preferences for a slate of three or more candidates in a way that doesn't do violence to our intuitive sense of democratic choice is actually impossible.
The strict conditions here may not hold (we're down to two candidates) but the larger point seems apt. The real problem here is less the content of the rules and more the fact that they're being revisited ex post-facto. Donna Brazile manages to more or less nab the final word for the morning session when she lectures Blanchard on exactly this point. "My mama always taught me to play by the rules and respect those rules," she says to enormous applause from the Obama supporters.

"My mother also taught me, I'm sure you're mother also taught you, that when you decide to change the rules, especially in the middle game and the end of the game, that is referred to as cheating."

The air seemed to tighten around that word the moment it was out of her mouth. Set against the "spirit of unity" everyone's been invoking all day it seemed taboo. But it least had the virtue of being true.

[Christopher Hayes writes blogs for the Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/325347]

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Fox News, Without Shame, Whitewashing Nazis

Photo: Gas ovens in Fox's 'just a labor camp'

[A DailyKOS piece reveal a reporter who tried to enlist other Kansas vets in this smear, but they were told by the vet to 'go crawl back under your rock.']

Using the
Holocaust to
Smear Obama

By Menachem Rosensaft
Huffington Post


June 1, 2008 - I never thought I'd see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for "gotcha" politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain's supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them.

It started yesterday when the RNC put out a statement slamming Obama for referring to Auschwitz as he related a family story on Memorial Day. Instead of merely asking for clarification, the RNC smeared Obama's "dubious claim," and suggested -- tongue in cheek -- that perhaps Obama's uncle "was serving in the Red Army." They went on to say that the story raised questions "about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief."

It turns out that Obama's great uncle -- the brother of the grandmother who largely raised him -- served in the 89th Infantry Division of the United States Army, which liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald. But astonishingly, that only served to fan the flames for those on the right who saw an attempt to use the heroic service of Obama's uncle against him. In their breathless attempt to damage Obama, Fox News has stooped to a level that is truly depressing.

This morning on the program Fox and Friends, one of the hosts said: "It wasn't Auschwitz. It was a labor camp called Buchenwald." Just in case the point was missed, she repeated. "It wasn't Auschwitz, it was a labor camp. You would think you would want to be as specific as possible if you are telling one of these anecdotes." Meanwhile, a news "crawl" at the bottom of the screen reinforced, in bold letters, that this was "a work camp, rather than an extermination camp."

Here are some facts about Buchenwald, which is one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. At this "work camp," prisoners were often worked, starved, tortured, or beaten to death. Sometimes they were simply murdered. Roughly 250,000 people were imprisoned there between 1937 and 1945, many of them Jews. Over 50,000 people lost their lives.

At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes. Buchenwald was also a site for the infamous Nazi "medical experiments" on prisoners, which were often nothing more than crude and horrific forms of torture.

To take just one anecdote about the "work" done at Buchenwald, prisoners had to build the camp road, and camp guards used to shoot those who were not carrying stones that were heavy enough. In the final days before liberation, some 10,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rossen were marched to Buchenwald, adding to the horrific scene that awaited American troops.

On April 4, 1945, Ohrdruf became the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American forces. U.S. troops -- including the 89th Infantry Division -- found a scene that was vividly described by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission: "The scene was an indescribable horror even to the combat-hardened troops who captured the camp. Bodies were piled throughout the camp. There was evidence everywhere of systematic butchery. Many of the mounds of dead bodies were still smoldering from failed attempts by the departing SS guards to burn them."

Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley would tour the camp in the days ahead. Eisenhower was so moved by the atrocities at this "work camp," that he wrote to his wife Mamie that it was "beyond the American mind of comprehend." He made both his own men and all of the citizens of the German town of Gotha tour the camp. He wanted the Americans to know the evil that they were fighting. He wanted German citizens to see what had been done in their name. After this tour, the Mayor of Gotha and his wife hanged themselves.

Many of the terrible photographs and videos that we have seen of the Holocaust come from these days. Eisenhower said that he wanted, "to give first-hand evidence if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'" The carefully documents attrocities at Buchenwald are thus part of the record that we use to confront anyone who would deny the horror of the Holocaust.

The men who liberated Buchenwald were heroes, plain and simple. That includes Barack Obama's great uncle. In their march across Europe, the 89th Infantry Division suffered over 1,000 casualties, with over 300 men killed. In their liberation of Buchenwald, they put an end to one of the most horrible concentration camps of the 20th century. We must honor them, just as we must remember each and every victim of the criminal Nazi regime.

To those who continue to use this story to damage Barack Obama, I have a simple question: have you no shame? You attempts to diminish his uncle's service for your own political gain says a lot more about you than it does about Barack Obama.

[Menachem Rosensaft is the head of the International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors. ]

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