First, I'm not going to pretend or explain away vote margins that don't go Barack Obama's way.
Once again, like Ohio, we've got a state where Clinton has won a sea of rural and suburban counties (and metro Pittsburgh going away) and Obama has kept it as close as he could by running large margins in a few (mostly urban) counties and fighting the good fight in some congressional districts where he was sure to lose but benefited from fighting hard to keep the margins tight.
Pennsylvania looks like a 200,000 vote and a 9 point win for Clinton (pending the customary counting of provisional ballots and certification by the Secretary of State.)
In a state like Pennsylvania, in a closed primary and with even more seniors than Ohio, Barack Obama acquitted himself well. If Clinton had won 45.5% of the vote in states where she lost to Obama the overall delegate totals would be much closer right now. They are not.
Obama has ceded at least 10 delegates to Clinton in PA with more to be counted once the at-large and PLEO's are added to the mix. To explain, as Chuck Todd has, that the current delegate margin and popular vote margin in PA is not sufficient to fundamentally change the dynamic of this race is to state what's been obvious since OH and TX finalized their counts.
Senator Clinton will not win the Pledged Delegates or the Popular Vote when all is said and done in June. Her only recourse will be to go to the convention and to contest for MI and FL, states where Barack Obama simply did not campaign and Senator Clinton herself pledged would not count.
Given that, Clinton is no closer to the nomination tonight than she was yesterday; in fact, with every state that she fails to rack up large delegate advantages, she is further away from overtaking Obama. That's the hard truth of Clinton's losses in VA, MD, CO, MN, IA, WI, WA , ME, GA, MS, MO, CT, and NE, ID, AK and on and on and on.
But that's not what I want to address tonight.
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reasons for hope
I want to hark back to something I started this piece with. You can't blame people for voting their perceived self-interest.
That's democracy.
Now, there are those who would propose some alternative to democracy based on some cocktail of the philosophies of Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and a misreading of Plato's Republic or what have you...but I'll take voting and persuasion of my fellow citizens any day.
The question I'd like to pose to folks who support Obama tonight is this: how deep are we in this movement for change?
Are we in this deep enough that we've thought out where we go five, ten and twenty years from now? Are we in this deep enough that we've thought out the scenarios and the hard work we have before us when Barack wins?
How are we going to unite to truly reform health care?
How are we going to unite to forge a peace in Iraq?
How are we going to unite to fight back global warming?
How are we going to come together across lines of race and class to build an equitable economy?
All these goals will take more than the effort of the President.
I remember going to New Hampshire with Jesse Jackson in the 1988 campaign and we talked about how 8% would be a victory since we were at 4% in the polls. We got 8%. And we fought for every last vote. (We narrowly edged out a guy named Albert Gore, Jr. btw.) Yes, ultimately we lost in 1988, but Paul Wellstone paid attention to what we did and used the techniques that Jackson innovated to win a grassroots campaign for the US Senate in Minnesota in 1990.
Things change.
Barack Obama's grassroots campaign won 37% of the vote in New Hampshire in 2008 and lost that primary by less than 8,000 votes. He's currently, whatever Bill and Hillary Clinton and their surrogates would like us to think about the matter, the leader in delegates and the popular vote in 2008.
But this is bigger than Barack Obama for President...
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the stakes
I'm old enough to know something that some of those younger than me often can't quite see.
Those of us inspired by Wellstone and Dean and Edwards and Obama are the future leaders of this nation and the Democratic Party.
When we joined together here on DailyKos to do the Chicago Voices program, I got to see something that those not involved in the day to day administration of that effort could not.
Something is happening in America.
That something is bigger than Barack Obama. It's bigger than DailyKos. It's bigger than the blogs. It's bigger than progressive politics. It's bigger than one election cycle.
Millions of us are getting involved. Millions of us are getting organized and staying organized. And as we do this we are learning.
We are learning not simply how politics works, but we are learning that we have, within ourselves, leadership abilities that we did not initially recognize.
I saw that in the Chicago Voices program. I see that as I meet the volunteers who staff the Barack Obama campaign. I see that in the local bloggers, across the nation, who've made a difference by blogging about politics where it matters, in their own communities.
This powerful new birth of leadership and organization, is, as positive a development as it sounds, not simply a cool trend that we can take for granted...a bonus..it's a necessary development.
The challenges we face as Americans and as citizens of this globe have never been more stark.
The time for forging a lasting coalition committed to progressive change is now. Barack Obama is one part of that process, but his people-powered campaign alone is not sufficient to the task at hand. It's not enough to simply elect Barack Obama President.
We did that once. We elected Bill Clinton and then we "kicked back." What we got for our efforts was a Republican Congress, a Republican President and a political culture that became more conservative year after year. What we have seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and what we see day in and day out in the conduct of the war in Iraq, has been enough to teach us that we need to take a different path.
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there is a better way
We progressives know this in our bones. There's a better way. There's a progressive way of doing politics.
But to see our policies to fruition, to see that they become law, will take something more profound than traditional politics and business as usual.
Barack Obama understands this. It shows in how he's run his campaign.
But we need to do something more.
First, we need to stick together, we need to get unified and organized. We need to consolidate the lessons we've learned. We need to break out of the concept that we all simply work for leaders who run for political office but never consider ourselves up to that task.
If the Barack Obama campaign yields anything in addition to new voters, new volunteers, a revitalized progressive coalition and a new Democratic president...it should also yield new leaders and new elected officials rooted in communities across this land.
And these new leaders will need to pay attention to what just happened in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Not simply how the corporate media and Rovian politics inserted themselves into the process and distracted us from the common task at hand, but also this fact:
People vote their perceived self-interest.
If we are going to build a multi-racial, multi-regional, multi-generational, multi-class coalition to forge progressive policy in this nation, we need to understand this to the bones. We need to understand the reality of this challenge. We need to listen and learn and organize.
Nothing will change in America or on this planet if we don't reach out to all our brothers and sisters in a language they can understand about how progressive politics works for everyone. Our politics is not just for those who advocate for it most ardently.
We may support net neutrality and sustainable development and mass transit, but that advocacy is empty if we can't successfully link those issues to the mortgage crisis and the war in Iraq and the kitchen table politics of main street and the shopping mall. That linking is empty if we can't make those connections clear in simple and straightforward terms that everyone can understand.
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something to think about
We are at work on something bigger than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.
The baby boom generation had the luxury of not having to think about the consequences of burning coal and oil and gas like it was going out of style. Those of us coming after them do not have that luxury. Our children will live with consequences of the choices we make not simply over the next twenty years, but the choices we make right now, over the next two or three or four years.
Will we build a coalition that is able to take effective action, that communicates the importance of changing our energy policy and achieving a sustainable, thriving green economy in clear-cut terms?
Or will we fail?
I don't know the answer to that question.
I support Barack Obama because I want our candidates and our ideas to win.
When one of the Chicago Voices grant recipients challenged me and asked me why I was so involved with electoral politics given all the compromise and the seeming hypocrisy involved, I had a simple answer to that question:
I work on electoral politics because politicians write the laws.
That's no small thing. That's what progressive change is all about. We want new laws and effective regulatory policy. We want to build legislative majorities that create legislation and enact policies that work for every last citizen.
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the challenge
Our challenge is how we communicate what we progressives know and understand to be true in terms that a majority of voters can understand and endorse.
How do our principles and ideals translate into a language that conveys progressive policy in terms of the perceived self interest of the majority of voters?
That's the question, that's the challenge.
I'm not a pollyanna.
What I want, given the stakes and the crisis at hand, is to maximize our effectiveness, to maximize how we organize locally, to bring a new generation of activists together.
I am convinced that Barack Obama is the best candidate to help us do this.
But, to be real, Barack Obama alone is not sufficient. Hell, his campaign has pointed up the challenges any of us face when trying to make progressive change.
The powers that be will distort and degrade and distract and demonize us until the image presented of us will not even resemble what we know to be true or who we see in the mirror.
That's not an excuse, that is our challenge.
Our job is not to tear down, our job is to complete the circle.
And, yes, it's much harder to do the latter than the former.
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we are one people
Barack Obama was right on when he said that. You and I know it's true.
But to communicate that, especially when some of our views have not crossed the chasm to the majority, is the great challenge we all face.
It's on us. Each one of us.
It's 2008. There's no luxury here. There are no easy decades ahead and no easy answers. There's no fat of the land left that we can consume without thought of those who come after.
Our challenge is the same whether we win or whether we lose. We need to understand that deeply. We need to look long to the horizon.
To be honest, I'm not thinking about those of us old enough to make decisions for ourselves. We've lived in the lap of luxury. We've enjoyed the finest fruits of a powerful civilization. We've had the luxury of our days in the sun.
I'm thinking about those who come after us. Our children. Our responsibility. Our hope.
In that light, it's not about who wins or loses a state like Pennsylvania. It's about whether all of us understand the stakes at hand.
It is our job, win or lose, to learn how to communicate that the common interest of humankind is best served by policies that work for all of us.
We are in this together. We need to talk like it. We need to act like it.
And more than seeking to tear down and divide, we need to seek to understand.
That's our message. That's our challenge.
And that's the lesson we need to learn from the verdict of the voters in Pennsylvania.
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EVENTS, MAKE CALLS, TAKE ACTION
