Columnist's note: The book review below has been reprinted in its entirety with the permission of the book reviewer, Jeremy McGuire. I am grateful to Jeremy for the kind and generous words about my upcoming book, Mr. and Mrs. Grassroots: How Barack Obama, Two Bookstore Owners, and 300 Volunteers Did It. You can read Jeremy's book blog at http://jeremymcguire.com/....
by Jeremy McGuire
This is real Frank Capra stuff, real "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" stuff. I defy anyone, regardless of what they may think of Obama, to walk away from this book not saying this is the way the American political system is supposed to work. All politics is local.
Many books are likely to be written about the historic presidential election of 2008 when Barack Obama became the first black President of the United States, most of these books will be either by objective observers or by high ranking Obama campaign insiders. As valuable and indeed essential as these works are to the student of American politics, none will be as intimate or as passionate as John Presta’s Mr. & Mrs. Grassroots: How Barack Obama, Two Bookstore Owners and 300 Volunteers Did It. If all politics is local, it doesn’t get any more local than this.
John Presta has experience as a journalist, but do not expect journalistic objectivity here: he is unabashedly an Obama loyalist. In this detailed memoir of a remarkable political ascendency, he tells you why. Those who think Barack Obama is the Antichrist, then, may not like it much. No matter. They should read it anyway if for no other reason than to find out what all the fuss is about and how Obama came from nothing to capture the nation’s highest office. Presented here is a study in politics as is should be, politics as I imagine the Founding Fathers dreamed it would be, politics as local neighborhood efforts by small cadres of true believers.
The charge has been made that Obama is the result of the corrupt Chicago political machine. Presta says it’s just the opposite. Obama was the outsider, the impatient upstart who would not "wait his turn," and was opposed by the Chicago establishment when he ran unsuccessfully against the entrenched incumbent congressman Bobby Rush in 2000. Again in 2004 when he came back to challenge the legacy candidate Dan Hynes in the US Senate race, the machine ignored him or treated him as no more than a nuisance. The outcome of that race was just understood as a given, Hynes would win. Hynes had the pedigree, Hynes had the "chops," Hynes had waited his turn and had the support of the powerful Democratic establishment. But Obama had something even more powerful. Obama had the neighborhoods.
"The Democratic Regular Party organizations in Chicago were built on patronage and jobs as rewards for political favors. The group that Obama built was much more abstract. It was built on hopes and dreams." (p.175)
While the Machine candidates had the Labor Union officials, the rank and file, the working class, went for Obama. He was one of them.
"These ordinary people had a lot in common with Obama. Obama and his wife Michelle were still paying off their student loans. Barack sacrificed much in the way of earning power by running for office. they, like many of us, were struggling to pay their bills. They also faced the challenges of raising two young children. We all came up the same way. Michelle and I had a special affinity with him because we were all community organizers."
Anyone who met him then, Presta says, felt the connection; he treated each individual as if there was no one else in the room, he made eye-contact with each one of them." As people got to know him, they grew to love him," Presta says, and he surprised everyone in the Chicago Machine by winning.
This is real Frank Capra stuff, real "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" stuff. I defy anyone,
regardless of what they may think of Obama, to walk away from this book not saying this is the way the American political system is supposed to work. All politics is local.
How he defeated the legacy candidates, the machine candidates, is simple: slowly and incrementally, one neighbor at a time, supported by a growing network of other neighbors, perhaps the most enthusiastic of whom were John and Michelle Presta of the Beverly neighborhood in Chicago, owners of a small independent bookstore called Reading on Walden located on the Walden Parkway, a bookstore that became a mini-headquarters for the Obama campaign.
So, how did Barack Obama get the reluctant but eventually passionate support of these two bookstore owners?
For John, the "Aha!" moment came during the 2004 Democratic Primary campaign during a candidates forum he’d organized at the Bethany Union Church on the south-west side. Congressman Bobby Rush, secure in the nomination and with the backing of the Chicago Democratic Party, could not at first bother to attend. But Presta put the word out to all the media that Rush would be represented by an empty chair, which proved to be a pretty good news hook, attracting cameras and reporters to the event that would otherwise have ignored it. The negative publicity surrounding "The Empty Chair" was what convinced Rush to attend, but he arrived late, telling everyone that he had been stopped by the police on the way, a race-card lie that no one believed. By contrast, Obama, refused to comment on Rush or in any way make him the night’s issue. He was deliberate, spoke persuasively about a new politics that did not rely on partisan "scorched earth tactics," and his vision for a government whose chief function was not winning elections but getting things done for the people.
"He dazzled the crowd," Presta writes, "and frankly, dazzled Michelle and me." (p 42) From that moment on they became tireless foot-soldiers in all his subsequent campaigns.
Obama’s message, his core beliefs, Presta says, have not changed throughout his several campaigns; he does not tailor his message to the audience. Even when speaking on the subject of his disagreement with the Iraq war to the Southsiders for Peace, many of whom held that war is never an option, Obama said, "I do not oppose all wars...just dumb wars." (p. 61) It would have been easy for him to leave that tidbit out and concentrate only on his opposition to the Iraq war, but that would have been dishonest. He’d rather lose a few votes than say the politically convenient thing that he might have to retract or spin later.
John and Michelle Presta, and many more people like them across the country, built a grassroots, and ultimately a "netroots" internet campaign for their guy that proved unstoppable. By the time of the 2008 presidential election, even the Chicago Democratic Establishment embraced Obama because he did what they most respect: he won. He caught all those who opposed them, the Clintons first and then the Republicans, by surprise. It was the passion, it was the faith, and it was the bone-crushing hard work that did it as well as the certain knowledge that elections are won, not through the endorsements of any PAC or party establishment, but one neighbor at a time. All politics is, indeed, local.
Obama emerges from this narrative as one of those once-in-a-generation historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who, quietly and with a minimum of drama, transcend politics and history, who "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus," and become most powerful as part of the American mythos. We all recognize it, albeit begrudgingly; the Republicans recognize it also and it scares the bejeezus out of them for it may well signal the end of the thirty-year GOP ascendency which began with that other mythic figure, Ronald Reagan. That may explain why they are so intractably opposed to him and anything he proposes, even if the idea was originally theirs. Their aggressive antagonism might just guarantee what they most fear, though, because he will simply rise above them. It would be far better for them to work with him, for to do otherwise could result in their descent as a political force, at least in the immediate future. As it stands now, they appear to be doing everything necessary to acheive the exact opposite of what they need. That is a thing that even Obama does not want; it would weaken the governmental process. Obama is a politician in the best sense of the word, he sees his mission as one of caring for the "polity," which is to say, the American people, all of them, Democrat and Republican alike.
There is much to be gleaned from this story that is applicable in arenas other than the political. It is, after all, drive, confidence and persistence that in the end create success. Enduring failure, ignoring the protests of nay-sayers, making that next phone call, talking to that next neighbor, planning that next meet-up, forging ahead in spite of all but certain failure and the inevitable disappointments and set-backs, enduring through sheer cussedness and a profound faith in the cause until at long last that faith is justified and you bask in the glory of "your guy" standing on a stage in Grant Park acknowledging the cheers of thousands and the tears of many upon his election as the first African American President of the United States.
Mr. & Mrs Grassroots is a must read. I give it my highest recommendation.