One of the many pleasures of the Obama victory was being able to live through a "Tipping Point" experience as described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book of that name. As Kos has pointed out, the Obama campaign made good on the ideas that first arose during the Dean presidential run. And it was the connectedness provided by the internet that was able to deliver the organized community that became the grassroots phenomenon that brought American politics to a new level.
I know it’s a TP moment when I have a concern arise and then come upon four separate pieces in the Traditional Media that deal with the same issue. Right now, what I’m struggling with is the question of transforming the Obama network into a true movement that will bring meaningful change to our government and our communities.
E. J. Dionne started his piece entitled Obama’s Transformational Network with these two paragraphs:
While the nation's capital obsesses over who will be the next pick for Barack Obama's Cabinet, the president-elect's lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama's vast grass-roots network?
Electoral campaigns, like circus tents, quickly disappear after the show is over. But Obama is our first community-organizer president, and he sees the way he got elected as being almost as crucial as the fact that he won. Because of the emphasis he put on organizing, barackobama.com might fairly be seen as the most successful high-tech startup of the last two years.
The L.A. Times had an article called Vast Obama Network Becomes a Political Football which had almost the same beginning:
It is the biggest and broadest American political force ever created -- a vast, electronically linked network of activists, neighborhood organizers and volunteers who raised record amounts of money and propelled Barack Obama to the White House.
Now, as Obama turns from campaigning to governing, his advisors are struggling to harness this potent web of supporters to help him move his agenda over the next four years.
Both of these reports discussed how people were debating whether the network should be inside or independent of the Democratic Party. My feeling is that what is going to develop is some sort of new hybrid that is paradoxically both, sort of a post-partisan wing of the Democratic party capable of transparency and self-criticism.
The November 17th issue of The New Yorker had several excellent articles on the election and its aftermath. The piece that is relevant to this discussion is one called The New Liberalism. Near its end is this in-depth analysis:
Obama, in order to break through the inherent constraints of Washington , will need, above all, a mobilized public beyond Washington . Transformative Presidents—those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way—have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement. Clinton didn’t have one, and after his election, Reich said, "everyone went home."
Obama has his own grass-roots organization, on the Internet and in hundreds of field offices. This is new territory, because those earlier movements had independent identities apart from any President, whereas Obama’s movement didn’t exist before his candidacy; its purpose was to get him elected. Even so, it has the breadth, the organization, and the generational energy of other movements, and it can be converted into a political coalition if its leader knows how to harness it.
Obama’s advisers haven’t yet worked out the mechanics of this conversion. The Internet could be used to insure transparency; almost every activity of the federal government could be documented online, as some state governments have begun to do. The White House could use the vast Obama e-mail list to convey information about key issues and bills, and to mobilize pressure on Congress. Just as F.D.R. used radio and Reagan television to speak to the public without going through the press, Obama could do the same with the Web.
It’s hard to imagine, though, how an electronic "social-network platform" would constitute a movement with the clarity and the coherence of the religious right, or the freedom marchers, or the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The agenda of Obama’s candidacy is a list of issues that have different constituencies rather than a single, overarching struggle for freedom or justice. Throughout the campaign, Obama spoke of change coming from the bottom up rather than from the top down, but every time I heard him tell a crowd, "This has never been about me; it’s about you," he seemed to be saying just the opposite. The Obama movement was born in the meeting between a man and a historical moment; if he had died in the middle of the campaign, that movement would have died with him—proof that, whatever passions it has stirred, it remains something less than a durable social force.
But it was good old sensible Robert Reich, in one of his regular Marketplace commentaries on public radio that aired the day after the election, who best summed it up for me:
Obama's agenda can survive all [the challenges facing it], but only if he continues to mobilize and energize the public behind it. That means creating a new politics, utilizing his vast campaign network of volunteers, grassroots activists and Internet participants and turning it into a movement to take back our democracy from the lobbyists, naysayers, pork peddlers and moneyed interests that normally run things in Washington .
In other words, the real contest is just beginning. Can Obama succeed? As we heard last night, yes WE can.
This is exactly where I want to go, taking back our democracy. I have a vision as to how that might be done here in Florida .
During this past year I got pretty clear that it wasn’t so much I loved Democrats as that I hated the venality, incompetence, and mean-spiritedness of the Bush administration and its supporters in the Right Wing Noise Machine. I began to drift away from partisan politics and began looking at Common Cause. I liked that they concentrated on making government more democratic and responsive. I also became interested in the voter initiative movement as described at the Ballot.org site.
Here in Florida, Common Cause has been trying to get initiatives for two state constitutional amendments on the 2010 ballot for redistricting reform (one for congressional districts, one for legislative districts). I have blogged about this several times and have collected petitions to make it a reality. The amendments are presently getting reviewed by the state supreme court to see if they pass muster. (An earlier version was thrown out). If you want to know more about this go to the FairDistrictsFlorida.org site.
During the Obama campaign I put all that aside and happily joined everyone else phone banking and canvassing and generally had a truly wonderful time. Our neighborhood team recently had a reunion at a Mexican restaurant in order to keep in touch and sixty people showed up. That was very moving. But, can this and other groups stay together? And, if so, what are we going to be doing?
If you participated in the campaign you’ve probably received the survey from David Plouffe asking for feedback on your experiences and requesting input on what direction things should take now.
E. J. Dionne, in the article mentioned above, described part of the survey like this:
Offering a clue as to what Obama insiders are thinking, the survey asked supporters to rank four objectives: helping the new administration "pass legislation through grass-roots efforts"; helping elect state and local candidates "who share the same vision for our country"; training others in the organizing techniques perfected by the campaign; and "working on local issues that impact our communities."
I want to do all of these. And I also want to help create good government and take back our democracy right here in Florida. I strongly believe that the first step for doing this is getting the redistricting initiatives on the ballot and passing them during the election.
Using the social networking skills developed during the campaign, getting the necessary 600,000+ petitions signed would be a piece of cake for the Obama network. People can keep having house parties, but instead of organizing phone banking or canvassing, you sign petitions or take them around for voters to sign.
If this can be successfully achieved, then a light bulb is going to go off in everyone’s head. If we can pass this initiative, why can’t we pass others? And the first one I would suggest would be a constitutional amendment creating a true referendum process, where people would be voting on making new laws or revoking existing ones, and where only a 50% majority is needed along with a smaller petition requirement. Now THAT would be real power to the people. This is what the people at Ballot.org are talking about.
This would also eliminate the bi-annual blarney we have to endure about how we’re filling up the state constitution with ridiculous amendments. (Hey, if that’s the only outlet people have, that’s the one they’re going to use.)
What would really make this idea work would be if someone like CFO Alex Sink would agree to be the spokesperson for it. But, the best thing would be if she could get Gov. Crist to join her in backing the passage of these amendments. That would make it truly non-partisan.
What’s interesting about Crist is that he’s willing to do things like this. He went against his party on restoring rights to felons and on extending early voting hours. It’s quite possible that he is doing these things because he knows they get him national attention which he might parley into a future presidential run. But, to be honest, I don’t care what his motives are as long as we end up with better government.
If the Obama network in Florida can come together on this program then it will happen. I know that it would be difficult if not impossible to get consensus on most policy issues, but I believe we can all agree that we want, in the words of Robert Reich, to "take back our democracy from the lobbyists, naysayers, pork peddlers and moneyed interests that normally run things."
Can I get an "Amen!"
Cross Posted from FlaPolitics.com