Lick your wounds and get back in the game

I just watched the Alex Wagner show on MSNBC (11 a.m. Central time) and am having one of those deja vu moments that come along unexpectedly in our lives. The discussion centered around Van Jones' new book, Rebuild the Dream, which describes what happened to the grassroots surge that got Barack Obama elected in 2008. Most of us thought the morphing of Obama for America into Organizing for America was going to be chapter two in the story to move our country away from the destructive policies of the past to a healthier, saner political reality.

As it turned out, we were misled. The panelists on Wagner's show agreed that, rather than firing up the millions of voters who worked to elect Obama, DFA was co-opted by the Democratic National Committee as a campaign tool rather than an activist network. I guess this should not be surprising since politicians are, first and foremost, politicians. If you don't get elected, you become what politicians fear the most - irrelevant.

Once Obama was inaugurated, the message to his base seemed to be, in the words of a Rolling Stone writer: "I got this." In other words, thank you very much and now go home. This was especially apparent during the debate about health care reform. As much as we tried, the Obama administration was not interested in the solid evidence in support of a single payer system. We've basically wasted almost three years with no powerful, persuasive message about why Democrats are better at building and protecting an equitable economic system for all Americans. At the same time we progressives were disbanding and thinking we had the reins of power, the tea partiers got better organized and more vocal. Backed by boatloads of cash from corporate powers, groups like Americans for Prosperity moved their operatives into place, and you know the rest of the story.

Van Jones said it best. We assumed too much about the role of the presidency and President Obama in particular. We thought we had won the game, but the election of 2008 was just the starting whistle. It sounds contradictory, I know, but even as we were pushed aside as unnecessary in the fight for justice, we should have insisted on keeping our mass movement alive and functioning. Thanks to the courageous actions of the Occupy Wall Street activists, we are now talking about income inequality instead of the national debt. But what's next?

President Obama seems to be coming out of his self-imposed "compromise" mode and is finally drawing sharp lines of difference between what Democrats value and what Republicans have done to the majority of us. We need to help the Obama-Biden campaign in Missouri, but, more than that, we should do everything we can individually or en masse to spell out the stark differences between the parties and what is at stake in November.

The latest appeal from President Obama for a campaign donation begins, "It's hard to believe, but the stakes in this election are even higher than in the last one. Nothing less than the fundamental promise of America - -who we are as a people - - is on the line."


"Who we are as a people." One of the panelists on the Alex Wagner show said that the Republicans are not even trying to hide what they are really all about this time. We've always known that they push the social hot buttons to distract voters from the wholesale theft of our standard of living that's been their core agenda for decades. But now they are not just using those social issues to mask their evil intentions, they are pushing them front and center. Nancy Pelosi said months ago that she has known all along that the anti-abortion mantra was not just about abortion. It's about dragging women and children back into the early 20th century when men had all the power and the wife and kids were supposed to shut up about it. Since the whole birth control debacle, polls show Obama leading any Republican opponent by double digits, and most of that increase is from women.


When the President says what's on the line this election is who we are as a people, he is absolutely right. Now it's up to us to stand firm with faith in the future and ourselves. We must make it clear to everyone we meet that we are proud patriotic progressives determined to make our society more just, more humane, and more democratic. Choose an issue, learn everything you can about it, and ride it as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

APRIL 2, 2012