Progressives Must Build on Obama's Organizational Breakthrough

While Obama's foreign and economic policies position him as a moderate Democrat, many progressives hope that if he wins, his administration will be more open to progressive policies than were the preceding Clinton and Carter regimes. The greater the size of his win, the more that is likely to be true. The more Democrats in Congress, the more wiggle room progressives will have to craft majorities on problems such as economic regulation, health care, taxes, climate change, and military spending.

Regardless of the exact balance of power that emerges in Washington over the next two years, however, the Obama campaign has already created a shift in the balance of power in U.S. politics which is likely to last a generation. I am referring to the qualitative changes in organizational effectiveness which the campaign has brought to the Democratic party. In voter registration, mobilization, and fundraising, the Obama effort has displayed a seriousness that the national Democratic party has not shown in my lifetime. The latent energies gathered by this mobilization can be used by progressives to ensure that an Obama victory is not mired in the politics of centrist compromise.

"The Obama campaign has united web and field recruitment to wage one of the largest voter registration drives of a modern campaign," Ari Melber wrote in The Nation recently. Democrats in the battleground state of Pennsylvania have 500,000 new voters this year. "Election officials throughout Illinois are digging out from under a record number of last-minute voter registration requests," wrote the AP last week. "Democrats Hope to Defy Odds in Mississippi", the The New York Times headlined, on the strength of 170,000 new voters. As for the youth vote, "Rock the Vote alone has recruited 2.3 million under-30 voters - more than double the number it helped register in 2004 - while other groups including Student Public Interest Research Groups, HeadCount and Declare Yourself expect to add millions more." Latinos, Blacks, and others have been targeted up to the last minute to increase the voter rolls.

Throughout the country, the campaign has mobilized volunteers on an unprecedented scale with the focus on turnout. With hundreds of field offices open, it has deployed volunteers volunteers are deployed to canvass neighborhoods and identify Obama-leaning voters. In the blue state of Massachusetts, hundreds of volunteers are dispatched to neighboring New Hampshire every weekend, reports The Boston Globe. The massive voter databases that are resulting from this effort will not only help Democrats turn out support for Obama but will form the foundation of turnout efforts for national and state races going forward.

The Obama campaign also uses extensive Internet mobilization efforts, reaching voters through Facebook, MySpace, email , TouTube, and text messaging. Building on the methods developed by MoveOn, supporters are urged to donate, to hold debate watching parties in their neighborhood, and to make outreach calls to voters in swing states from their homes, using convenient lists and scripts provided by the campaign.

The campaign's fundraising has surpassed all records. The campaign announced that it added 632,000 new contributors in September for a total of 3.1 million contributors. It took in $150 million in September alone and $600 million total. By comparison, the Kerry campaign in 2004 had only 2.6 million names on its e-mail outreach list and raised $249 million in the whole campaign.

Needless to say, a donor base of 3.1 million people is a formidable political force. "The party that spent decades stifling voter turnout, from illegal suppression to court-sanctioned ploys like ID requirements, could find electoral salvation depends on the ability to register its own new voters. Couple that grassroots pressure with an economic crisis stoking intense bipartisan populism, and a 'new politics' might really be on the horizon," concluded Melber.

Obama's effective campaign organization and disciplined message build on his personal skills as an organizer. His track record as a community organizer in Chicago has frequently been discussed, and he got his start in voter registration as director of Project Vote in Chicago in 1992. The contrast with the campaign methods of Bill Clinton, whose politics were based on a "triangulation" strategy that distanced him from the Democratic party and its Congressional representatives, could not be more stark.

The Howard Dean 50-state strategy helped lay the groundwork for the current mobilization. By "expanding the battlefield" to the formerly red states of Indiana, Missouri, Georgia, and North Carolina, the effort energizes Democrats who not only put their own states in play for Obama but become a factor in Congressional, state and local races.

Obama has recreated a Democratic party machine in which progressives can play a significant part and which has mobilized a potentially progressive-leaning base of new voters. It is now up to us to master the new organizational methods and use them to appeal to that base to mobilize support for progressive politics on a national scale.

Echoes of inspiration

In the past week I had the opportunity to hear two speakers and see a movie that reminded me of the richness of the many waves of progressive struggle I have been privileged to witness and support in my lifetime.

What happens when aging revolutionaries turn into hippies? Kendall Hale, whom I remember as a singer in New Harmony Sisterhood, a popular Boston women's political band of the 1970s, has now written Radical Passions, a memoir of her life in the antiwar, new communist, women's, housing, and solidarity movements. As became apparent when she read from her book at a Boston event last week, she has now discovered her spiritual side. "We didn't have the tools back then to deal with the problems we faced," she says. "We didn't know about mindfulness." Hale has not given up on the socialist ideals of her youth, but is striving to fuse them with the soulful energies that are the flip side of the 60's consciousness which formed our generation.

A italk by Helen Caldicott reminded me of the anti-nuclear struggles of the 1980s which ended the cold war, tellingly recounted by James Carroll. She was hosted by WAND, the liberal women's peace group, which drew an affluent suburban crowd. Caldicott showed her familiar incisive, fearless ability to analyze the dangers and opportunities in the current situation. The baby which she held aloft to dramatize the instinctive human desire for peace in a memorable photo years ago attended the talk, now a young adult. To tell you the truth, my sharpest memory of Helen Caldicott from the 80's was her verbal assault against kleenex. I have carried a cotton handkerchief every day of my life since I heard those words.


The movie Battle in Seattle memorably dramatizes the anti-globalization protests at the 1999 WTO conference. Can tree-huggers, turtle-lovers and anarchists stop the rape of the planet by governments doing the bidding of amoral corporations? In this film, protest rallies are treated as an extension of the war-movie, cop-show genre. Both sides are humanized as a plot weaves together protesters with a love interest, a policeman and his pregnant wife, the mayor, the Medecins sans Frontieres representative, and the African statesman who angrily denounces the developed world's monopoly on trade. After fiercely resisting daily police assaults on the right to protest, the demonstrators win as the WTO summit adjourns in disorder. The scenes of violence against protesters seem all too real after what we saw last month at the Republican Convention in St. Paul. While the political issues at stake are not examined in depth, they are presented, and the movie site links to Who Controls the World?, which is rich with anti-globalization resources.

With this rich legacy of struggle as a backdrop, the battles of today are pressing. The rejection by the House of Representatives of the Wall Street bailout, then its passage four days later, are a memorable series of events that indicate the fluidity of the political situation. A "teachable moment", says Dennis Kucinich. "The American people are bitter. They are angry, and they are confused," says Bernie Sanders. The confluence of a presidential election and a financial crisis are bringing to the surface questions about the nature of the capitalist system which have rarely before been debated so openly. An economic system which cannot stabilize itself and cannot provide for the well-being of the people who live under it, is suddenly exposed as irrational, ungovernable, and unreliable. There is much to discuss.