Tim Egan: "Turns out, having a community organizer in the White House Situation Room was not a bad thing."

Timothy Egan:

You must remember this: “He worked as a community organizer.”

Rudolph Giuliani paused to choke on the words in his speech at the 2008 Republican convention, followed by a gasp, waves of laughter and more ridicule.

It became a punch line, the part of Barack Obama’s résumé that had him working with Roman Catholic parishes on Chicago’s South Side to help the unemployed. The kicker was delivered by Sarah Palin when she touted her own credentials. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities.” MORE...

Ari Melber on "Lesson for Obama: Organizing 101" on The Young Turks (with video)

The Nation with video (13:05):

Nation Net Movement Correspondent Ari Melber joins The Young Turks to talk about Obama's inability since in office to galvanize the public on a grassroots level and to get any legislation passed through Congress. Based on a column by prominent organizing expert Marshall Ganz, Melber criticizes Obama for not polarizing people around the issues, such as health care and the stimulus. Melber discusses Ganz's argument that "you always polarize to move people; that creates the urgency for action...then you have to be realistic enough once you build power to depolarize and to settle or make a deal." Melber says Obama's strategy was the opposite; he placed emphasis on bipartisanship first.

Because of this strategy, Melber says, Organizing for America, Obama's campaign organization that remains tied to Obama, wasn't in a position to mobilize. "When the president was pursuing a strategy of 'let's compromise with everyone,'...OFA wound up being in a very weird position where...there was nothing they were clearly fighting for so there was no strategy," Melber explains.

Melber argues that OFA could have been used in very creative ways, but the administration was too afraid to alienate any Democrats. "I think his folks expected to get a lot more credit for bipartisanship than they've gotten," Melber points out. "They thought that by laying out this whole 'Kum Ba Yah' outreach that the establishment would have given them more room to maneuver [but it's been] quite the opposite."

Giordano: "Want Health Care? Go Door to Door or You Won't Get It"

Al Giordano:

On May 26 I wrote The Summer of Shove Begins, at a time when pundits and bloggers alike were gnashing teeth over whether US President Barack Obama was overreaching in his now successful agenda to have Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor confirmed by early August and to have a health care bill ready in September.

I suggested, as I pretty much always do, that readers ignore the chattering up above and watch the ground game down below and that will decide how the story goes: “the real history will be made, this summer - as during the last two - by the unsung heroes and heroines: the organizers.”

It was a reference to Organizing for America – Obama’s grassroots political arm – and its organizers (you know who you are) who would spend the summer setting up the battle to be waged in this month of September over the problem that has eluded solution for decades in the United States: the now 46 million Americans who don’t have access to health insurance.

Labor Day weekend is here, so let’s bring the patient in for a seasonal check up.

Two days ago, Organizing for America field marshal Mitch Stewart blasted out an email titled The Real Story of August, (a title that resonates with my own May declaration of where “the real history” of the summer would be made). He wrote:

At the beginning of August, President Obama wrote to the OFA community to challenge us to work hard, break through the noise and give the American people a voice in the fight for health insurance reform.

It wasn't easy: With Congress back home, special interests and partisan attack groups went into overdrive spreading lies, and the media seemed to broadcast any story of conflict or division they could find.

But you accepted the President's challenge -- and delivered.

See it for yourself: Check out the latest photos and stories from around the country.

Our strategy for the month was simple: engage the millions of individuals who know we need change to fight the lies and tell the truth, build support for reform, and ensure that support is highly visible while members of Congress are home gauging public opinion. We continued our methodical, battle-tested approach of volunteers reaching out online and offline in every part of the country. We offered the facts, answered questions and engaged those who were ready to get involved.

Stewart provided the following numbers, as any decent community organizer does: 350 town hall meetings were held over the summer across the country with 70,000 attendees. More than 5,000 group visits to local Congressional offices were organized, along with more than 100,000 phone calls to Congress members in support of the President’s health care proposals.

Mass meetings like those held in Missouri by Senator Claire McCaskill and in Ohio by Senator Sherrod Brown have drawn thousands of health care supporters, always with a screaming but small minority of health care opponents just to keep it lively. A similar dynamic was at play last Monday in Skokie, Illinois, when US Rep. Jan Shakowsky held such a session in a 1,300 seat auditorium. A Field Hand who was there reports there were still 500 left outside waiting in line, including a few screwballs chanting “No public health care!” Various shouting matches ensued. Sounds like democracy to me.

Stewart concluded:

Our strategy is working. We are going to win this thing. Americans will finally get the health insurance reform we all need.

And he added a link to On The Ground reports from mass pro-health care rallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, all in the past week. These were mainly held, notably, in Electoral College “swing states” that were in play last November and will be again in the future. As such, they also contain many “swing districts” where members of Congress of either party are vulnerable to challenge and thus more susceptible to the kind of grassroots organizing and pressure from below that is targeted at them.

It’s a two-fer for the Obama organization, as it is impacting the effort to pass national health insurance while also flexing the muscles of its political organization to keep it in shape for the 2010 midterm and 2012 presidential elections.

On Wednesday night, the President will address a joint session of Congress, mainly about health care, and that will be nationally televised. It will be the official kick-off of the fall political season in the United States.

Meanwhile, the pundits and the blogosphere alike have been more obsessed with the game up above. Every utterance by every “unnamed White House source” in the media about what kind of bill might get voted on in Congress becomes the daily bread of commentary, with the usual doses of Chicken Little feathers flying and armchair quarterbacking.

And while the polls show that the American public strongly favors national health care with a “public option,” the media and Internet cacophony over the specifics of the plan have generated considerable confusion.

Democratic pollster Joel Benenson explains in a memo:

82% of Americans say that the U.S. health care system needs either fundamental changes (55%) or needs “to be rebuilt” (27%). (CBS, Aug. 31)

So far, so good, but:

Only 31% say they “understand the health care reforms under consideration in Congress, while 67% say they find them confusing. (CBS, Aug. 31)

…an NBC poll found that initially, only 36% said that the President’s health care plan is “a good idea” while 42% say it is a bad idea. (NBC, Aug. 17).

And he outlines three “talking points” that, when explained to the public, jump that weak support for a specific plan to a clear majority of 53 percent:

• Requirements on insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions;

• Requiring all but the smallest employers to provide health coverage or pay a percentage of their payroll to help fund coverage for the uninsured

• Tax credits to help families and individuals to help them afford coverage

The good news: If those three points are explained coherently to the public, support hardens for a specific plan. Since Congress responds to polling data, that’s important. Those three talking points are the road map to victory.

The bad news: Neither the corporate media nor the blogosphere are going to clarify any of those three points for the public. They're too obsessed with the sideshows up above to achieve any clarity or coherence on the matter.

And this leaves the whole ballgame in a different set of hands in the coming weeks: yours.

Organizing for America is, simply put, the best and only instrument through which regular everyday people can effectively inform and move public opinion to write the outcome of this battle.

What’s clear is that Organizing for America is healthy and strong as an organization. Every task that it said it would do at the beginning of the summer has been complied with. It is an organization that is walking its talk. And it exudes the same competence and trust in community organizing that characterized the Obama campaign of 2007 and 2008.

A lot of people have asked me recently what to do if they want national health care with a public option. I’ve answered that Organizing for America has the plan and specific instructions for what each individual can do. Some have responded, “but what else can I do?” Wake up. There is no “what else.” That is the path, the only one that leads to possible victory on this long elusive goal.

At this point, any health care proponent that isn’t signed up and carrying out the community organizing tasks charted by Organizing for America is self-marginalized from making history here. You can blog or post Facebook status updates until you are blue in the face and it won't change a thing.

You can argue about whether the US House Progressive Caucus and Speaker Pelosi will really vote against a plan that doesn’t include a full public option (knowing these Congressional progressives for many years, I would put very little faith in their ability to stand firm as a group when push comes to shove), or whether Senator Olympia Snow’s “trigger” option, or US Rep. James Clyburn’s watered-down “pilot program” option will or should be taken seriously, or whether the administration should be talking to one side or another about those proposals.

But none of that chatter about the political game up above means spit when it comes to determining what kind of plan can achieve passage.

It’s crystal clear to me that the White House wants a full public option, but that it is Congress that will determine whether it is attainable in September or October of 2009.

It is also evident that, through Organizing for America, the President has unleashed a gargantuan grassroots effort to push Congress and public opinion toward the best possible plan, preferably with a public option. In that, he's done more than the people shouting at him to "do more" have done.

Whether that public option can be achieved immediately (I disagree with those who opine that if it isn’t done now it will never happen, the arc of the universe bending slowly and such) depends entirely on whether enough members of Congress perceive it in their self interest to vote yea on it.

Thus, shouting at the President about what kind of plan he should discuss or not with Congress is the most futile task imaginable. If you’re for the public option, the President is already on your side to the extent that he has the votes in Congress.

And as ought to be obvious, Internet activism doesn’t move Congress. It never has. One has to go out onto the street, knock door to door, staff phone banks and such to bypass the media-fed confusion (and also to break out of your own demographic market niches), and explain those three talking points above to the people. That, and only that, has a chance of bolstering the poll numbers around a specific health care plan with a public option.

So don’t tell me - as some have - that I have to be blogging every day about this – serving only as an echo chamber for a hundred competent health care policy bloggers that are already doing it – when we all know (or should recognize) that blogging and online social networking doesn’t hold any key to victory here.

I’ll say it again, as it is the central message of this essay: If you want health care with a public option, go door to door with Organizing for America to get it. If you do not go door to door or phone bank or do data entry or other support work for such efforts, you’re not going to get it. Period. End of story: Then it will be your fault, not the president’s.

Those are the big, left, outside and from below observations of a correspondent who has just spent half the summer in Honduras doing the ground level reporting that is made necessary because the President’s Secretary of State has botched the US response to the coup d’etat there in ways that have bought time for the coup regime.

(In the event anyone thinks I’m just just shilling for Obama when I tell you that Organizing for America offers your only path to health care with a public option, I’m really not a happy camper when it comes to his administration’s behavior on my own beat of Latin America, but one must have the wisdom to be able to recognize two different policy fronts as two different battles. If the White House or anybody else would like me to spend more time writing or firing people up about health care, my only demand is that they pull Secretary Clinton’s havoc-wreaking incompetence off of this corner of a country called América. Until then, I’m too busy cleaning up after her mess down here, and doing the supervising job that her superior seems too distracted by the health care battle to conduct.)

So what do I know about the health care debate? To look at events in the United States from outside of them, with the perspective that comes from being apart from the US media and Internet echo chambers, is what The Field has done since it began. That, and administering Chicken Little vaccine shots, which, alas, are not yet offered in any health care legislation. The booster shot I just gave some of you – I’ll repeat: Want health care? Go door to door or you’re not going to get it! – was with the small needle.

And I’ve got a big painful syringe waiting for some of the flock that just seem to be clucking for a smackdown. But for now, let’s see if the little needle works.

>

A New Wave of Community Organizers for the Obama Era: “Community organizing has become cool"

Peter Dreier (TPM Cafe):

I usually have about 20 students in the Community Organizing course I teach each year at Occidental College in Los Angeles. So far, 42 students have registered for next fall's class.

I haven't all of a sudden become a more popular professor. There's clearly something happening on American campuses and in the broader culture that's tapping the pent up idealism of today's students. An important element of that new mood on campus is Barack Obama.

More and more college students want careers where they can help make society more humane, fair, and environmentally sustainable. They want to put their skills, their idealism, and their energy to work promoting social justice. My colleagues around the country tell me that the same thing is happening on their campuses. A growing number of students are asking faculty and staff about internships, summer jobs, and careers working with non-profit, advocacy, and grassroots organizing groups. Why wait on tables when you could be changing the world?

That's what reporter Sara Rimer learned when she interviewed college students (including several of mine) for her article in this Sunday's New York Times, "Community Organizing Never Looked So Good."

Given that headline, and the fact that it appears in the Fashion & Style section, you might think that Rimer asked students what they were wearing to the next protest demonstration. But, in fact, hers is a serious piece of reporting about what today's student activists want to do when they graduate. Many of them want to become community organizers, inspired by our new president.

Fortunately, there are many more opportunities today to work for social change than there were when I was in college in the 1960s or even when Obama was in college (at Occidental and Columbia) in the 1980s. The number of nonprofit organizations engaged in the struggle for justice -- community groups, unions, environmental and consumer groups, public health and food justice groups, civil rights organizations, women's and gay rights groups, fair trade and anti-sweatshop groups, groups advocating for children, for the disabled, for the elderly, and for immigrants -- has mushroomed dramatically. In addition to the thousands of issue-oriented advocacy groups, there are many publications, think tanks, and, of course, websites that promote progressive causes, most of which didn't exist even 20 years ago.

As Rimer discovered, community organizing groups and networks like ACORN, PICO, DART, the Center for Community Change, the Industrial Areas Foundation, National People's Action, U.S. Action, Gamaliel Foundation (whose Chicago affiliate hired Obama after college) and others are getting more applicants from college students and recent graduates. Many of them already have some organizing experience through college internships, summer jobs, or volunteering for political campaigns like Obama's presidential crusade.

Perhaps because so many of them get practical experience while still in college, working with off-campus groups, today's student activists are much more pragmatic, savvy, and patient than their counterparts in the 1960s. They are skeptical but not cynical. They are not paralyzed by old ideological battles or identity politics. They respect differences of opinion, including religious beliefs, as well as the right to dissent. They understand that they can disagree with their government and still love their country and its ideals. They want major changes in our institutions and policies, but they know that people need to win stepping-stone reforms before they can envision a different kind of world.

For sure, student interest in political activism and community organizing was going on long before the Obama campaign. In the 1990s, students mobilized against sweatshops and for "fair trade" consumer products, in support of "living wages" for university employees, and around global warming and "greening" America's college campuses. The AFL-CIO began the Organizing Institute, a summer internship program for college students who want to learn about union organizing. After years of watching the conservative movement spend millions of dollars to recruit and train activists on campuses, and plug them into jobs with politicians, think tanks, and right-wing publications, liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, Wellstone Action, Democracy Matters, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and others began to focus more attention on college students -- to invest in the next generation of progressives. In addition, over the past decade, a growing number of colleges and universities embraced the idea of "service learning," linking classrooms and the community.

But there is no doubt that Obama's campaign and victory lit a spark, accelerating student interest in politics in general and grassroots organizing in particular. Millions of young people, including college students and recent graduates, got involved in the Obama campaign. Thousands learned organizing skills at Camp Obama training sessions. The efforts of these young people -- as well as the expanded youth vote -- made a big difference in Obama's triumph last November. Many of the students who volunteered in the campaign got a taste of organizing and now want to pursue it as a career.

In many ways, Obama has given community organizing a new cache. He has described the three years he spent after college as a community organizer in Chicago as "the best education I ever had."

Obama has provided enormous visibility and credibility to organizing as a career and profession. Obama's campaign stump speeches typically included references to America's organizing tradition. "Nothing in this country worthwhile has ever happened except when somebody somewhere was willing to hope," Obama explained. "That is how workers won the right to organize against violence and intimidation. That's how women won the right to vote. That's how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be beaten, and some went to jail and some died for freedom's cause."

Change comes about, Obama said, by "imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before." His campaign slogan -- "Yes, We Can" -- was borrowed from Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers movement

Credit must go, too, to Sarah Palin, who attacked Obama's community organizing experience during her Republican National Convention speech in St. Paul last September, and then, along with John McCain, went on the warpath against ACORN, one of the nation's largest and most effective community organizing groups. The GOP assault triggered a huge backlash not only among community organizers all over the country (who were happy for the free publicity) but also among newspaper columnists, editorial writers, readers who wrote letters to the editor, and bloggers. In the aftermath of that attack, more newspapers and magazines published stories about community organizing -- describing and praising the activists who improve communities by bringing people together and giving people the confidence and leadership skills to promote change -- than had been written in the entire previous decade.

Despite our serious economic crisis, the country's mood has changed for the better. Americans are worried about their jobs and their families, but they still give the new president high marks for moving quickly to address our problems. This is important, because significant improvements only occur when people believe that things should be changed and that they can be changed. Obama has restored a sense of possibility and hope to American politics.

Even so, if Obama has any chance to be a transformational President, like FDR, it will require a powerful progressive movement that aligns itself with, but isn't controlled by, the young president and progressive forces in Congress. There is plenty of evidence from polls that Americans want a more activist government to address the problems of economic insecurity, health care, the environment, and U.S. military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. To win universal health care, labor law reform, or legislation to reduce global warming -- and to stimulate the troubled economy to promote shared prosperity and green jobs, and rescue people from foreclosures -- Obama will confront fierce resistance from powerful forces in the business community and their friends in Congress.

The Millennial generation - Americans now under 30 - voted overwhelmingly for Obama. They are also ready to follow Obama's lead and join the growing ranks of progressive activists.

They also know, however, that grassroots organizing is only one way to bring about change. Increasingly, for example, students who go to law school want to use their legal talents to right wrongs rather than represent banks, corporations, and developers. Fortunately, there are a growing number of public interest law firms around the country that link lawyers to social movements concerned about the environment, housing, consumer protection, immigrant rights, and other issues.

Likewise, students interested in medicine and health care can take many paths to help change our failing health care system. A growing number of students are pursuing careers in public health, where they can combine their concerns about the environment, medicine, social justice, and creating livable communities. Or they can go to medical, nursing, or nutrition school and use their skills by working in community clinics that serve low-income people and agitate for change with such groups as Physicians for a National Health Program, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the California Nurses Association.

Whatever profession they pursue -- architect, city planner, teacher, biologist, engineer, nutritionist, accountant, aide to an elected official, child care provider, lawyer, or physician, among them -- they can use their talents to help move society in a more progressive direction or to protect and defend the status quo. They understand that it isn't simply a matter of having skills. It's a question of what values those skills will be used to promote -- and what kinds of organizations they work for.

Obama has already helped change the nation's mood -- and helped to inspire a new generation of organizers and activists. More and more young people want to pursue a career with a conscience.

But will the nonprofit groups that help advocate and organize for change have the resources to employ them? Many environmental, community, and other groups that do this work are facing difficult times, since they depend on members' dues, foundation grants, bake sales and other fundraisers to keep their organizations afloat. And will today's young people be able to pursue their ideals if they can't afford to stay in college, or if they are saddled with college loans that they can't afford to pay back on an activist's salary?

Here's another way that Obama, and Congress, can help. They have already expanded the federal budget for AmeriCorps, the nation's major community service program. But what's needed is a major commitment similar to the GI Bill that gave returning World War 2 veterans funds to attend college. America should guarantee all students in two- and four-year colleges financial assistance -- allowing them to graduate debt-free -- if they pursue careers in public and community service. This means encouraging doctors and nurses to work in clinics serving the poor, architects and planners to work for nonprofit groups building mixed-income housing, teachers to work at public schools in low-income areas, engineers and technicians to work with organizations that design and install "green" technologies in our homes and workplaces, and community organizers to work with groups that help people help themselves, through their faith-based institutions, neighborhoods, and schools, in the great American tradition of voluntarism.

A character in George Bernard Shaw's play, Back to Methusaleh, says, "You see things and you say, 'why?' But I dream things that never were, and I say, "why not?'"

That's the essence of an activist -- someone who doesn't just criticize awful conditions, but tries to change them, not on his or her own, but with others. We endured eight years of White House contempt for the practical idealism that makes change possible. Obama has restored Americans' faith in themselves.

You can find that new mood on almost every college campus today.

When a skeptic asks me if the students in my community organizing class have what it takes to change the world, I'm proud to say: Yes, They Can.

Barack Obama

Alinsky: "Never go outside the expertise of your people."

Al Giordano takes on John Judis, who writes:

"I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go.

Giordano, after quoting Judis (above) chides him and the "high brow Gospels According to Paul Krugman"... "(and the NY Timesman's frat boy cheerleader squad in some corners of the blog world)" for knocking the Stimulus Bill and Obama and as well as union members and blogospheric activists for1) failing to make "the Stimulus Bill bigger" and 2) refusing to be "adversarial to the popular president." Giordano argues that this misunderstands the current state of affairs and says that comparisons to Huey Long and FDR are off base:

At present, Barack Obama is far more popular among union members than the leaders of those unions. He is more popular among MoveOn.org members than the organization is.
(snip)
The only popular movement that has been constructed in the United States in decades is, in fact, the one that the Obama campaign built over the last two years with its emphasis on training and deploying real organizers. They went out there among the rank and file with the credo of "respect, empower, include," and the results are here today in front of everyone's noses. (And, let's be honest about this point, too. For the various tantrums of teeth-gnashing from some declaring that Organizing for America - the 2009 manifestation of the Obama organization - has somehow fallen short: what other entity on the left in the US has displayed, this year, the convocational power to organize 3,500 house meetings in a matter of a few weeks?)

In short, Giordano says there is no effective left-wing army of organizers to actually take on Obama from "the outside." He compares Judis to "house intellectuals who "have no 'popular movement' to move, because they haven't rolled up their sleeves to organize one on the local level."

Barack Obama

"The End of Activism and the Renaissance of Organizing"

Al Giordano:

Booman, thoughtful as usual, comments on my correction-critique of claims made by Open Left blogger Chris Bowers that Obama's "silence" had somehow been "deafening" regarding the Stimulus tug-of-war in Washington. Still, I thought Booman's title, Philosophical Differences in Activism, and its implicit presumption that we're all part of something called "activism" (or even all on the same side in politics) could use some punk-rock negation from me.

That's probably my fault, for not saying something explicitly which I will shout from the mountaintop right here, right now:

I am not an activist.

I don't believe in activism.

I think activism, as it is generally practiced in the United States, is more often than not a cop out and an excuse by some to avoid doing the heavy lifting of organizing.

What is the difference, you might ask, between activism and organizing?

To me, it's this:

Activism is the practice of preaching to the choir, rallying the already converted, and trying to convince other "activists" to do your work for you (say, call your Congressman, or write your Senator for or against a piece of legislation). Activists like to make declaratory "statements," hold "meetings," invite other activists (usually fairly hegemonic of the same socio-economic demographics as them), engage in group "process," make "decisions," veto (or attempt to do so) others from taking initiative outside of the groupthink that too often happens in activist projects, declare "party lines," enforce them, and claim that one is part of a "movement" even when there is no evidence that one really is.

Activism seeks media attention through protests and other means, errantly thinking it will draw others to its cause by doing so. This dominant tendency in "activism" becomes a circular, self-reinforcing, self-marginalizing, chest-thumping, bureaucratic and anally-retentive activity and a big waste of time with little impact on the issues or policies it seeks to change or defend.

Organizing is something completely different: It is based on attainable and quantifiable goals (be they small, as in, "put a stop sign in the neighborhood," or be they large, as occurred last year: elect an underdog as president of the United States). Here's a simple yardstick by which to measure: If it doesn't involve knocking on doors, making phone calls or otherwise proactively communicating with people demographically different than you, it's not organizing. If it doesn't involve face-to-face building of relationships, teams, chains of command, and, day-by-day, clear goals to measure its progress and effectiveness, it's not organizing. If it happens only on the Internet, that's not organizing either.

Clearly, both tendencies involve some similar activities. An organizer may call everybody in the neighborhood (or go door to door) to get something done, whereas an activist will call those he knows already agree to recruit them to make some kind of statement that he believes - usually futilely - is toward getting something done. And once an organizer or group of organizers has built an effective organization or base, some of the tools of activists (i.e. "call your Congressman") can then be deployed effectively. But that shouldn't cause activists to think that if they do that absent a locally based organizing campaign that it somehow rises to the level of organizing or is the same thing - or even on the same side of the barricades.

What's happening now is that, with the ringing in of 2009, the Community Organizing Renaissance is so clearly established that many dogmatic activists are in a kind of panic and some are even lashing out at the organizers (including the Community Organizer in Chief) to lecture us that we must do things their way. Some even go so far as to condescend to us, imply that we're Kool Aid drinkers, blind fanatics, or lockstep brownshirts, because we are calmer and more optimistic - although not less busy - than they are at this point in history. To which I can only say: Fuck them.

On some level, they must notice, if even unconsciously, that the organizers won, in 2008, so many of the battles that the activists paid lip service to for 30 years but had failed to achieve: constructing a multi-racial and multi-generational progressive movement in the United States, attracting millions of generally apolitical or apathetic people - regular folks that had rejected and shunned the activists and their ways for so many years - to take part in it, organizing neighborhoods and towns down to the precinct level, and changing American history in the process.

The current manifestation of this tension is, for activists, as always, the current "big conflict" in the media. Today it's the Stimulus Bill. Tomorrow it will be something else. Activists generally take the queues from the mass media and its conflicts-du-jour. Some seem to have grown addicted, in a way, to the adrenaline rush of the daily poutrage: the tantrum as aerobic exercise. They then go through the same routines over and over again: Insist that "this is the most important thing," that everybody else must recognize that and drop everything else to protest with them, and often with a recommendation for "action." Today it's to call members of Congress over a hodgepodge of concerns regarding the Stimulus Bill: Throw out the tax cuts! Keep this or that worthy program in it! Don't compromise not one inch with Republicans!

I just yawn.

And I laugh, since when Washington debates, in 2009, whether a Stimulus package should cost $900 billion or $600 billion, we've come a long way from when Congress rejected a $16 billion economic stimulus proposed by President Bill Clinton. If there are worthy things that don't make it into the final form of this Stimulus Bill, they're mostly things for which the votes exist in Congress to pass them in other legislation later on.

Often, activists demand that others who have done the organizing that they did not do must adopt their tactics and mission, oblivious to the reality that those tactics have not worked. (Often, they end up calling on us to do something we've already planned to do, but on a more carefully strategized timeline that requires laying other foundations first - and then they'll try to take credit for having "pressured" us into doing it, pat themselves on the back, and proclaim themselves "owners" of our labor, again. They also generally claim that it was a "movement" that somehow forced us - or the political leaders - to do it, but let's face it: they have not built an authentic movement or any significant base rooted in geography, and they delude themselves each time they insist that they do.)

There's been a lot of activity today on various "Netroots" blogs with such activist demands to call Congress on different aspects of the Stimulus Bill. But none have organized for any kind of accountability or measurement to find out just how many calls they have generated or even to whom. I figure that if you add up the entirety of all the Netroots pleas for people to call their legislator in Washington, that they generated, cumulatively, less than 1,000 calls today, and probably much, much less than that. But let's be generous and say it's 1,000: Divided among 535 members of Congress, that's an average of less than 1.9 per legislator, and even that smattering of calls ended up being with different and uncoordinated messages, sometimes conflicting, other times with talking points based on errant "facts" which only end up generating laughter and mockery by the staffers that answer those phones, and deservedly so, for their ineptness and lack of seriousness about the true facts of each issue.

On a certain level, they must be at least subconsciously aware of their own incompetence, which is why they call on Obama or others to do their work for them, often with macho posturing to infer that if he doesn't do as he's told he somehow lacks backbone. (Actually, the opposite is more true: backing down to pressure is precisely what reveals lack of a backbone!) And if we don't jump on their makeshift bandwagons, we're portrayed as somehow afraid to challenge the man, too. Well, fuck them twice, then.

So, back to Booman's post (I hope it's clear that I'm not saying fuck him): If I've so far left room for people to presume that I'm on the same side of the barricades as those I'm correcting, I hope I've now cleared that up.

Organizers don't play on the same field as activists, although many activists will insist otherwise.

Chess is chess and checkers is checkers, and while the boards look the same, they don't ever happen on the same set of squares at the same time. I consider myself 100 percent autonomous and independent from people of those purely activist tendencies, and don't find them to have shown themselves to be effective at changing much of anything - more often they screw things up for their own causes and for ours when we've allowed them near enough to do so.

I do think one question that Booman raises deserves a response. He writes, summarizing Bowers:

How are Obama's minions supposed to know what to advocate if they are not provided with better guidance?

Giordano glosses over this point as he explains how Organizing for America is proceeding and why they are proceeding in that way. Giordano's insights into organizing are incredibly valuable and accurate, but they don't address Bowers' concerns. And there are issues of concern that Bowers did not raise in this particular piece but which have been obviously disturbing the whole OpenLeft team since early on in the primaries.

Chief among them is what to do when activism and organizing goals are at odds or differ in priorities with the Obama administration and/or the Democratic Congress. Giordano, rightfully, emphasizes the feedback loop features of Organizing for America which allow members to influence policy and priorities. But Bowers is more concerned with what to do when that influence is ignored or rejected.

Left-wing activism isn't synonymous with the Obama administration or the Democratic Party, and it is not desirable that all left-wing activism be absorbed into the Organizing for America borg. Moreover, Organizing for America is just getting started and will always remain somewhat of a lumbering beast. The blogosphere is much more nimble and prepared to act and mobilize at a moment's notice. Rallying opposition to an unanticipated amendment or tactic is something that requires an alacrity Organizing for America is likely to lack.

Hmmm. I don't consider myself a part of anybody's "minions." Nor do I wait for orders from headquarters, and my experience is that most organizers view themselves as similarly autonomous. After all, once you know you can organize and win, you get to pick and choose your battles without waiting for others to choose them for you. Rather, we'll get fired up and busy when an action plan by anyone seems realistic enough to succeed at goals we share. That's why I'm impressed with Organizing for America: because I think its game plan can and will work much as it worked in 2008. Had the Obama organization proposed a different kind of project, one more "activist" and less "organizer," I probably wouldn't be writing or talking about it at all. The presumption that we organizers are "minions" is errant in that sense. It's not that OFA 2.0 comes from Obama that is attracting the organizers. It's that it's an organizing plan that has all the best ingredients to further our shared agendas.

If anything, there's a cognitive dissonance in pleading for Obama to "tell us what to do" especially when it comes from a website that contemptuously, again and again, accuses organizers and optimists of adhering to some cultish "Dear Leaderism." (Really, Bowers and Sirota ought to have that fight among themselves and get on the same page, since they're co-piloting the same plane on a currently erratic path, before lecturing other pilots of other airplanes how to steer. Short of that, could they please put a "black box" in the cockpit so we'll have a recording of the drama when it all blows up?)

As for when Organizing for America's priorities differ from mine or other organizers, it's pretty obvious what we'll do: We'll organize independently. Here's an example: One of Obama's campaign positions was not to rule out nuclear power. (There's even an effort in the Senate to put $50 billion for new nukes into the Stimulus Bill.) My longtime anti-nuclear colleague Harvey Wasserman wrote about it this week in the Huffington Post.

Now, that atomic company welfare provision might get taken out in the Senate, or knocked out in the House-Senate conference committee, or it might become law. But because we in the anti-nuclear power movement were so successful all those years ago and stopped a new generation of reactors from being built, we then went on, as individuals, to more current struggles, and today we're not organized sufficiently to flood the Capitol with sufficient phone calls or pressure to determine the outcome (although some of us - Ed Markey, John Hall - are members of Congress and may be able to kill that $50 billion before it is born anyway; that's another fruit of winning is that many of the winners then become bigger players).

But I don't worry myself about it. Why? Because I know from experience how to organize to stop a nuke from being built or fired up. I even know how to organize to shut an existing one down. These are things I've done in this life: by organizing, going door to door, reaching out and calling people who are apolitical or apathetic and even those that start out disagreeing to win them over, and then by organizing an authentic movement (one that we organized in an era before there was an Internet) at the grassroots, local, level. We did it under the presidencies of Carter and Reagan, and if need be we'll do it under Obama. It doesn't matter if the federal government is with us or not. It doesn't matter if Obama is with us or not: the people will be with us against nukes in their backyards, and we'll win again. So why would I scream hysterically over a piece of legislation when I and others like me are holding the real veto pen in our own pockets?

And the same goes for any other matter upon which we may not like what the Obama administration does: there's no use complaining unless one is willing to back it up with the perspiration of old school Community Organizing. Otherwise, we just end up scraping our fingernails on the blackboard, causing the masses and multitudes to run from the room.

I'm also not seeing much evidence that the 2009 version of the Netroots is able to, as Booman phrases, be "nimble and prepared to act and mobilize at a moment's notice. Rallying opposition to an unanticipated amendment or tactic." I think at present, too many of its denizens are caught up in the "what Obama must do" hysteria and with the exception of Markos Moulitsas - who when he sets out to get something done is tenacious and organized enough to often succeed (hint: he's studied Alinsky) - the rest of the Netroots doesn't have that kind of "alacrity." (And that's why you often see the activists trying to tell Kos what to do for them, and most of that advice, he smartly ignores.)

I think there's a realignment of forces going on right now in the progressive blogosphere and I think the differences will likely grow greater and clearer, and reasonably should. The organizer and the activist tendencies on the Netroots are increasingly oil and water. Any suggestion that some of its B-Listers and I, for example, would be able to collaborate on anything at present do not seem reality based to me, because we don't share even basic concepts of how things get done. And I'm not quite convinced that many of them care that much about winning anyway. It's easier to pout, to be perpetually hysterical and indignant, and to hook up the mass media adrenaline IV to their veins for one more fix.

I meant it when I publicly divorced the Chicken Littles back on September 8. And overall, it's the same tired crowd that lectured "what Obama must do" and was proved wrong throughout 2008 that is squawking, today, "what he must do NOW."

Some have grown since then and others will surely grow to embrace the concept of organizing as the cure for pointless activism. You know who you are and it's great that we're collaborating in the present, especially after rumbling in the past. But I see zero chance that we organizers are going to start walking backwards to embrace the forms of activism that we walked away from each time we stepped deeper into organizing.For those who want to organize, I'm always ready to collaborate.

For those who want to merely do "activism" but somehow call it organizing... Nah.