Category Archives: Barack Obama

campaigns that stir up civic participation

I don’t believe that voting makes sense on its own. If all you do is vote, it takes too much effort to become adequately informed, and the payoff is too small. Very few elections are actually decided by a single vote. However, if you work on public problems in other ways, it makes sense to vote as an additional form of influence. Besides, if you’re heavily involved in civic work with other people, they may give you information about the election, which then comes virtually free. And you can persuade them to vote, which multiplies your impact.

The level of local civic engagement is demonstrably much lower than it was even 25 years ago, and that makes it harder to recruit voters. As a response, campaigns could actually organize local civic work as a way of developing supporters. I’ve looked at the websites of all the major presidential candidates, D’s and R’s. Most provide ways to “volunteer,” but that usually means helping the campaign to mobilize voters. Two campaigns claim a much more ambitious strategy: organizing local discussions and work on issues. We don’t yet know the “return-on-investment” in terms of votes for their candidates, nor can we estimate how much positive civic impact these efforts will have. But I think the attempts should be celebrated, and therefore I quote their websites (at the risk of appearing partial to the candidates, which I’m not):

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the Clinton/Obama spat

(A belated comment. …) I don’t think last week’s exchange of accusations was particularly significant; by itself, it won’t affect either campaign. But it did reveal weaknesses that both candidates should address.

For Senator Clinton (whom I refuse to call “Hillary”), it should be a reminder that three of her strengths have concomitant disadvantages. She represents an administration that looks pretty good in retrospect. She has been popular in Hollywood. And she has lots of powerful and wealthy supporters. However, she needs a forward-looking vision, some distance from Hollywood, and a way of mollifying voters who dislike money in politics. Last week, she seemed to be angry because a movie mogul who used to give her lots of money had criticized the Clinton Administration. That was dangerous territory for her.

For Senator Obama, the spat underlined the importance of going far beyond “civility.” When the Senator calls for a new type of politics, the press hears a promise to be more polite to other politicians. That is a promise that Obama will not be able to keep in the heat of a competitive national campaign. Thus he will inevitably be branded as a hypocrite. Besides, although civility may have some value, it is far from adequate. We won’t see civic renewal in America just because our candidates reduce their mean-spirited personal attacks.

A sympathetic reading of Obama’s speeches and writings suggests that he wants to change the role of American citizens in politics (not just the behavior of candidates on the campaign trail). He wants to unleash Americans to develop their own responses to fundamental problems. The press ignores those parts of his speeches because they assume that he is just spouting democratic bromides–it’s all throat-clearing. All they hear is a promise to be more polite to his rival candidates. In order to show that he is serious about civic renewal, Obama is going to have to be concrete about it. That means making arguments for national service, broader economic roles for municipalities, land-trusts, net-neutrality, civic education, public participation in the response to Katrina and future disasters, and possibly charter schools.

three forms of populism in the 2008 campaign

It appears that the next presidential campaign will offer several strong but contrasting flavors of populism:

Sam Brownback asserts that Americans’ traditional, popular, moral values are threatened by the “violence, obscenity, and indecency in today’s media,” by “activist judges,” by “foreign suppliers” of oil, and by the federal government. I happen to disagree with almost all his positions, but the Senator does share the majority’s view of several issues, such as prayer in schools.

John Edwards makes the case that we all belong to one economic community, one commonwealth, and inherit our national prosperity not because of what we do as individuals but because of others’ sacrifices, past and present. “We are only strong because our people work hard.” “We are made strong by our longshoremen and autoworkers, our computer programmers and janitors, and disrespect to any of them is disrespect to the values that allowed for America’s greatness in the first place.” Since we belong to one commonwealth, gross disparities in opportunities are unfair.

I used to believe that this position–while morally valid–was a political dead end. Although we had left many Americans in poverty, more than half of all voters were affluent enough that they didn’t need government except for purposes that are always well funded, such as roads and suburban schools. “Redistribution” meant “welfare,” and the welfare system that had developed since the 1930s was justifiably unpopular. Finally, Americans’ were strongly committed to markets and mistrustful of governments.

But several factors make Edwards’ version of populism more promising today. Federal welfare has been deeply cut; the remaining safety-net programs serve large majorities of Americans. The issue has shifted from income inequalities (which Americans tend to tolerate) to huge inequalities in risk. Most people must finance their own retirements while some get huge golden parachutes, exemplifying a new kind of unfairness. Meanwhile, the latest generation of super-rich people has behaved very badly: Paris Hilton is a potent symbol. Not least, John Edwards is a skillful persuader, a litigator who knows how to read a jury and marshal effective evidence and arguments.

Barack Obama so far represents a different strain of populism. He says that we American citizens should play a central role in defining and solving our common problems. We are in a “serious mood, we’re in a sober mood,” and we are ready to work together. “We are going to re-engage in our democracy in a way that we haven’t done for some time, …. we are going to take hold of our collective lives together and reassert our values and our ideals on our politics. … All of us have a stake in this government, all of us have responsibilities, all of us have to step up to the plate.”

For Senator Brownback, the way to assert our values is to pass laws that he favors and that have majority support. For John Edwards, “the great moral imperatives of our time” are to fight poverty and get out of Iraq. For Senator Obama, asserting our values means deliberating together as a diverse population and developing ideas that may be new and unexpected.

In philosopher’s terms, this is civic republicanism, and it’s truly different from mainstream recent liberal politics. To make it work, Obama will have to overcome two challenges. First, he will have to develop an answer for grassroots Democratic activists who are furious at Republicans and consider the Bush administration to be our nation’s central problem. Obama believes that both parties are responsible for marginalizing citizens, and what we need are broader public coalitions. The Senator will have to find a way to talk to Democratic primary voters who are not in the mood right now for non-partisanship and cooperation. Second, Obama will have to find a way to respect the voice of American citizens while also saying something concrete about issues such as health care and taxes. He needs to respect the public’s voice but also perform the main duty of a candidate, which is to put ideas on the table.

why Obama has lit a fire

There is a remarkable gap between Senator Obama’s actual speech in New Hampshire last weekend (click for video) and the endless coverage and commentary that I have read about it. Reporters and bloggers uniformly take the line that Obama presented himself as someone “new”–as a “change”–and New Hampshire Democratic voters liked him for that reason. Supposedly, they saw him as “new” because of his recent arrival in Washington, his relatively young age, his career in grassroots organizing, and even his race and immigrant background, which make him different from all the other contenders–and worlds apart from the incumbent president.

Novelty would be a superficial reason to “swoon” for Obama; that feeling would soon wear off. But reporters really didn’t pay attention to his speech, which is why they don’t grasp the source of his popularity.

Now, listen, I have to confess that there has been a little bit of fuss about me lately. And I have been a little suspicious of it, because I actually come from a background of community organizing and grassroots organizing and mobilization and empowerment, and so–a lot of reporters of late have been asking me, ‘Well, why are you coming to New Hampshire? What does this mean? You’ve got big crowds. Does this definitely mean you’re jumping in? And this and that and the other.’

What I told them during a press event earlier here today, and what I want to say to you–Obviously it’s flattering to get so much attention, although I must say it’s baffling, particularly to my wife. I actually think that the reason I’m getting so much attention right now has less to do with me and more to do with you. I think to some degree I’ve become a shorthand or a symbol or a stand-in, for now, of a spirit that the last election in New Hampshire represented. And it’s a spirit that says we are looking for something new. [applause] …

It’s a spirit that says we are going to re-engage in our democracy in a way that we haven’t done for some time, that we are going to take hold of our collective lives together and reassert our values and our ideals on our politics. And that doesn’t depend on one person. That doesn’t depend on me or the Governor or a congressman or a speaker. It depends on you.

There’s a wonderful saying by Justice Louis Brandeis once, that the most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen. And that, I think, more than anything is what the election here in New Hampshire represented on Nov. 7. And that is the tradition of New Hampshire, not just in presidential primaries but each and every day: the idea that all of us have a stake in this government, all of us have responsibilities, all of us have to step up to the plate, and as a consequence of everybody … doing just that, we had an outstanding election here in New Hampshire. So I’m here to get some tips from you. [Applause] I’m here to soak up some of that energy. [Growing applause.] I’m here to bask in the glow of the great work that you have done. And I want you guys to remember that. You’re the story, not me. Now that’s hard to understand, because that’s not the politics we have seen just lately.

The Senator then talks about his work trying to “rebuild and renew America”–especially low-income America–through grassroots organizing. He connects his own work to American history, which he sees as a series of popular uprisings led by “pastors, organizers, agitators, and troublemakers” who have had the audacity to hope.

In each and every juncture of our history, there has someone who has been willing to say that we can do better. … We can create a country where everybody’s got a shot, where every child can dream. … And I think what’s been happening over these last several months is people have realized that that kind of spirit has been lost over the last decade. [Applause.] It’s not that ordinary people have forgotten how to dream big dreams; they just think that their leadership has forgotten. [Applause] … And so what happened in this election, not just here in New Hampshire but all across the country, is that voters decided to start paying attention. They looked up and they said, ‘We’re in a serious mood, we’re in a sober mood, and we want to know, how can we rekindle that spirit?’

Pundits have ignored everything in the speech after “we are looking for something new.” (You literally can’t find the rest of the speech with a Google search.) Reporters assume that Obama’s words about citizenship were just throat-clearing, or crowd-pleasing rhetoric, or false modesty. Thus they can’t grasp why people love him.

The public is hungry for more opportunities to participate in solving our grievous problems. It is not only the depth of our challenges that upsets us, but also the sense that we have been shut out of civic life and cannot be part of the solution. A candidate who can genuinely empower citizens will ignite powerful enthusiasm–not among all Americans, but among the politically active who dominate primary elections.

Obama has most of the ingredients he needs to run a persuasive “empowerment” campaign–much more so than Al Gore, John Kerry, or Hillary Clinton. As a community organizer, he has the right resume. (His “home town” of Chicago has been the epicenter of grassroots civic work since the time of Jane Addams.) He speaks eloquently and insightfully about civic participation. What he will need is a list of serious policy proposals for civic renewal. By connecting his rhetoric of empowerment to concrete reforms, he may be able to persuade reporters and other elites to take that rhetoric seriously. They will realize that he really means what he says. And then the fire that he has kindled may begin to burn.

… and that’s my obligation, to make sure that I’m willing to partner with the American people on the common-sense, pragamatic, not ideological agenda that they’re hungry for to meet the challenges that we face [Applause.]

purple nation

We’re just back from a high school reunion in Macon, Georgia. Bush took 58% of Georgia’s vote in 2004, and 96% of the “white conservative protestant” vote in the state. At the reunion, nobody talked about politics, but religion was freely discussed, and it was clear that most participants were conservative and protestant (and white). We live in DC, where only 2% of exit poll respondents described themselves as “white conservative protestants” in 2004, and Bush took just 9% of the vote.

This seems a good time to mention “A House Divided: The Psychology of Red and Blue America,” a recent article by D. Conor Seyle and Matthew L. Newman in The American Psychologist. The authors criticize the omnipresent map of red states and blue states. They contend that this map is not merely a flawed device for representing our situation; it also affects us in troubling ways.

The map is a misleading representation because it organizes America along one dimension and divides all the states into just two categories. In reality, there are differences among Democrats and among Republicans, and there are big regional variations within states. Sometimes, the line between red and blue seems clearly inappropriate. For example, Pennsylvania and Ohio are pretty similar politically; but on the map, Ohio is as red as Utah, and Pennsylvania is as blue as Vermont.

This misrepresentation may have negative effects:

1. It can make the political minority in a state feel marginal and demoralized, although sometimes they have great political potential. (For example, Kerry took Bibb county, where Macon is located.)

2. It can prompt the two groups to move to their extremes, following a well-known pattern in social pyschology.

3. It can instill a sense that we are fundamentally divided into two identity groups, whose members not only vote differently, but also worship differently, eat different food, and hope for different futures for their children. To a large extent, that’s false.

It’s worth contrasting the red-versus-blue scheme with old-fashioned party labels. The “Democratic” label is a cue to think about electoral politics; and electoral politics is about disagreement and competition. To call yourself a “Democrat” may prompt positive feelings among fellow Democrats and negative ones among Republicans–which is fine. Even people who vote differently can get along well when they’re not talking about politics.

In contrast, “red” and “blue” appear to be “unique and overlapping” categories (as Seyle and Newman write). They indicate a person’s culinary taste, regional accent, denomination, race, preferred means of transportation, favorite news source, and practically everything else about him. If we think in such categories, it’s hard to cooperate even when we happen to agree.

Senator Obama was right:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.