Harry Boyte wrote an op-ed for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on Sunday entitled “The work before us is our work, not just his.” Boyte begins:

Over the first 100 days of his presidency, Barack Obama changed his message from “we” to “I.” The challenge for the president, if he is to achieve his administration’s potential to unleash the energy of the nation, is to return to and flesh out “yes, we can” in the everyday work of addressing our common problems.

Obama launched his campaign for president with the idea that “all of us have responsibilities, all of us have to step up to the plate.” He had learned a philosophy of civic agency — that we all must become agents of change — from his days as a community organizer in Chicago. And in extraordinary ways, he used the presidential campaign as a vehicle for taking the message of agency to the nation. … The message was expressed in campaign slogans such as “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” drawn from a song of the freedom movement of the 1960s. …

On Wednesday night, at the news conference marking the first 100 days of his administration, Obama was asked what he intends to do as the chief shareholder of some of the largest U.S. companies. “I’ve got two wars I’ve got to run already,” he laughed. “I’ve got more than enough to do.”

The change has partly reflected the administration’s adjustment to the fierce pressures of the Washington press corps. As Peter Levine noted as early as December 2006, reporters and pundits assumed that Obama’s words about citizenship and involvement “were just throat-clearing.” Journalists and pundits constantly demand that he explain what he is going to do to solve the problems facing the country.

But the general citizenry outside of government is not composed of innocent bystanders. In our consumer-oriented society, we too easily assume that government’s role is to deliver the goods. Dominant models of civic action, as important as they are–deliberation, community service, advocacy–fit into the customer paradigm, as ways to make society more responsive and humane. The older concepts at the heart of productive citizenship–that democracy is the work of us all, that government is “us,” not “them”–have sharply eroded.

The Administration needs our help making a rhetorical shift back toward “we,” and matching that rhetoric with real programs and policies that will allow Americans to play more active and constructive roles. The Kennedy Serve America Act is a step in the right direction–although high-quality implementation will be a challenge. But much more ambitious initiatives are necessary, and they need to go beyond “service.”