{"id":14645,"date":"2014-12-09T15:14:04","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T20:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14645"},"modified":"2014-12-09T15:24:25","modified_gmt":"2014-12-09T20:24:25","slug":"obama-new-organizers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14645","title":{"rendered":"Obama faces the new organizers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Dreier <\/a>has a great piece on President Obama’s background as a community organizer. The priceless photograph above comes from Dreier’s article. I also explore this aspect of the president’s past\u00a0in We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For<\/a>, pp.\u00a0152-161.<\/p>\n

Dreier writes, “But Obama seemed to abandon his affinity for organizing soon after he entered the White House. He tried to be a consensus-builder, eschewing conflict, even with those in Congress and in corporate boardrooms who pledged not only to defeat his policy agenda but also to undermine his legitimacy as president.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, Obama’s consensus-building contrasts with the confrontational style of community organizing that he employed on occasion in Chicago in the 1980s and that he faced recently when he met a group of young\u00a0leaders in the White House. As movingly recalled<\/a>\u00a0by Phillip Agnew, the White House meeting was a frank exchange between\u00a0“a community in active<\/em> struggle against state sanctioned killing, violence and repression” (on one side) and the leader of that very\u00a0state, the former community organizer turned POTUS (on the other). Agnew\u00a0concludes:<\/p>\n

We walked out of that meeting unbought and unbowed. We held no punches. There was no code-switching or bootlicking; no concessions, politicking or posturing. The movement got this meeting. Unrest earned this invite, and we can\u2019t stop.<\/p>\n

If we don\u2019t get what we came for, we will shut it down. President Obama knows that and we know it. No meeting can stop that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d only complicate the contrast\u00a0in one way. Obama was trained in confrontational tactics but also in relational organizing. Frank C. Pierson, who is an Industrial Areas Foundation\u00a0organizer in Durham, NC, says<\/a> that the IAF network\u2019s \u201crelational culture is characterized by positive valuation of\u00a0relationships themselves as well as the capacity for collaborative action they generate.\u00a0 Relationships tested in the crucible of public action when sustained over time can forge lasting political friendships within, between and outside IAF organizations.\u201d Scott Reed, the executive director of the PICO organizing network, told me recently that he and his colleagues strive \u201cto develop relational capital.\u201d The veteran organizer Gerald Taylor recalls the reason that a Maryland IAF affiliate called BUILD defeated the NRA:<\/p>\n

Thousands of people were talked with and listened to. Questions about the nature of community and the relative merits of a law that was not perfect were discussed. In short, people were taken seriously as citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BUILD members met with Senator Paul Sarbanes, who asked them their “demands.” “‘None,’ they responded, to the senator’s amazement. ‘We came here to find out what your interests<\/em> are: Why you ran for this office and what you hope to achieve.”<\/p>\n

Relational organizers do not value all relationships equally, but they treat\u00a0the development of a new relationship as an asset even if it involves an adversary. This is why the relational approach is sometimes called “broad-based” (as opposed to “issue-based”)\u00a0organizing. Obama likewise observed in 2007 that\u00a0\u201cpolitics\u201d usually means shouting matches on TV.\u00a0But \u201cwhen politics gets local, when the person talking to you is your neighbor\u00a0standing on your front porch, things change.\u201d In that speech, he called for “dialogues” in every community on Iraq, health care, and climate change.<\/p>\n

Note that the diagram that a younger Barack Obama is drawing on the chalkboard (above) is a relationship map. It shows problematic relationships among banks, utilities, and other powerful entities; but if he applied relational organizing techniques, he was about to add citizen groups to the same diagram. After all, he wrote at length as a young organizer about the “internal productive capacities, both in\u00a0terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.” He was, in fact, a practitioner of Asset Based Community Development, which emphasizes the power and resources already present in marginalized neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Confrontation is not incompatible with relationship-building or a positive assessment of community assets. Any robust movement will combine these approaches\u00a0and will\u00a0debate the relative importance of each at every moment. I believe that confrontation is necessary and helpful at the current juncture. But I think that Obama has used something of a mix himself, as president. And when he has elected to build consensus, that too comes from\u00a0his experience as a community organizer.<\/p>\n

*Frances Moore Lappe, “Politics for a Troubled Planet” (1993), pp. 175-6<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Dreier has a great piece on President Obama’s background as a community organizer. The priceless photograph above comes from Dreier’s article. I also explore this aspect of the president’s past\u00a0in We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, pp.\u00a0152-161. Dreier writes, “But Obama seemed to abandon his affinity for organizing soon after he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14645"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14654,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14645\/revisions\/14654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}