OBAMA’S ARMY: WHERE IS IT WHEN WE NEED IT?

By Jerry D. Rose

People like me who are skeptical of many of Barack Obama’s policies and practices have been re-assured that, however his election may have seemed to ratify a continuation of abusive conditions in the established social order, his election has at least stirred up a sleeping giant of youthful enthusiasm for profound social change. The “Yes We Can” campaign for hope and change that got him into the White House has morphed into post-election organizations like “Organizing for America” that promise to fulfill the oft-stated idea that real change does not come from the outcome of an election, but by the grassroots activism that drives such changes between elections and presumably will encourage a more favorable next election outcome. Let us all celebrate the Obama victory as a vital step toward change because it has “mobilized” this powerful force of efforts toward change in our everyday civic lives.

A further encouraging assumption about this grassroots mobilization is that its adherents are going to remain faithful to the progressive ideology that the followers shared (or thought they shared) with the candidate who mobilized their efforts. If Obama or any candidate will necessarily make concessions to other interest groups with other agendas, the mobilized “base” will at least remain organized around promoting that progressive agenda. If the candidate turns “centrist,” the grassroots mobilization could be expected still to exercise its influence toward realization of its progressive ideals, opposing on specific issues the candidate that they supported in the election.

Just now, for example, one might think that “Obama’s army” would turn out legions of people opposed to continuation or expansion of foreign wars, favoring single payer health insurance reform, demanding retrenchment in military budgets, an even-handed position on issues of Israeli and Palestinian conflict, vigorous support of simplifying the process by which workers can join unions, and a number of other “progressive” positions that run counter to the direction that the Obama administration is taking. Where is this mobilized army on these issues? More pointedly, where is that army? (Where was it, for example, in last week’s miserable turn-out at the annual observance of the invasion of Iraq?) I have long said facetiously that college students would lose their enthusiasm for political activism once the beer and chicken wings paid for by the largely Wall Street-funded Obama campaign ran out. More seriously, the Obama “phenomenon” would seem to have been a fad or a fashion, the “thing to do” to be “cool” within a peer group, until a new fashion came along and the peers chased off after a new thing, making Obama excitement “so 2008!”

Having said this, there is a remnant of that campaign army that has held fast in the form of about a million “volunteers” that Organizing for America has been able to put on the streets during recent days…suggesting that the “beer and chicken wings” (that is, the external funding) has not quite dried up even if the excitement may have waned. So we have door-to-door knocking volunteers being sent into congressional districts across the country to urge citizens to contact their members of Congress… and for what? To ask them to vote for Obama’s budget bill, elements of which (the Wall Street bailouts) are extremely unpopular in “Main Street” America, but extremely important to a political administration the limits of whose economic imagination is that “recovery” will come by pouring more and more money into the rescue of misbehaving financial entities. This is the “change” we’ve been waiting for? This is the way grassroots organizations support grassroots America? There are plenty of worthy missions for Obama’s army of progressive supporters, as I suggested above but their missions lose all credibility when the “progressive” is removed from that equation of “progressive supporters.” For the local activist efforts in which I have been involved, I have been eagerly looking for “Obama’s army” as allies. So far I have found very few members of this sleeping giant, which seems to have gone back into hibernation.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist