I just came to the end of my last extended (11 day) leg of my book (The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, for those of you who haven't been following along) tour. From here on in, I will be doing some quick 2-3 day trips to specific places (next week - Austin, the week after that - Raleigh/Durham), or occasional speeches at conferences.
Some fun photos Adam took of this leg are up at our Flickr page here.
This last big leg was a fascinating, exciting, and exhausting tour that included 12 different book events in 8 different cities, along with 6 media interviews, 4 receptions (where I didn't speak about the book), and 12 meetings with various activists/politicos/bloggers/donors. The 8 cities we spent time in were Boulder, Denver, Sacramento, Sonoma, Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Diego, and LA. Our events included progressive organizations hosting receptions, bookstore talks, county and state Democratic party gatherings, a Drinking Liberally party (at which I saw my esteemed colleague Paul Rosenberg), a lecture at an elite law school, and a fancy downtown luncheon club. 14 different organizations, wildly diverse in nature, co-sponsored the events. I learn an enormous amount from being out on the road like this. Through all the diversity of cities, formats, co-sponsoring groups, and the demography of the participants, certain common things keep coming through over and over again.
The thing that concerned me the most was the continuing sense of disconnect between regular people, even the relatively plugged in party and organizational activists coming to a lot of my events, and their elected officials. That sense of disconnect is leading people to be pretty pessimistic overall about the chance to really change things. This is striking given that Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time in nearly a generation.
I find it fascinating that the general public seems to be quite optimistic about Barack Obama, but the party/organizational activists and donors who got him elected are feeling more pessimistic. This was not the mood of Democratic and progressive activists in 1993, when they felt pretty confident about President Clinton being able to get a lot of things done.
This disconnect between activists and their national Democratic elected officials really started years ago, I think, in the election of 2000. Activists were beside themselves that after 8 years of peace and prosperity, running against a fool like George Bush, that Democrats couldn't figure out how to win and that the Gore Campaign seemed so passive and dysfunctional in the Florida recount fight. When in 2002, so many Democratic senators and congresspeople voted for a war that activists were overwhelmingly against, that disconnect deepened, and when Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, and yet nothing significant seemed to change, it didn't help. Probably the single biggest reason that President Obama won the 2008 primary is that so many Democrats were so tired of the Democratic establishment Hillary Clinton seemed to personify.
Activists feel like they have been burned too many times, and are cautious about getting their hopes up. While I think people are hopeful and excited about Obama, I also think that the skepticism built over this last decade will not die down easily. Beyond that, the issue of how President Obama is dealing with Wall Street, which is the ultimate big money vs. the people issue, is fueling the skepticism activists have in a big way, because there is literally not a single person in any event I have been at (40 events, with a few thousand people in attendance so far) or gotten from that has indicated any support for the Obama banking plan. Obviously part of that is due to the complexity and general murkiness of the issue, and of course most of the folks coming to my book events are strong progressives. But even at the Democratic Party meetings I have spoken at, there is a lot of concern and discomfort on Obama's position on the balancing issues, and it is clearly fueling a broader unease among folks about what kind of President Obama will be.
Democrats and progressive activists are in a hopeful but feisty mood. They are still thrilled at our victory, and still pumped up about helping the President change America. But they are also nervous, wanting President Obama to act on their behalf and not on behalf of the powers that be. How that mix of hopefulness, energy, and wariness in the Democratic base plays out - whether Obama can bridge the divide between activists and the Democratic establishment by delivering real change - will be one of the defining stories of the Obama Presidency. Right now, with Obama still riding high in the opinion polls and making progress on his legislative goals, that skepticism isn't a problem, but as both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton learned, when you hit bumps in the road and don't have a passionate base backing you up, it can make the bumps seem like mountains.
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