AMY GOODMAN: What happened in those first 100 days? In fact, Roosevelt wasn't Roosevelt at the very beginning, the Roosevelt we know of the New Deal. It took tremendous pressure from within his cabinet. Of course, they were people he appointed. Adam Cohen, the editorial writer for the New York Times, has a very important book coming out on exactly what happened in those hundred days. But, Bob Kuttner, you also write about it... how people struggled within the administration, like Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, who became his vice president, Harry Hopkins, the social worker, and how they beat out the more conservative forces.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, and they had two things on their side. They had reality on their side. If Roosevelt didn't become bolder, he would have been Hoover all over again. They also had social movements. And if you look at the great presidents-Lincoln, Roosevelt, the Johnson of the civil rights, not the Johnson of Vietnam-you had the abolitionist movement, you had the industrial labor movement, you had, of course, the civil rights movement.
And I think there's going to be a tug-of-war inside the administration. And the really interesting question is, what is going happen to the youth movement that became an Obama movement that I think needs to become its own movement for social change, not simply Obama groupies.
And I think there's a lot to celebrate, obviously, in the election of Obama, but we need a social movement to stand on its own two feet and push Obama when he needs to be pushed, the same way Dr. King in the civil rights movement pushed Johnson, the same way the abolitionists pushed Lincoln, the same way the labor movement pushed Roosevelt. And the great presidents actually pushed the social movements to put pressure on themselves so that they could break logjams in Congress. It's a very interesting dynamic, the way social movements interact with presidents.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Arun Gupta, Indypendent, Democracy Now!, we cover grassroots movements. This massive grassroots movement that elected President Obama, soon to be, was also coordinated by an extremely well-resourced community organizing strategy, what the Republicans mocked in Barack Obama as a community organizer. But the other part that might work against this now is that extremely well-resourced, right? The money and those who gave it. At the bottom, the people at the grassroots, you had a ten-million-person email text list for Barack Obama. They were coordinating from the top. How do they reorganize themselves, not-you know, by themselves, not as a tool of the state, because Barack Obama becomes now the head of state?
STATE BLOGS
