Winter Storms (Political and Otherwise)

by: Mike Lux

Mon Jan 04, 2010 at 13:00

Having survived all that, I am now back in DC eager to see the health care reform fight finally finished, and have the political focus move on to all those other easy issues: financial reform, jobs legislation, the energy bill, immigration reform. It should all be a walk in the park. Or maybe not.

President Obama has done plenty of things to infuriate me, but you have to give him credit: he has been willing to take on the biggest, most intractable, most complicated and messy issues around. I wish his proposals had gone further; I wish he hadn't made some of the compromises and tactical decisions he had; I wish he had fought harder and communicated better on important policy choices. But he deserves a lot of credit for taking on these huge issues and trying to get them done- it shows a courage few politicians have.

The truly mystifying thing is how he has handled the politics of it. As I wrote in my last post of 2009, it takes special talent to take on all these big issues that progressives have been dreaming of working on for decades and yet have your activist base this disillusioned. So what is going on?

When The Political Is Personal

by: Natasha Chart

Tue Nov 25, 2008 at 12:16

I think this might be the right moment to introduce a useful distinction between political movements and communities:

The former is always goal- and often status-oriented; movements are driven toward particular ends, usually by large personalities, if not big egos. They require a great deal of coordination which almost inevitably turns into a desire for lockstep-action.

Communities, on the other hand, are focused on persons and the relationships they manifest. Movements succeed when they accomplish their objectives, but communities succeed when they nurture the members they have - and when they expand their circle. Movements are short- (or at least limited-) term and transactional, communities play the long game and are transformative.

Obama's genius has been to figure out a way to create community - and to make it trump the ideological conservative movement. (Also, to be fair, he was able to figure out a way to convert the communities he built into a partisan movement that launched him to the White House.)

A certain part of what we've been struggling with ..., I believe, is that many of us are movement types. But Obama's not - when push comes to shove, he's a community guy. This is why he chooses some baffling moves, such as not horsewhipping Joe Lieberman or populating his cabinet with centrists, rather than progressives. He's playing a game of incremental change, one that requires a steady expansion of coalitions. Not to beat a dead horse too badly, it's also why Obama has always been strong among religious voters. Anybody who's spent time in a religious community knows that the art of life in a group like that is to do what you can with the people you have, even when they piss you off.

Anyway, take it for what it's worth. I name it because this is what ... progressives at large are going to be banging their heads on the wall over until they get it figured out. Obama's shifting the political paradigm in ways that we're not going to fully understand until years later.

I have admired Pastor Dan's writing and community-building efforts within the blogosphere for years and it pains me to disagree with him. But except for his saying that we probably won't know the full impact of the coming administration for years, that's just good sense, disagree I must.