jackiedoherty.org

The first time I saw Barack Obama was at a rally for Deval Patrick in Boston. I was in the pit about 10 feet away waving a Patrick sign. The oratory that night was amazing as was the energy in the room and the feeling of momentum, the feeling that victory in November was possible. I first met Deval Patrick at the Brewed Awakening coffeehouse on a cold winter night with about 20 other people, when he seemed very much a long shot. In June of that year, when he won the democratic nomination and gave his stirring acceptance speech, the convention center in Worcester was a sea of blue signs and the cheers were deafening. The Obama campaign had the same message of hope and change and the same feel of the grassroots building momentum and becoming an unstoppable force. I’m thrilled with this victory and feel that we dodged a disaster in that Obama turned out to be, contrary to the beliefs of many, very much electable, yet I hope he is able to harness the powers that put him there and to deliver on the promise of change.

Okay, to get to the point: the parallels in the Patrick and Obama campaigns have me worried. Truth to tell, there isn’t that much change in Massachusetts since Patrick was elected governor; of course, things haven’t gotten worse either. I’m not sure what I expected though, governing is much harder than campaigning and the entrenched powers on the Hill seem to make it difficult to make much progress. I think the trouble with the grassroots method, powerful and empowering as it is, is that once the campaign is over, the grassroots go dormant so to speak. People return to their lives and stop paying a lot of attention (at least that’s what I do). George Packer, in a recent New Yorker article, sums up my fears. He quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, who says that “all our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” He listed the “transformative Presidents” as Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and Grover Cleveland. I think today we might eliminate Cleveland, but certainly FDR would make the list. There seems to be some consensus that Obama could be such a President. However, toward the end of the article Packer says:

Obama, in order to break through the inherent constraints of Washington, will need, above all, a mobilized public beyond Washington. Transformative Presidents—those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way—have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement. Clinton didn’t have one, and after his election, Reich said, “everyone went home.”

From what I can tell, the bloggers aren’t going home, but the movement is by nature diffuse, broad-based and unfocused – that is a strength. Whether the grassroots can help with governing remains to be seen.