How to Push Obama

On November 4, the American people by a popular majority of
more than eight million votes selected as their new President a
Democratic contender who had been attacked by his Republican foe as a
radical who "began his campaign in the liberal left lane of politics
and has never left it."

If only. In truth, Barack Obama was never the Che Guevara in
pinstripes that the rightwing attack machine conjured up. His record on
Capitol Hill was never "more liberal than a Senator who calls himself a
socialist [Vermont's Bernie Sanders]," as John McCain wheezed at the
last stops of a dying campaign. And he has never even been in
competition for the title bestowed upon him by former Senator Fred
Thompson during last summer's Republican National Convention: "the most
liberal . . . nominee to ever run for President."

Thompson had apparently forgotten not just George McGovern but
Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, all of whom sought the Presidency
as more left-leaning contenders than did Obama in 2008. And, as
McGovern, an able historian, himself reminds us: Franklin Roosevelt put
contemporary Democrats to shame when it came to embracing and advancing
radical notions.

For today's liberals and progressives, who find themselves moving
from the comfortably predictable opposition stance of the Bush-Cheney
interregnum to the more challenging position of dealing with the first
Democratic President elected with something akin to a mandate since
Lyndon Johnson in 1964, it is important to see Barack Obama for who he
is and his admini-stration for what it can be. The best way to do this
is not by listening to Obama's Republican detractors-or to the
lite-Republicans of the Washington Democratic establishment-but by
hearing the President- elect in his own words.

After he secured the delegates required to claim the Democratic
nomination, Obama found himself at a town hall meeting in suburban
Atlanta, where he was grilled about whether-having run as a
primary-season progressive-he was now shifting to the center.

The Senator was clearly offended by the suggestion. "Let me talk
about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the
center or that I'm flip-flopping or this or that or the other," he
began. "You know, the people who say this apparently haven't been
listening to me."

Obama continued: "I am somebody who is no doubt progressive. I
believe in a tax code that we need to make more fair. I believe in
universal health care. I believe in making college affordable. I
believe in paying our teachers more money. I believe in early childhood
education. I believe in a whole lot of things that make me progressive."

Those were not casually chosen words. Barack Obama knows exactly
what it means to say he is a "progressive." When he does so, he is not
merely avoiding the word "liberal," as the sillier of his rightwing
critics like to claim. Obama actually understands the subtle nuances of
the American left. This is a man who moved to Chicago to be part of the
political moment that began with the 1983 election of leftie
Congressman Harold Washington as the city's first African American
mayor, who studied the organizing techniques of Saul "Rules for
Radicals" Alinsky, who worked with proudly radical labor leaders to
defend basic industries and avert layoffs, who used his Harvard-minted
legal skills to fight for expanded voting rights, who was mentored by
civil libertarian legislator and federal judge Abner Mikva, who
discussed the intricacies of Middle East policy with Edward Said and
Rashid Khalidi, and who learned about single-payer health care from his
old friend and neighbor Dr. Quentin Young, the longtime coordinator of
Physicians for a National Health Program. And, famously, Obama did not
just make anti-war sounds before Iraq was invaded, he appeared at an
anti-war rally in downtown Chicago with a "War Is Not an Option" sign
waving at his side.

Obama knows not just the rough outlines of the
left-labor-liberal-progressive agenda, but the specifics. He does not
need to be presented with progressive ideas for responding
appropriately to an economic downturn, to environmental and energy
challenges, to global crises and democratic dysfunctions. He has, over
the better part of a quarter century, spoken of, written about, and
campaigned for them.

I first covered Obama a dozen years ago, when he was running for the
Illinois state senate as a candidate endorsed by the New Party, the
labor-left movement of the mid-1990s that declared "the social,
economic, and political progress of the United States requires a
democratic revolution in America-the return of power to the people."
When we spoke together at New Party events in those days, he was blunt
about his desire to move the Democratic Party off the cautious center
where Bill Clinton had wedged it. And when we spoke in the years that
followed, as he positioned himself for a 2004 U.S. Senate run, Obama
told me that he saw Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold-the lone dissenter
against the Patriot Act-as the best role model in the chamber.

So why not pop the champagne corks and celebrate Obama's nomination
and election as a victory for what the late Paul Wellstone described as
"the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party"? Because knowing the
ideals and values of the left is not the same as practicing them. As a
Senator, Obama did not take Feingold as a role model. In fact, they
differed on essential constitutional, trade, and Presidential
accountability issues, with Obama consistently taking more cautiously
centrist positions. One of Obama's first votes in the Senate was to
confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Dr. Young wrote to his
friend. "I told him I was disappointed in him," the veteran campaigner
for peace and social and economic justice recalled. "Rice was the
embodiment of everything that was wrong with this Administration. So,
he called me back and he said: 'Why didn't you pick up the phone and
call me? Do you think Bush would ever send to the Senate a nominee for
Secretary of State who I could vote for? I said: 'You ara the constitutional lawyer. It's about advice and consent, right? You should have denied him your consent.' "

Young was, of course, right. But the lesson that should be taken
away from the Rice vote, and from the many disappointments that have
followed it, ought not be that Obama is a hopeless case. In fact, quite
the opposite. In that conversation with Young, the Senator outlined the
relationship that the left ought to develop with a powerful but as yet
ill-defined President.

Obama was nominated and elected in 2008 by progressives, both
younger tech-savvy activists who made his candidacy an early favorite
of the blogosphere and old-school liberal precinct walkers who saw in
his candidacy an extension of the frustrating work of opposing all that
was Bush and Cheney. The Senator won the Democratic nomination because
he was the only first-tier contender who could say that he had opposed
authorizing Bush to take the country to war with Iraq. In the Iowa
caucuses that would define the 2008 race, those anti-war credentials,
above all other factors, made the young Senator from Illinois a
contender.

Similarly, as he campaigned in key states such as Wisconsin, Obama's
call for a new approach to free trade agreements and for massive
infrastructure investments allowed him to secure backing from labor and
liberal farm activists at critical stages in the process. The
progressives who committed to Obama early on were the essential foot
soldiers of his long march through the caucuses, the primaries, and the
fall campaign. These activists formed a base within the campaign and
the Democratic Party, centered on but not limited to the Obama team's
quasi-open website and blog, ww.MyBarackObama.com, which did not always
cheerlead for the candidate. In June, when Obama broke with Feingold
and other Senate progressives to support Bush's rewrite of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senator felt enough heat from his
own and independent netroots sites that he was compelled to explain
himself, making what Obama described as a "firm pledge" that he would
revisit the issue as President to shore up privacy protections.

What Internet activists such as OpenLeft.com's Matt Stoller and
Firedoglake.com's Jane Hamsher did during the FISA fight was roughly
equivalent to what Obama told Dr. Young to do back in 2005: "Pick up
the phone and call me." They were undermined by a
rally-round-the-candidate mentality that protected Obama during the
campaign season. Yet netroots activists made themselves heard and
earned a response from candidate Obama. And they can do much more with
respect to President Obama. As Hamsher notes, "We can get the public
engaged."

And so they must, especially with that portion of the public that
took seriously the candidate's promise of "change we can believe in."
But to do this effectively, activists cannot wait for Obama to define
the playing field. They must assume that he knows what they know. And
this requires a radically different approach than the left took to
Southern centrist Democratic Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so
much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of
his spin-drive communications team. Highlight the right appointees and
the right responses to deal with the challenges that matter most. Don't
just critique, but rather propose. Advance big ideas and organize on
their behalf; identify allies in federal agencies, especially in
Congress, and work with them to dial up the pressure for progress.
Don't expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a
lesson from rightwing pressure groups in their dealings with Republican
administrations and recognize that it is always better to build the
bandwagon than to jump on board one that is crafted with the tools of
compromise.

Smart groups and individuals are already at it. The United
Steelworkers union has been way ahead of the curve in critiquing the
financial services bailout and in working with Congressional allies
such as Ohioans Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich to challenge the basic
assumptions of a top-down bailout. The Laborers union has been
promoting a fully developed infrastructure-investment plan that
represents a smart stimulus. The American Civil Liberties Union is
already prodding Obama to keep a series of promises he made during the
campaign with regard to civil liberties and abuses of executive power,
and providing concrete examples of how he can do so. The ACLU and other
groups will be working with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee
such as Feingold to assure that Obama's Justice Department nominees are
asked the right questions.

Perhaps most impressive are the moves made by the California Nurses
Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Physicians for a
National Health Program, and Progressive Democrats of America to ensure
that the option of single-payer is not forgotten as Obama and House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi establish their domestic policy priorities. To
that end, sixty activists from these and allied groups met one week
after Election Day at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington with
Michigan Congressman John Conyers, an early Obama backer and the chief
House proponent of real reform, to forge a Single-Payer Healthcare
Alliance and plot specific strategies for influencing the new
Administration and Congress.

The point won't be to teach Obama about single-payer. Less than six
years ago, he told the Illinois AFLCIO: "I happen to be a proponent of
a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the
United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the
world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health
care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody . . . a
singlepayer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's
what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there
immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we
have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

Since then, Democrats have taken back the House, the Senate, and the
White House. The man who set those prerequisites in 2003 will sit in
the Oval Office in 2009. But change didn't just come to Washington. It
came to Barack Obama. His statements, his strategies, and his
appointments evidence a caution born of the political and structural
pressures faced by Presidential contenders and Presidents-elect.
Whether the previous, more progressive Obama still exists within the
man who will take the oath of office on January 20 remains to be seen.
But the only way to determine if Obama really is the progressive he
claimed as recently as last summer to be is to push not just Obama but
the public.

Franklin Roosevelt's example is useful here. After his election in
1932, FDR met with Sidney Hillman and other labor leaders, many of them
active Socialists with whom he had worked over the past decade or more.
Hillman and his allies arrived with plans they wanted the new President
to implement. Roosevelt told them: "I agree with you, I want to do it,
now make me do it."

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees
with them on many funda-mental issues. He has said as much.

It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack
Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives
to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do
it.