The Politics of Yesterday, and of Tomorrow (Fein / Forward)

[struggle4progress]

The Hour
By Leonard Fein
Published March 04, 2009, issue of March 13, 2009

There were two oddly related meetings in Washington, D.C., recently. You’ve probably heard of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, the one that featured Rush Limbaugh. It was well covered by the media — C-SPAN and Fox News carried large chunks of it live — and not just because of Limbaugh. Joe the Plumber was there, and John Bolton and Mike Huckabee and Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and sundry members of Congress, too, along with some 8,000 registered participants. CPAC’s organizers were particularly pleased with the large number of young people who turned up, some 2,000 of them.

The other meeting was called PowerShift, a mobilization of young people organized by the Energy Action Coalition, a network of 50 national organizations that advocate for clean energy and responsible climate policies. It received very little press coverage, though it drew 12,000 young men and women — mostly between ages 18 and 26 — to its deliberations ...

I well recall my reaction when I attended the first inaugural of Clinton and Gore. I wrote then that if these two could not do it, perhaps it could not be done. And the disappointing truth is that they did not do it. But now I see the PowerShift meetings and begin to understand the relationship between Obama’s strategic ambitions for our nation and the tactic called “community organizing.” Strategy and tactic are mutually reinforcing, reciprocally inspiring. It turns out that what many of us thought was “merely” terrific rhetoric — “We are the change that we seek” — has real meaning. Essentially, PowerShift and all the other ongoing efforts at energizing and mobilizing people old and young are critical components of the new political equation.

It matters that Barack Obama is the first African American to become our president. That is, as everyone acknowledged in the first post-election days, many with tears in their eyes, a historic event. These days, however, it matters less and less. His multiracial background is among the most interesting things about Obama, but it is far from the most important. The most important is that he is an adult, as whole a person as we have seen in public life in a very long time. And he is a teacher who knows the first and foremost lesson of distinguished pedagogy: You don’t talk down to your students. He tells us, as he promised during his campaign he would, not what we want to hear but what we need to know ...

http://forward.com/articles/103593/