"Hell Yes We Can" What? Let a bunch of Democrats allow the Tea Party to pull this country in a more corporate direction? by Kevin Gosztola
Sean Wilentz, writer for The
New Republic, thinks he understands why the Obama Administration has
floundered: movement politics has undone and unraveled his presidency. To a
point, Wilentz would be right, but the conclusion that Wilentz comes to is to
utterly disregard movements and engage in "'status quo' politics" to save his
presidency and ensure re-election in 2012.
A look at recent columns on "movements" and "activism" in the country would likely reveal that there is nothing all that exceptional about Wilentz's view. It's conventional wisdom in professional journalism. All the more reason to dissect his viewpoint.
His article titled, "Live By the Movement, Die by the Movement," characterizes social movement politics as "Obama's doomed theory." The outline of history on how a veteran union organizer and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, Marshall Ganz, was "hired as an Obama campaign official and charged with training volunteers" may be interesting to some who are unaware with how Obama developed his campaign.
Peter Dreier, a member of Progressives for Obama and a politics professor at Occidental College, also receives some attention as a publicist who posted articles to The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, and Dissent. Dreier apparently channeled "memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movement, imbued with high moral as well as political purposes," to help develop a campaign that could "transform the very sum and substance of the political system."
Readers are reminded that President Obama, as president, would be "organizer-in-chief" tapping into movements that elected him to "reform health care, end global warming, and restore economic prosperity." The movements would provide President Obama with the opening to bring change the people believed in. But, unfortunately, as progressives or liberals know, things didn't go as planned.
After the midterm election, Ganz, according to Wilentz, charged that President Obama "lost his organizer's fire and neglected to deliver the wonderful speeches that would frame the political course for the movement." He "lamely sought reform"inside the system structured to resist change" and ignored, in fact, scorned "liberal and leftist advocacy groups." Networks on MyBarackObama.com were demobilized and he became "transactional" instead of "transformational." (President Obama acknowledged this reality in his post-midterm election press conference saying he had hoped to change processes but in the end his Administration had been in such a hurry to get things done that they didn't change how it was done.)
Wilentz argues that Ganz does not understand is that bringing movement politics into the presidency "may have been a dead end" and that it may have "helped foster an inevitable disillusionment." Here is where Wilentz starts to misunderstand and craft a false understanding of movements and politics in America.
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