"OK, so your heart's broken," as the old song goes. So's mine. But we have to get over it--now--and start taking action for the November election.
Granted, we're far from where we thought we'd be when Barack Obama was elected and people danced in the streets. Change was on its way, spearheaded by Obama's soaring words and by the millions of ordinary Americans who got involved as never before to help carry him to victory. We thought we'd finally created the opening for a historic transformation.
Now, too many of us watch morosely from the sidelines, feeling disappointed, spurned, and betrayed, wondering if anything we can do will matter. We're angered by the gap between Obama's lofty campaign rhetoric and his reality of half-steps and compromises, and by his failure to fight passionately for his policies. We're angered that we dared to hope for more. We're angered at scorched-earth Republican obstructionism, a Supreme Court inviting corporations to buy our democracy at will, and a public all too receptive to blatant lies. In response, we decide not to let our hearts get broken again by taking the risk of working for change, at least not in the electoral arena. We feel this way even though most of us have done little since Obama took office to create the kind of sustained grassroots movements that could have actually pressed him and a resistant Senate to take stronger stands.
So how do we act in the upcoming election despite dashed hopes? How do we do this in a way that builds for the future?
Granted, it's far easier to take a stand in those moments when, in the words of poet Seamus Haney, "the longed-for tidal wave of justice" seems to rise up, and "hope and history rhyme." Yet unless we decide that our democracy and the planet are all simply doomed, we can't afford to succumb to cynical retreat.
We might start by acknowledging our disappointments. We don't have to be delighted about Obama's Presidency to get involved in the fall elections. We can talk honestly about areas where he and the Democrats have fallen short, while still making clear the major differences between their positions and those of the Republicans. In fact, people may respond even more positively if we admit our mixed feelings, some of which will reflect their own. This approach may not be quite as time-efficient as simply repeating whatever standard talking points we're given, but it lets our conversations do justice to reality.
When I've tried this approach with disenchanted friends, they've confirmed that they'd be much more likely to volunteer in the election if they could voice the full complexity of their feelings. They don't want to be spectators. But they want to acknowledge critical areas where they're angered and frustrated. They don't want to surrender their voice. We'd do well to be honest both with those who we need to recruit as fellow volunteers, and with the ordinary citizens who we need to convince to show up at the polls.
If we're going to be honest about our disappointments, we should be equally clear that opting out of this election portends disaster. For all our frustrations with the Democrats, at least we've been fighting about how to move the country forward, out of the hole of the disastrous Bush years. Productive change will be far more difficult if our inaction helps hand the Senate over to those who deny climate change, scapegoat immigrants, blame the unemployed for their fate, and strive to privatize Social Security, make permanent Bush's regressive tax cuts, and block every conceivable environmental and consumer protection regulation. Equally troubling, they seem to have no shame in campaigning on gross distortions and lies, from talk of health care "death panels" to claiming to stand up against Wall Street while blocking everything they could in the financial reform bill to doing nothing to challenge the belief in Obama as Kenyan-born closeted Muslim. Though we may want to deny the possibility, the polls threaten major Republican gains, the right-wing base smells blood, and even once-safe states like Illinois, Washington, and maybe even California are in play. The important legislation from green energy funding to the valuable parts of the health care Democrats are equally at risk in the House, where Nancy Pelosi has led in passing and financial regulation bills to the strongest student financial aid program since the Pell Grants got started. Were it not for Senate intransigence, Pelosi would also have passed a climate change bill, a far larger stimulus package, and a health care public option. But if we don't get engaged in the next couple months, we risk electing enough Republicans to replace her with hard-right Republican John Boehner, who's already talked of reviving Gingrich-style investigative crusades against every conceivable Obama agency and program. Despite the frustration that many of us have with Obama, we might also remember some of his underappreciated actions, like appointing a labor secretary and National Labor Relations Board strongly supportive of workers' rights, an EPA head who's begun to regulate greenhouse gasses and pretty much ended destructive mountain-top removal, and an attorney general who by accepting state medical marijuana laws, has opened space to question our costly and futile prohibition policies. It matters that Obama has saved America's auto industry, appointed two decent Supreme Court justices, and begun to reshape our international image from one of reckless belligerence. For all the Democrats' failure to adequately reverse their inherited crises, their flaws don't compare to those of a party determined to turn everything over to the most predatory forces in America.
Making all this clear is essential when we're trying to bring people out of demoralized retreat. Obama had 13 million people on his email list. If we can reengage enough of them, including those who've pulled back from active political involvement, we can help our fellow citizens reject the corporate-funded lies. In the wake of the ghastly Supreme Court decision gutting campaign finance laws, groups like Karl Rove's American Crossroads, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce are spending four hundred million dollars to try to buy the election, and the impact of their spending will be everywhere. For the moment, we can't stop it, although it would take only one honorable Republican to require financial transparency by helping pass the Disclose Act. But even without this, if people knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, talk to enough neighbors and coworkers, donate enough money and engage in enough real dialogue, we have a chance to make the lies backfire. Massive citizen-to-citizen outreach will be critical for engaging the young and minority voters who carried the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008, but largely stayed home during subsequent Democratic defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts and threaten to do so once again. Americans do mistrust the powerful economic interests that have strip-mined our country. But they're also scared, overloaded, distracted, cynical about government, and insulated from perspectives that could help them separate truth from lie, or give them reasons to vote. So we need to get as many volunteers as possible to help them sort through the political arguments and to convince them to go to the polls. We do that best by reaching out as directly as possible and honoring whatever mixed feelings people have.
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