Whose Movement Is It?
by Laura Flanders
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
"Hopeful base voters aren't doing all this work simply in
order to get a change of personnel in the White House."
The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating and the
media love it. If the ratings records set by the recent political debates are
any indication, the ongoing primary battle may yet save cable TV. "Super
Tuesday" -- the night that was supposed to wrap everything up - didn't
(for either party). Clearly, this extended nomination contest is getting people
excited, but will that excitement translate into substantive change - for
Democrats in particular? The past offers some hard-knocks lessons worth
thinking about.
Give this long primary season credit: It has, at least,
turned that overused word "change" from a bumper slogan pooh-poohed
by all knowledgeable pundits into a fact-based phenomenon. In the closest thing
the nation has seen to a countrywide primary, first term Senator Barack Obama
overcame Hillary Clinton's double-digit leads in major states and national
polls to win a majority of states on February 5th and draw into a tight battle
over the delegate count. Now, their operatives are off to Ohio for a March 4th
primary that everyone assumes will be crucial.
The chance to be seen and heard in more than just a handful
of quirky early-primary states has already made a striking difference for the
Illinois Senator, who was the clear underdog when he entered the race.
"What was a whisper has turned into a chorus," Obama told his
hometown crowd in Chicago.
But a whisper, many would like to know, of what? For more
than thirty years, Democratic voters like those pouring out of their homes to
get involved this primary season have doggedly trooped to their polling places
with no expectation of having an actual impact. Young voters, poor voters,
urban voters, anti-war voters, women, people of color, lesbian and gay (LGBT)
folk, immigrants, the Democratic party's so-called base - would turn out - and
then be sent home. Come the general election, Democratic candidates typically
tacked right, ignoring those reliable, old blue-base voters. Thanks to the
tyranny of the two-party system, they could remain confident that the base
wasn't going to defect to the - gasp! - ever-more rightward-tacking GOP. And
mostly, they were on the mark.
For Democratic base-dwellers, in normal times there was
only one party season when anyone wanted to hear from them - this one.
Primaries are the one period in the election cycle when contenders suddenly
seek to curry favor with the Party's most activist - and progressive - part.
That's one reason a primary season this long is significant; but, for those
voters, will it make any difference at the level of policy? The most positive
answer is perhaps.
"Base-level Party activists, with help from liberal
bloggers and others, have already pulled off an organizing feat that's changed
the face of the presidential race."
Fuelled by frustration with the way the Party's been
conducting its business and propelled by disgust at the policies of George W.
Bush, base-level Party activists, with help from liberal bloggers and others,
have already pulled off an organizing feat that's changed the face of the
presidential race. Helped by online databases and social-networking software,
volunteers can have new impact. Unpaid volunteers have been building attendance
at local meetings through their own voter-initiated websites in red and blue
states alike. The most significant result so far has been the record turnout.
Democratic turnout was up 100% in Iowa and South Carolina, while Georgia
witnessed its biggest turnout in a primary since 1992.
The presence of a nominee who was once himself a grassroots
organizer and recognizes the value of such work, state by state, has had its
own transformative effect. Altogether, grassroots organizers have made the
candidacy of Obama, at one time a long-shot nominee, more than viable. And
that's pushed Party veteran Clinton whose campaign-style is naturally more
top-down and disciplined to invest her resources heavily in "field."
Before this Tuesday, the candidates were both openly competing for the label
"grassroots." "We've put together a grassroots campaign,"
Hillary Clinton told a rally the Friday before Super Tuesday. "We will
call one million Californians this weekend." Obama's northern Californian
spokesperson told reporters: "We are running the biggest field campaign in
California since Robert Kennedy in '68."
"Party flacks and the traditional "black and
blue" organizing machines of black churches and labor unions are no longer
influential enough to turn out sufficient voters."
With the campaign continuing, Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton must still compete for local support and influential endorsements. And,
at the state level, that's good news for progressives. Party flacks and the
traditional "black and blue" organizing machines of black churches
and labor unions are no longer influential enough to turn out sufficient
voters. Expanding their reach, both campaigns have been delving into
non-traditional territory for community support. In South Carolina, the Obama
campaign teamed up with barbers and the owners of beauty salons. The candidates
are also competing for support from ethnic groups they never prioritized before
- Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans - and everyone's competing over women
and youth.
Remember 1964
"This is a moment unlike any we've ever known,"
Obama said in his Super Tuesday night speech. In spirit, he may turn out to be
right, but there are obvious echoes from the past. This is not the first time
that the Democratic Party has seen an upsurge in turnout, a newly expanded
electorate, and a new generation of trained and talented organizers coming on
the scene. In fact, 2008 bears a haunting resemblance to 1964, the last time
the Party's political maps were remade.
Keelan Sanders is executive director of the Mississippi
Democratic Party in Jackson, Mississippi. Until recently, Sanders was the only
person on its payroll and the Party's "headquarters" (a renovated
family home on a residential street) was open only part of the time; no
presidential candidate ever came to visit. In 2004, isolated Democratic voters
paid out of their own pockets to produce Kerry/Edwards yard signs. Today,
thanks to an investment of funds from the Democratic National Committee,
Sanders has a fulltime staff - a beneficiary of DNC chair Howard Dean's drive
to revitalize the party in all fifty states. When I asked him why he stuck with
the Party so long, solo, Sanders responded quick-as-a-flash: "Because of
my grandmother."
Sanders' grandmother was a member of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party. In 1964, she risked her life to register African American
voters in the Deep South; then, she carpooled her way to Atlantic City, New
Jersey, as a Freedom Party delegate in hopes of taking a seat from
Mississippi's all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention.
There, at the height of the civil rights era, she and the vast majority of
Freedom Party delegates were locked out.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council (SNCC) organizer
Hollis Watkins, who still lives in Mississippi, remembers believing what he'd
been told - if black people registered enough voters, they'd be given a chance
to unseat the state's pro-segregation delegation. "It was like being told
to scale the walls to the roof of a building on fire, and doing it, and then
realizing there were no supporting beams beneath our feet," Watkins told
me in 2006. "We wanted to believe it, we believed it, but we were
naïve."
In 1964, the party of President Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted
to talk about civil rights - even sign the Civil Rights Act - and position
itself as the party of desegregation, but it wasn't ready to fight
desegregation in its own ranks. Not yet. After a bitter stand-off, the
Democratic National Convention finally offered the Freedom Democratic Party's
leader, Fanny Lou Hamer, a seat where she could observe the proceedings, but
not vote.
Just four years later, the picture had shifted
significantly. The Voting Rights Act was law and the southern delegations had
been desegregated, but the power of the old party machine hadn't passed to the
grassroots activists who'd forced the transformation. It remained bottled up at
the top of the Party structure.
"In the 1980s Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition showed
that massive numbers of new Democratic voters could indeed be activated with
just a little attention to the base."
Rather than overhaul state-level infrastructures, Party
leaders gradually made an end-run around them. That's partly why state parties
like Mississippi's have been in such sad shape for so many decades. Among other
changes, the party altered the rules of the nomination process (and the
convention) to emphasize state-wide primaries - now generally the norm - taking
power out of the hands of local party bosses. Advertising themselves via
television, candidates could "run" campaigns by communicating
directly with voters without the help of embedded, state-level movements.
Actually growing the Party's base seemed to scare the
establishment. Whenever the Democratic National Committee appeared on the verge
of launching a massive voter registration program, they backed off. Insiders
who lived through the period recall how in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson's
Rainbow Coalition showed that massive numbers of new Democratic voters could
indeed be activated with just a little attention to the base, the Party's major
donors refused to fund such an effort (allegedly for fear that any massive
voter-registration drive would only push the Party into Jackson's hands).
Today's "outsiders" are once again working hard,
organizing locally, and counting on being seated at their Party's table.
Whoever the nominee may be, he or she is guaranteed to enter the general
election stronger in terms of state-field operations and possible resources
than any Democratic candidate in decades. In no small measure, it will be those
"outsiders" the Party has to thank. When Democrats regained control
of Congress in 2006, Eli Pariser, the director of the liberal mass membership
group MoveOn.org, boasted of the Democratic Party, "We bought it, we own
it, we're going to take it back." If a Democrat does indeed win in
November (by no means a certainty), Pariser isn't going to be the only one with
bragging rights -- or expectations.
Will the "Change" Election Be About Change?
The key questions are: Will progressive activists use the
continuing primary race to raise solid policy demands about peace, justice, the
environment, and healthcare - and will whoever turns out to be the Democratic
candidate actually listen? Let's keep in mind that those hopeful base
voters aren't doing all this work simply in order to get a change of personnel
in the White House.
It's change in their lives and their communities, as well
as in the country at large that they need and want. Even a shift of power in
both chambers of Congress in November 2006 has brought them precious little of
that.
"The conservative movement spent decades building up its
forces to challenge the Republican Party establishment."
If history offers any hints, real change relies on movements
very much like the one that, however inchoately, has slowly been forming, I
believe, just beyond our sight in these last years. This is, of course, exactly
the part of our political landscape that our media covers least well and least
often (and maybe those ranks of new organizers are actually lucky for that).
It's often forgotten that the conservative movement,
sidelined by President Johnson's smashing defeat in the 1964 election of the
original conservative presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, spent the next
decade and a half largely out of the limelight, building up its forces to challenge
the Republican Party establishment. Through the use of the new technology of
that moment - especially direct-mail fundraising - and the mobilization of new
ground troops (evangelical churches) through cheap media (talk radio and cable
television), they found ways for outsider candidates to mount effective primary
challenges and rattle incumbents, while they moved, increasingly triumphantly,
from the local to the state to the national level.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Right had a
storyteller in the White House who could re-tell America's tale their way. His
narrative threw out the 1960s and 1970s version of an all-in-the-same-boat
society. It declared government the enemy and asserted that individuals (and
more importantly corporations) unfettered from government regulations were what
made the country great.
Reagan himself didn't deliver all that much beyond that.
It was in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years that the Right secured the
tax cuts, deregulation, and roll back of government programs they had sought so
long. Eventually, they did secure many of their goals exactly because, in the
1980s, the gang that brought Reagan to office didn't rest on their laurels,
having elected a President. They built their movement and mobilized every last
resource, in season and out, to change the national discourse and shift public
opinion inside the Beltway, in the media, and in the states.
"It was in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years that
the Right secured the tax cuts, deregulation, and roll back of government
programs they had sought so long."
Asked in South Carolina last month which of the Democratic
contenders he thought Dr. King would have endorsed, Senator Obama responded,
"He wouldn't endorse any one of us." That's because King was building
a movement meant to hold all candidates - and Presidents - to account. It was
that movement which made it impossible for LBJ to try, however feebly, to
accommodate Fanny Lou Hamer at the 1964 convention, that movement which literally
changed the faces in politics, that movement which made the candidacy of Barack
Obama possible, as the later Feminist movement would Hillary Clinton's. It's
that movement the Reagan-Right learned from so well and today's progressives
would do well not to forget.
The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating - and the
media love it. But real change happens on a different timetable. If you're
looking for estimated times of arrival, the problem is: We don't know that
timetable yet.
Laura Flanders is the author of Blue
Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, Inspirational Political Change in America,
just out in paperback from Penguin Books, and the host of RadioNation on Air
America Radio. For more information on her click here.
Copyright 2008 Laura Flanders