when it comes to electing a president, it seems people make gut decisions through whatever filter they see life. most people already have their minds made up of who they like, obama, clinton or mccain, or they have a predisposition toward a particular candidate.
once their minds are made up, they're not likely to change them. with that, it seems the key is getting people to vote who normally wouldn't. that's what's given obama an edge, turning out new people to the polls.
let's hope there are enough of us to take obama to the whitehouse.
anyway, nicholas von hoffman describes what an obama inauguration day might look like. instead of grand balls for lobbyists and power brokers, there might be a ceremony with 100s of thousands of normal people, non-professional politicians. there might be people parties and meetings and workshops on important issues, so the work might begin at the inauguration.
one of the commenters on the von hoffman article suggests:
Instead, and as I have already suggested to the Obama campaign, Barack Obama should ask every community to host its own inaugural celebration. And instead of indulging the old power-brokers in the capital, he can participate electronically across the nation. Such celebrations can stimulate local economies and provide a vehicle for continued community involvement by those who made his election possible.
The Washington economy will take a small hit, but the message will be a clear one. Power has been returned to the people.
read more of von hoffman's article because it gets to the heart of obama's change from the bottom up and inclusive government.
the nation....In speech after speech Obama tells his audience that he became a bottom-up thinker thanks to his days as a community organizer. He seldom fails to explain how he was formed by his experience. Hence his references to governing from the bottom up are more than sloganeering. They come, as he repeatedly says, from his days walking the streets of Chicago's South Side, organizing people.
The person who invented community organizing, at least in its modern form, was Chicagoan Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Articles about Obama often mention Alinsky and suggest that he has been influenced by him. (Google the two names together and you will get 29,000 hits.) Sometimes Obama is called a disciple, although Alinsky had no use for disciples, acolytes or slavish dedication to schools of thought.
If he were around today and Obama asked him for some ideas about how to turn that page, Alinsky would come up with a basketful. He would start with the inauguration.
The crowning hour of a presidential inauguration comes in the evening after the parade up Pennsylvania Avenue, when the city is hit by limousine gridlock. As the sun goes down, the millionaires and billionaires with their lackeys and the lobbyists fill the streets on their way to the dozen or more inauguration night balls that the President comes, and by so doing affirms his bond to the enduring power of moneyed special interests.
Alinsky would advise Obama to skip the balls. That in and of itself would be a new-page statement, but Alinsky would add that such a symbolic act will not mean much unless it is not backed up. He would suggest inviting all the people who worked on the campaign to Washington. Students and others who can't afford such a trip would merit some kind of stipend or scholarship, something the campaign organization with its astonishing fundraising abilities ought to be able to handle.
The arrival of these thousands of non-professional politicians would hit Washington much as the arrival of the western farm people's arrival at Andrew Jackson's inaugural did in 1828. Their raucous presence ended the Federalist-aristocratic era and announced a new time of popular democracy.
Beside taking up every spare bed in Washington, Jackson's horny-handed sons of toil went overboard on the corn liquor and carried on with an egregious lack of couth. Alinsky would anticipate the problems posed by bringing 100,000 into town with nothing planned for them to do.
There should be people's parties as opposed to the lobbyist balls, but there should be more--organizational meetings, seminars on important issues, opportunities to visit the city's marvelous museums and so forth. The inauguration could be turned into an opportunity to convert Obama's campaign organization into a permanent, democratically self-governing, political-social organizational entity of a new and unique character. It would be outside the Democratic Party so that the breadth and enthusiasm brought to the Obama effort by independents and Republicans would not be lost.
Alinsky would point out that for such an organization to endure and perfect itself, it would have to have a rich ongoing life at the local level involving local projects in education, health, environment or whatever the membership determined. Thus it would be profoundly different from the usual political party organizations which essentially go to sleep between elections.
This organization would afford a new kind of communication system for politics and government. It would free the White House from dependence on polls and focus groups and keep it informed on the mind of the nation, as ideas and news could make its way back and forth from top to bottom and bottom to top. Such an organization would provide millions of people around the country as well as Washington office holders with an information system outside of commercial media.
Such an organization, Alinsky would say, would be indispensable to the success of an Obama Administration intent on instituting changes that the K Street money interests will delay, obfuscate and block. This organization, with a stable grassroots presence in most of the nation's Congressional districts, will be able to show members of both houses of Congress how much it will be to their advantage to vote with the Administration rather than with the lobbyists.
Finally, Alinsky would explain that such an organization holds out the prospect of solving the problem of expensive, centralized federal programs that sound good but disappoint, exasperate and scandalize. The existence of local democratic organizations holds the promise of getting around bureaucratic, one size-fits-all government entities trying to operate 1,000 miles away from the people they are supposed to help. Such an organization could tailor large national programs to fit needs and desires at the state and local level.
To succeed, this organization cannot have its agenda handed down from Washington, even an Obama Washington. What it does and how it does it must depend on people at the precinct, county, state and national levels making those decisions democratically themselves.
It's a huge amount of work but the Obama campaign has cracked open and released the energy of idealism. It has coupled it with the use of the Internet in diabolically clever ways, which have shown that building organizational networks is possible and practical. Alinsky, never a man to lapse into dogmatic formulae, would seize on these new opportunities to build a twenty-first-century popular democracy as startlingly fresh as the one that emerged in Andrew Jackson's time.
The writer worked for Alinsky for ten years.
