Why It's Obama's Time to Lead
by Max Fletcher, Wed Aug 15, 2007 at 07:22:23 PM EDT
To begin my stint as one of the Obama supporters on the front page, I'd like to thank Jerome for the opportunity to write here. In the tradition that has developed over the past week, I'll start my series by writing about who I am and how I've come to support Barack Obama for President.
In many ways, I fit what has become the stereotypical (though by no means accurate or all-encompassing) profile of an Obama supporter. While each of the MyDD bloggers for both the Edwards and Clinton campaigns are middle-aged, I'm still less than a month removed from celebrating my 21st birthday. I'm currently a student at Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago, further fulfilling the conventional characteristics of being a "well-educated" urbanite (well, as well-educated, in one manner of speaking, as someone my age could be, I like to think). Finally, and most importantly, I consider myself to be something of an activist, having served on the executive board of a progressive student community development group for the past 2 years, volunteered for the campaigns of netroots candidates Tim Walz (MN-01) and Dan Seals (IL-10) in 2006, and, this summer, interned for the Iowa arm of Senator Obama's Presidential Campaign.
It is from my experiences volunteering in low-income neighborhoods, studying theories of community development and social policy, and talking to hundreds of voters in small-town Minnesota and suburban Chicago that I have drawn the conclusion that Barack Obama is the best candidate to lead the Democratic Party and the country in the post-Bush years. Put simply, I find that:
1) Obama's life experiences demonstrate the greatest commitment to progressive causes and ideals of any candidate running, and from these experiences and his resulting vision he has demonstrated that he is not only the best advocate for our causes, but also has the best judgment to take them on in the Oval Office.
2) Obama is far and away the best spokesperson our Party has to offer in a time when a new era of extended Democratic and progressive dominance of government and popular political orthodoxy are within reach. An Obama Administration would be our best chance to facilitate such dominance.
Experience
It may seem strange to many of you that I would cite Obama's experience as a reason to support him in the primary, given that most of the attacks he has faced from his opponents have focused on his supposed "inexperience and naivety." Beyond throwing out platitudes about "experience that really matters," Obama's time spent as an organizer and civil rights lawyer has shaped his worldview in a way that has caused a deep understanding of the issues he will face in the White House. The experience also demonstrates a lifelong commitment to progressive advocacy absent in many of the other candidates. Since most of you have likely read or heard about Obama as a community organizer, I'll just quote a brief explanation of one of the many lessons he took away (this comes from a long article in the New Republic profiling his days as an organizer):
Obama was a fan of Alinsky's realistic streak. "The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people's self-interest was met," he told me, "and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in."Chicago pastors still remember Obama making the rounds of local churches and conducting interviews--in organizing lingo, "one-on-ones"--where he would probe for self-interest. The Reverend Alvin Love, the Baptist minister of a modest brick church amid the clapboard bungalows of the South Side, was one of Obama's first one-on-ones. During a recent visit to his church, Love told me, "I remember he said this to me: There ought to be some way for us to help you meet your self-interest while at the same time meeting the real interests and the needs of the community.'"
Such an observation may seem obvious or unimportant in distinguishing a candidate (and perhaps some of the more perceptive Clinton supporters would be able to point out she herself wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky), but the organizer in Obama shows up in both his political philosophy and his policy proposals.
Logically, the policy that strikes the strongest chord with his days as an organizer is his plan to end urban poverty. Obama recognizes and addresses the myriad complexities of the issue in very practical terms. I first wrote about the plan in a diary the day after it was introduced. While I've been quite impressed with the persistence of John Edwards on this particular issue, I think that Obama's greater experience in this area becomes clear when the plans are compared. The Edwards plan focuses on removing the poor from inner city neighborhoods and dispersing them into "better" areas. This cuts off the social lifelines developed over the years in such communities, and also often leads to problems accessing services designed for the poor, as relevant organizations become much harder to reach. Such an approach has proven ineffective in the past:
...Edwards proposes doing away with public housing projects and replacing them with 1 million rental vouchers, to disperse the poor into better neighborhoods and suburbs, closer to good schools and jobs.The idea sounds bold, but it faces a deflating reality: A major federal experiment conducted for more than a decade has found that dispersing poor families with vouchers does not improve earnings or school performance, leaving some economists puzzled that Edwards would make such dispersal a centerpiece of his anti-poverty program. Edwards said he was unaware of the experiment.
By contrast, Obama's plan largely focuses on developing neglected communities from within. In his speech introducing his plan, he once again highlights his knowledge of the intricacies of the issue by comparing a poor neighborhood as it is now with one that would be transformed by the services made available in his new program:
What's most overwhelming about urban poverty is that it's so difficult to escape - it's isolating and it's everywhere. If you are an African-American child unlucky enough to be born into one of these neighborhoods, you are most likely to start life hungry or malnourished. You are less likely to start with a father in your household, and if he is there, there's a fifty-fifty chance that he never finished high school and the same chance he doesn't have a job. Your school isn't likely to have the right books or the best teachers. You're more likely to encounter gang-activities than after-school activities. And if you can't find a job because the most successful businessman in your neighborhood is a drug dealer, you're more likely to join that gang yourself. Opportunity is scarce, role models are few, and there is little contact with the normalcy of life outside those streets.What you learn when you spend your time in these neighborhoods trying to solve these problems is that there are no easy solutions and no perfect arguments. And you come to understand that for the last four decades, both ends of the political spectrum have been talking past one another.
If you're a child who's born in the Harlem Children's Zone, you start life differently than other inner-city children. Your parents probably went to what they call " Baby College", a place where they received counseling on how to care for newborns and what to expect in those first months. You start school right away, because there's early childhood education. When your parents are at work, you have a safe place to play and learn, because there's child care, and after school programs, even in the summer. There are innovative charter schools to attend. There's free medical services that offer care when you're sick and preventive services to stay healthy. There's affordable, good food available so you're not malnourished. There are job counselors and financial counselors. There's technology training and crime prevention.You don't just sign up for this program, you're actively recruited for it, because the idea is that if everyone is involved, and no one slips through the cracks, then you really can change an entire community. Geoffrey Canada, the program's inspirational, innovative founder, put it best - instead of helping some kids beat the odds, the Harlem Children's Zone is actually changing the odds altogether.
Perhaps most importantly, Obama has deep ties to the issue. During his 2004 Senate campaign, while addressing the same organization he had worked with when first arriving in Chicago, he remarked:
"I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area. It's as a consequence of working with this organization and this community that I found my calling. There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public service."
While I chose to focus on poverty to emphasize how I think Obama's experiences have prepared him for the Presidency, one could just as easily see how the lessons he took from his family and years spent abroad helped him to avoid making the same mistake so many of our other candidates made in authorizing/co-sponsoring the Iraq War:
In so many situations, Obama takes the time to think through a difficult question and deliver an honest (and typically impressive) answer, rather than delivering a pre-packaged talking point as Clinton and Edwards often do (though if I have to be fed talking points, I do like the rather bold ones that have emerged from the Edwards campaign in comparison to the poll-tested garble that often emerges from Clinton). Obama has shown an unparalleled (in the Presidential field) lifelong commitment to fighting on behalf of progressive causes, and has demonstrated an ability to draw on those life experiences in explaining and defining his policy. This ability is very much related to the second major reason why I support Obama: the ability to build off of his Administration a new national progressive consensus, including a dominant and "durable" Democratic Congress and electoral college for years to come.
A Dominant Progressive Majority
Since psericks largely covered this point in his post earlier today, I'll spend less time here. Without going into great detail, I will simply point out that Obama is quite popular among independents, and holds larger national leads in general election matchups over Republican opponents than Clinton or Edwards. But perhaps the most compelling case to be made for Obama comes from the enthusiasm with which his candidacy has been embraced by America's young voters. By one (albeit imperfect) indicator of youth "activism"--Facebook--Obama overwhelmingly leads all of his closest rivals...combined:
# of Facebook Supporters as of the time I'm Writing This:Barack Obama: 129,896
Hillary Clinton: 36,044
Ron Paul: 19,466
John Edwards: 15,523
Mitt Romney: 15,282
Fred Thompson: 9,983
John McCain: 8,433
Dennis Kucinich: 7,457
*Rudy Giuliani apparently doesn't believe in Facebook
Obama's campaign has been quite effective in organizing on college campuses, folding into the campaign a group that had grown organically throughout the country earlier in the year. And if there is one group in the country that has overwhelmingly rejected Bush, it is young people. Young voters broke Democratic in the 2006 elections by a margin of 22 percentage points that would be absurd if it wasn't so...completely un-absurd, given who we were competing against. The internet generation is ours for the taking, and there is clearly no better candidate to turn this generation into the one that ushers in the next great era of progressive dominance than Barack Obama.
Think about it: the George W. Bush Administration will be the first lasting political memory in the collective consciousness of the millions of young adults of my generation.
What if the answer to the unprecedented corruption and lawlessness wrought on our country by the Bush Administration is the most sweeping and progressive government reform package offered in our history?
What if the reckless foreign policies of the neoconservative establishment and its enablers (including many figures running for the nomination of each Party today) were replaced by someone with the foresight to have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning because he thoroughly understood its disastrous implications?
What if the Republican ideology of "can't do, won't do, won't even try" was replaced by the progressive ideology of "I am my brother's keeper"?
What if we had a spokesperson who could explain our vision as eloquently as he did that summer evening in Boston every day for the next 4 years?
It's time to elect the one person who can make that happen.
Tags: 2008 Presidential Primaries, Barack Obama, candidate worship (all tags)
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