An Obama team and Democratic Party that was so successful in 2008 should not have to struggle to win races like this one in Massachusetts.  Yes, health care, jobs and other legislative initiatives are important, but considering that we can only do as much as we're strong enough to do, elections need to be equally important.  Losing the Governorships in New Jersey and Virginia should have been enough of a wake-up call for our Party leaders. The possibility of losing our 60 seat Senate majority next week should be the last call they should need.

Obama was a community organizer. We broke all kinds of records in voter registration and GOTV in 2008. It's time that our entire Party, from our Leaders down to our lowliest bloggers understood that in order to do what we want to do, we need to be in campaign mode all year, every year.  I hope we're wise enough to spend at least as much time and attention between now and November plotting exactly how we will win more seats in the House and Senate (which, contrary to what too many of even our pundits are saying is quite possible), than we spend immersed in long legislative battles like health care and the upcoming jobs push.

The best way to get an unmotivated base energized is to put us to work. I hope our party leaders start doing that soon, at least with regard to our most dedicated members, so that come November we can focus more on winning than on not losing.

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Cross-posted from OH-16: John Boccieri for U.S. Congress

I love days like today...a blogger's dream! The campaign just pounded so much Mojo at me today I had turn it into a major round-up. It's a quite fitting run of "Ground Mobilization" by our candidate, the Ohio State Senator Major John Boccieri. Boots on the ground! It's time to rock Ohio's 16th Congressional District out of the tired funk from "The Hillary, Barack, McCain Diary Train". Get ready for the battle brewing here in Northeast Ohio!

Out of Headquarters...Ground Mobilization!

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Barack Obama has promised "change we can believe in" and to "turn the page" in American politics.  His critics accuse him of tempting voters with inspirational rhetoric and the vagaries of hope without a strategy for turning words into real and meaningful change.  Naturally, all campaigns can be criticized for this failure - the best that can be said of political campaigns is that they set the stage for change by shifting the balance and dynamics of politics.  Few candidates actually deliver all of the change they promise because, in the end, few campaigns change the dynamics of politics. Most don't deliver change at all.

Yet, what distinguishes the Obama campaign is that it actually is changing political dynamics and that it actually has a strategy for change.  It is the Clinton campaign that actually lacks a genuine strategy for change any deeper than the candidate's pledges to "fight harder".  Obama's special gift is that he is able to reframe issues in ways that make intuitive sense to the best parts of most Americans.  The result has been that he's consistently found ways to use the values that unite the country - fairness, decency, justice, freedom, creativity, compassion, high aspirations, and (yes) hope - as frames for policies to which he's committed and for building new and more inclusive political unity.  As a result his campaign has activated and mobilized vast numbers of people across age, gender, race, class, and, to some extent, ideological lines.  They attend rallies, volunteer, contribute, caucus and vote.  Instead of PACs and lobbyists establishing their dominance within the campaign, more than a million individual contributors, most quite modest, have financed its operations.  

This values-based mass mobilization is a fundamental paradigm shift in Democratic politics, and it is what is changing the political dynamics of this election. It is a strategy for change.  If the mobilization can be sustained beyond the election, it will change the political dynamics that determine the country's future.  It is a new and powerful catalyst that will fundamentally shift the balance of power and the conventional dynamics of politics.  

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As the Bluegrass Express bus tour continued to roll through Kentucky on Tuesday, a quick change of plans relocated our afternoon leaflet stops from Madisonville to Paducah, in far-western Kentucky. Although western Kentucky often is seen as an area that's less than friendly toward unions, bus volunteer Jeff Wiggins, who is president of the Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council, treated me, Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan and AFL-CIO Field Representative Don Slaiman to a very different glimpse of the rich history of the area's labor movement.

The city of Paducah has a mile-long mural painted along a flood wall next to the Ohio River. In 2004, artist Herb Roe added a panel depicting the city's annual Labor Day parade, which was first held in 1892. The mural depicts a parade in the mid 1970s with a massive crowd of local labor activists, including W.C. Young carrying a giant "Solidarity" banner through the city's streets.

Young, who hailed from Paducah, and died in 1996, was a nationally known labor and civil rights leader. He began as a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks in 1941, when Jim Crow racial segregation and discrimination were the law and the social order in western Kentucky. Throughout his life, Young worked tirelessly to change this state of affairs, dedicating himself to the common causes of organized labor and the civil rights. He was a leader in the NAACP, the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education and journeyed to South Africa in the 1990s to protest apartheid.

I was very moved to see the mural, a beautiful testament to the incredible transformational effect Young and others in the labor movement have had on the American society in the past decades. That evening, while we distributed leaflets at the massive Gerdau Ameristeel plant in nearby Calvert City, I made a special effort to reach out and have conversations with the steelworkers coming in and out of the plant, rather than simply hand them the leaflets as they walked by. I wanted to hear their stories and to learn more about how union members in western Kentucky continue to change their society for the better to this very day.  

I felt sure that the workers I spoke to were keeping Young's wise and simple words alive:

You are supposed to love your brother and sister. That's the way it is with the union movement.

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