 Good afternoon. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and I would like to welcome you to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. We opened in 2007, and our mission is to raise awareness of the impact of feminist thinking, of feminist art, on the larger culture, and on the art world. In addition to that, we have this wonderful space, the forum, so that we can have dialogues and panel discussions about issues that relate either to art or to the social agenda or political landscape that we're facing. And last September 28th, Courtney Martin accepted my invitation to come and moderate a panel at that time, which she did. And it focused on political events. It was called The American Hero. And I said shero, and she agreed with the change. The American Hero and American Dream Reflections on Our Contemporary Political Narrative. And it addressed the dominant narratives of the election, this past election, perpetrated by both the presidential candidates and the media, and the ways in which the two candidates and their vice presidents were marketed by the media. And there was much discussion about questions of race, gender, and class. And also brought up, from my point of view, that we were looking at business as usual in politics. At the close of that panel discussion, I asked Courtney if she would come back after the election, after the inauguration, so that we could have a post-election and post-inaugural sort of debrief her. And Courtney said yes. And I'm delighted that she's here. As far as I was concerned, one of the high points of the whole thing, in addition to all of the other high points, was Aretha Franklin singing My Country Tis of Thee. I thought that was just the best. This Sunday's panel is titled A Politics Changed Forever. And it will be interesting, actually, now that we're a few weeks into this new administration, whether or not you would put a call into that and add something, or whether or not, well, I'm interested wonderfully to hear your discussions. June Cross has joined us, Andrew Gulles and Daniel May. And of course, Courtney will be introducing them to you. Courtney is an award-winning freelance journalist and author, senior correspondent for the American Prospect Online. She's editor at feministing.com. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor, amongst others. Courtney is author of the critically-acclaimed book Perfect Girls Starving Daughters, How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women. And she's co-writer of the life story of AIDS activist, Marvlyn Brown, called Naked Truth, Young Brave, and HIV Positive. Currently, she's working on a book for Beacon Press. She has essays in anthologies of 21st century, Ethical Toolbox, which was published by Oxford Press, and Declare Yourself, 50 American, American, I have here 50 American, it must be Americanza. Yes, 50 Americans talk about why voting matters, and that's Harper Collins. She's a recipient of the Ellie Wazzell Prize in Ethics. She's a Woodhull Fellow, Director of Undergraduate Programs at Op-Ed Project, alum of Progressive Women's Voices Project at the Women's Media Center. She speaks on air at colleges, campuses, and the like. And I always say, if you feel like you have done a lot in your life after you've heard that, then we can all think again. I don't know how many of you might be aware that, in addition to having been before on the Today Show and the O'Reilly Factor, that after President Obama's first news conference and the fallout over O'Reilly's abuse of journals telling Thomas, the Women's Media Center put up on their site a request for people to object and to go right into the link to O'Reilly. And as a result of that, O'Reilly got riled, and Courtney got chosen, and you'll have to tell me by whom Courtney, because I don't really know how that happened. But in any event, I got an email from Women's Media Center that Courtney was gonna be on the O'Reilly Factor. And she had, as I wrote here, fabulous calm in the face of sputtering ass, lucid in response to hot air, and I'm hoping has the ammunition required to get Tynette an apology out of the man, which she does have, and he hasn't given. So please join me in welcoming Courtney Martin and today's panel. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I think I was chosen because they thought it would be pretty cool to have a younger woman defending an older woman, that it would be kind of a neat intergenerational play, and that maybe it would disarm Mr. O'Reilly just a little bit. So I think we were pretty successful on those counts. Thanks everyone for being here. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for the opportunity. This is just such a cool space and a lot of the panelists here have connections to Brooklyn and I know a lot of you do and it's so awesome to have a place within walking distance of my house where I can have these kinds of interactions with art and politics and all these questions of the day. So thank you for creating this really vibrant, incredible center for all of us. So as Dr. Sackler referenced, I wrote the title of the panel pre sort of the last. I think it was probably three months ago in order for it to be in the program. So I thought I could safely say that politics would be forever changed. And now I stand beside the title. We'll see if my fellow panelists feel comfortable standing beside the title. But I do feel like I'd like to add sort of a parenthetical paragraph or two about the ways in which it possibly has not been changed as much as we hoped it might have been. But I did want to sort of revisit some of the really important things that have undeniably been changed. We had the longest and some could argue most followed presidential primary season in American history, right? The gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever. We had unprecedented conversations about race and gender, some of which felt a little bit like, it was opposite day, like we used to say at like third grade where conservative pundits were suddenly calling sexism with regards to Sarah Palin and the right was suddenly scared of religion when it came in the form of Jeremiah Wright. We had a totally new coordination of the internet, grassroots organizing, and old fashioned electoral politics in the form of a Obama's campaign. And we have some great insight on the panel about some of those things. Young people voted at three, four, and sometimes five times the rate of previous years in the primaries and got involved in record numbers and canvassing and other sort of political activity. And excuse me if you were already aware of this, but we have a biracial president, a black first lady and a cabinet full of people of color and women. So some things have changed, let's just admit that, okay? Now there are lots of things that obviously haven't. Now we have this really sort of undeniable and always present backdrop of an economic crisis on our hands. We have enduring violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The party is over, right? We know that bipartisanship is raging with the stimulus package. There are all these reasons not to feel particularly hopeful at this moment. In addition to which I have to make the point because it's so important to me that Obama's campaign alone cost over $1 billion and the election as a whole totaled and unprecedented $5.3 billion. So in terms of campaign finance reform, this is not a politics forever changed, right? Hope came at a very, very steep price, which is important for us to keep in mind. Today is not so much about debating the nitty-gritty of the stimulus package or getting sort of weighted down in all of the very specific things that are going on or even specifically what Obama has done in the last month. But it's more to kind of take a big picture view to look back and kind of take that bird's-eye view and say what has changed and what hasn't and sort of what is the work ahead and what are things that we can actually really feel good about and celebrate. I've convinced to that point these three brilliant human beings, all of which I've had these kinds of conversations with offline and out of the public eye. And so I know how much insight they have and sort of what a fresh perspective they bring to come and start that conversation that I really hope it will be a discussion for all of us. So without further ado, who wants to go first? Anyone? We didn't even talk about order. All right, Andrew. All right. Let me introduce Andrew to you. He is the deputy publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com and all the TPM media blogs. TPM's blogs are widely regarded as among the most innovative and influential political blogs in the country. He's worked in Democratic politics as a staff organizer for Howard Dean's campaign for the presidency and as the assistant training director for the Democratic National Committee. He also played an advisory role in designing and launching the causes application for Facebook.com. Andrew studied social theory and American political history at Harvard College where he ran a variety of campus campaigns and founded the Harvard Progressive Advocacy Group and the Campus Progressive Political Blog, CambridgeCommons.com. He was born and raised in Santa Rosa, California. He lives in Astoria, Queens with his wife to be and their cat and dog. Andrew's going to explain the way- We moved to Sunnyside, but- Ooh, like old bio. Still Queens, still Queens. We have a very nice house in Sunnyside. I've actually played ping pong there before. So Andrew's going to talk specifically about new media, sort of that whole blog world and how Obama sort of used that to influence major mainstream narratives and mobilize constituents. Andrew, take it away. Thank you. So yeah, I'm going to talk about, I'm specifically going to focus on the way in which the 2008 election kind of was the conclusion of what I think is completely new media ecosystem that's been birthed. And TPM is kind of one node of this ecosystem and just to give people background who don't know anything about it. It's a kind of combination of news and reporting. We have about two or three million readers a month and it's kind of focused on national politics. And so that's a short story of what that, of what we do. Tons and tons of people have already talked about the ways in which the internet kind of radically drove Obama's run. And a couple of the things that Courtney mentioned in her introduction were part of that. And the two things that I think are most often focused on and rightly so are his ability to use the internet to organize, which means his ability to kind of bring people together, allow them to find each other, turn people out to events and empower them to go and knock on their neighbor's doors and really move people and his ability to fundraise. As Courtney mentioned, he raised more money than anyone in the history of anything to get elected and was able to do that because of the fact that he was able to get tons of small dollar donations from tons of people. And that is simply impossible without the internet. But I guess I'm gonna argue today that those were necessary, but not sufficient changes to getting him elected. He could have been as well funded and his people could have been as well mobilized as possible, but without dramatic changes in the way in which Americans consume and share information, we still would have been trying to get a man named Barack Hussein Obama, who is black, elected president. And that in the face of a media infrastructure that had previously taken down, 40 year kind of established senatorial John Kerry and people much less offensive to kind of preconceived notions of what a president should and would be than Barack Hussein Obama. So what I'm gonna argue is that without these changes you would have seen all of these different conservative Arktx tape holds. So what are the different things that people said about Obama on the conservative side? Well, there was Obama, the Manchurian candidate for Al Qaeda, right? There was Obama, the socialist sharing the wealth and hanging out with Bill Ayers in Chicago. There was Obama, the corrupt Chicago city poll hanging out with Tony Resko. There were all of these various opportunities to swiftboat him in the traditional sense. And there was a good reason that the Clinton people really were saying during the primaries, this man is simply unelectable. I mean, in the traditional paradigm, he really was. It was, I mean, there was many, many reasons to think that the conservative machine could do to him what he had done to much easier targets in the past. And so what was required was pretty dramatic shifts in the way in which we can send him information. Now the first thing was that Obama himself was able to build a media organization in his own campaign that was as big as many outlets that we could discuss. He had a YouTube channel that put up videos that had millions and millions of views. His famous speech on race was viewed eight million times on YouTube, that's a 40 minute speech. And the view only counts if it goes all the way to the end. Right, that means more people watch it on YouTube than combined watch it on live on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. And it also means that as opposed to that clip being a 20 or 30 second package thrown onto ABC's Nightly News, as opposed to that clip being condensed and soundbitten, that nuanced kind of profound speech was viewed that many times by that many people and kind of existed permanently. So Obama was able to build his own media operation. Now the YouTube channel is part of that. He had an email list of 12 million people. And that email list, they'd hit multiple times a week and they would tell a story of where the campaign was and where it was going. Now that's not really a media outlet in the traditional sense but you're telling people a story over a course of a period of time and keeping them motivated and activated. And the last piece of that is that the Obama campaign rolled out a series of microsites. They had a site called fightthesmears.com and they very directly engaged all of these different critiques and kind of were able to fact check and put to rest at least in the eyes of anyone kind of with any sort of good faith who would have been the arbiters of what gets talked about any of these rumors. So the first thing then is that Obama was able to build this massive media machine in his own campaign as opposed to waging a campaign based on 30 second advertisements and speeches that are kind of chunked and not consumed by any mass media, he was able to build that. And secondarily you had the kind of conclusion I would say of the rise of the liberal blogosphere. Now, we existed in 2004 but we really didn't have the audience or the capabilities that we had in 2008. And I think that you have to look back at the history of media, starting with the kind of Walter Cronkite mainstream kind of trusted newsman, starting with the advent of television, you first had these kind of corporate, national broadcast media that dominated the narratives and they decided kind of what the story was. They decided what was important and what was not important. And that was sometimes good when Cronkite turns against the Vietnam War and LBJ famously says, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America. But then a lot of times that's not good for a whole variety of reasons we can talk about. And in the 80s with the rise of conservative media with the rise of Russia Limbaugh, we're talking about 15 to 20 million people every week listening to Russia Limbaugh. And this kind of undercurrent of conservative narrative, pressuring and mobilized, pressuring mainstream media and mobilizing their own had no counterpoint on the left much less in any other broader sense. And the result of that is Willie Horton, Whitewater, Swiftbuck because there was nothing to defeat that and the pressure on the mainstream and the ability to kind of make trouble in the media continued. So on the left, the biggest outlets you're talking about are maybe the nation before 2004 and there are 150, 200,000 subscribers a week as compared to Russia Limbaugh's 15 to 20 million. So the rise of Huffington Post, Talking Points memo to some extent, Daily Coast and outlets like Think Progress that are doing active fact checking have a huge counterweight pressure. Now, directly the result of that was that they were able to do a couple of things. One is they were able to call out and surface into the national conversation the explicit racism that was floating around in conservative media. So, you know, my friend Matt Corley who's this like scruffy guy who just sits there and listens to Rush Limbaugh every day, takes the audio clip, puts it online and sends it to every reporter in America. Limbaugh does not get to get away with doing the things he was able to get away with doing and he has called out and taken the task. Two, they were able to directly attack conservative politicians and create mainstream narratives that hurt them. So, you know, I would argue that without a lot of these publications, Sarah Palin would not have become the joke she became. You know, on TPM's YouTube channel which has got like 60 million views up to date, I think eight of our top 10 most watched videos are Sarah Palin because we were able to clip kind of her most ridiculous things and say, how can you seriously tell me that this woman she's president of the United States, she has no idea what she's doing and people got fascinated and they went viral. And the last thing they would do is similar to Obama himself being able to tell his supporters on his email list, this is a community that was able to kind of calm and keep mobilized the general left. You know, there's a famous flicker photo that floated around that's just Obama talking and it just says, everyone chill the fuck out, I got this. And that floated around at a moment in kind of the media sphere where everyone's like, oh Obama's losing it, he's doing it. So there's a calming and kind of mobilizing effect that that community has. And so I think because of that infrastructure, you know, you have pretty dramatic changes that are able to push back on those things. So three points to conclude. What I think this means is these three things. First, I think it's the end of Nixonian politics by which I mean that starting in 1968 with Nixon's appeal to the silent majority and his ability to kind of play on subtle race resentment politics of saying, you know, these lawless black people in urban America rioting or these crazy radicals, they don't represent us, you know, that went underground to some extent but has always been kind of the major political thrust of the conservative movement. I don't think that that has been able to stand up when surfaced into the national conversation. And I think that Obama kind of dramatically ended that paradigm. Maybe it'll fight back, but that's my hope and my belief. The second thing is I think we have some actual concern, there's some real concerns about this. Obama, because of the fact that I basically agree with his campaign wasn't that dangerous of a person to be able to put together the massive kind of propaganda machine he was able to put together. But the filter of the media is valuable and having politicians and people who are not concerned primarily with truth have as much access to as much audience as they do is dangerous. And so it's gonna be coming on journalists to very actively make the argument for why what you're hearing from me is filtered and true in a way you're not getting from these other people. So there could be a really dramatic rise in propaganda that we have to be aware of. And the third thing I would say is that the end of a lot of these niche conversations, the kind of surfacing of not just the Limbaugh's conversation, but the Jeremiah Wright thing was very largely about a conversation that had been going on in the Black Church for a long time, getting surfaced into national conversation and people saying, what the hell is this? There's gonna have to be a lot more cultural translation as a lot of these, as people see each other's kind of underlying conversations for the first time. Or we might see a lot of kind of culture clash unless we have kind of Obama to give that big race speech and explain white people to black people and vice versa. So I think those are the three things that I'm, I mean, both concerned and hopeful about. It's obviously valuable to end Nexonian politics, but there's kind of a big moment of upheaval that we have to start to make sense of. Awesome, thank you very much, Andrew. June, are you up for going next? Oh, I could, I was sort of hoping to go with Daniel. You can go after Daniel, that's fine. Well, we'll save the lady till the end. All right, so Daniel May, to my left, began organizing in 2000 in the South Bronx with Acorn where he directed the organizing of tenant organizations and block clubs in Mount Haven, one of the poorest congressional districts in America. Those neighborhood associations won improvements of plumbing, heating, refrigeration, and building wide renovations as well as increased police presence. In 2003, Daniel moved to Los Angeles to work with the Industrial Areas Foundation, IAF, the nation's largest and oldest community organizing network. Through his time in Los Angeles, Daniel worked with immigrant congregations in order to build political power for non-voting undocumented immigrants. His organizing led to the transfer of 600 elementary school students off a site term toxic, the term nation of predatory police profiling of undocumented immigrants, and a near doubling of voter turnout in the municipal elections of Maywood, California, leading to an entirely new city council. Isn't it nice to hear a bio that has actual real accomplishments in it? I love this. Over the past several years, Daniel has worked to engage Jewish synagogues and community organizing efforts as well as to bring congregations into alliance with organized labor. He has written on organizing for the nation, conservative Judaism and reform, the magazine of the Jewish reform movement, and he's currently a candidate for a master's at Harvard Divinity School, where he is studying religion and public life. Probably not to your surprise, he will be talking about the grassroots organizing and sort of community organizing ethic of the Obama campaign. All right, thanks. And thank you all for being here. So this election was, as we've been talking about, an election of many firsts, but it was also the election of our first organizer president. So the question I wanna explore a little bit over the next 10 minutes is to what extent does Obama's background as an organizer shape his politics? And then to what extent is that shaping our politics together? So Obama's three years from the age of 24 to 27, in the course of a lifetime, he was at law school longer than he was an organizer. He was a state senator for many, many more years than he was an organizer. He was a US senator for longer than he was an organizer, but his time organizing is sort of a central transformative event in the creation story that he told throughout the campaign. And for those that have read his first book, it's 150 pages of the book. So he talked about organizing as the best education he ever received, better than what he got from professors at Harvard. Many of the main people, central characters of his life, were relationships that began in organizing. He of course moved to Chicago because of an organizing job. So I don't think you can think about Obama without understanding the way in which organizing shaped him. But this is tricky because organizing is sort of a slippery term. It can be used to describe organizing for the NRA. City council members in Los Angeles have organizers on staff. But Obama comes from a very particular organizing tradition. And it was founded by this guy, Saul Alinsky in the 1940s, who founded an organization called Industrial Areas Foundation, that then spun off a number of different groups, including a network called Gamalil, which is the group that Obama worked for. And there are some very explicit principles to this kind of organizing. And the first, as far as I know, the first published article that Obama ever wrote, he wrote when he was in law school, aside from the stuff that he wrote for the Columbia paper when he was an undergrad that we all know now from Gawker, thankfully. So he wrote this article called Why Organize? When he was like 28. And I'm just gonna read the intro. So he says, over the past five years, I've often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical there was a remark, a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some pliers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school. Listen Obama, she began, you're a bright young man. You went to college, didn't you? I nodded. I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree, and become a community organizer. Sounds like Sarah Pan, right? Why is that? Because the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate it. I thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I've organized with the Developing Communities Project. So that was the name of the group that Obama worked for, that was part of the Gamble Hill Project. Based in Chicago's far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven't been as simple as a question. Probably the shortest one is this. It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it. So what is it that Obama thought needed to be done? The sort of central aspect, there's a couple really key principles of the way that the IF thinks about organizing. And the first is that you don't organize around an issue. You organize for power. So this is sort of the central radicalism of the kind of organizing that shaped Obama. So this is what makes it different from the civil rights tradition, for example. Or what makes it different even from the labor organizing tradition. Although it's closer to that, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But for those who have read Dreams of My Father, the process of organizing begins with a series of conversations where Obama goes out and does these interviews with people to find out what is in their self-interest. And then through those conversations, he begins to figure out what is the agenda that we're gonna work on. But he doesn't start with the issue. So he comes to figuring out, okay, we're gonna work on asbestos by a series of conversations he does in these churches in the south side. He comes to think about job training because of the conversations he's had with people who are not employed. So the work did not start because he was gonna do job training. So this is from Dreams of My Father, how he describes it. He says, Marty is sort of this invented figure who's an amalgam of two different organizers that Obama worked with. But in Dreams of My Father, the character he's created is called Marty. So Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That's why people get involved in organizing because they think they'll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I like these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment, politics, not religion. So I think that there is this idea that because Obama was an organizer, there's this sort of prophetic radicalism that's part of his politics. And there is that aspect to organizing but the particular kind of organizing that Obama comes out of is sort of radically non-ideological. It's not about justice. I mean it is about justice. But it's not like the training that the IAF does and that he did wasn't training around what does justice mean, what does equality mean. It was training around what is power and how do we build it. And the issues that emerged are these concrete, very specific sort of bread and butter issues. How do we get a job training center in our neighborhood? How do we get asbestos cleaned out of our school? So the other sort of, and I think you can see this in the campaign and certainly over the past few weeks in his election, the focus on individual stories as being the center of the engine of the organizing process is something that Obama used all through the campaign. Now other folks have done this but I don't think in the same way that Obama did. So at the convention, for those who saw it, before he spoke, he had these four people give these sort of seven or eight minute speeches and they were just folks who had stories to tell about what was going on in their lives. And the infomercial, did folks see this infomercial? It's half an hour. I mean the majority of the infomercial isn't even Obama talking. It's these everyday folks who are telling their stories. Last week in Indiana, he has this guy give a seven, eight minute introduction and the guy says, can you believe that I'm introducing the president of the United States? I think that all of that stuff is very much sort of part of the practices that he, that were ingrained at him as a young organizer. A little bit more on just this question of sort of the ideology of organizing. So as I said, organizing was the kind that Obama was trained and was founded by this guy, Saul Alinsky. So I just wanna read a quote from Alinsky from his second book called Rules for Radicals. And he says, an organizer is in an ideological dilemma. Truth to him is relative and changing. Everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist. He accepts that the mark of a free man is the ever nine inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right. In the end, he has one conviction, a belief that if people have the power to act and the longer than they will most of the time reach the right decisions. So I think that there is an aspect of Obama's sort of post-partisan politics that is very much connected to the particular organizing tradition that he comes out of, which is Alinsky has all this writing about curiosity and that not settling for easy answers. And Obama sort of talks about this, talks to this language and figuring out that what is the agenda gonna be? Who is it that we're gonna get ideas from? I'm not just gonna get ideas from my own party. We're seeing the limitations of this obviously over the last few weeks. But nonetheless, it's there. And so the other place that I think you could really see the influence of organizing was in the particular slogans that became the centerpiece of the campaign. And I just want to point out one, which is the yes we can. So yes we can was based on the Cise Puede, right? Okay, so Cise Puede was the mantra of the United Farm Workers. Cesar Chavez spent 10 years before the United Farm Workers working for Saul Linsky and the CSO. And Obama, this is like, he knows this history. He knows this tradition. But the interesting thing about yes we can is that it sort of embodies that idea that what we're gonna do is build power that can then act on all sorts of issues. It's not like yes we can do blank. Yes we can, it implies that there's all these things we can do. But the particular irony of the way that Obama used it was that it had a very specific sort of unstated conclusion to the phrase, yes we can elect a black man whose name Barack Hussein Obama. And that is a very almost sort of blasphemous, could be read by people sort of schooled in the rigidity of Alinsky style politics as an almost blasphemous use of the phrase. Because Alinsky had this idea, sort of this is where his labor training Alinsky's great hero was this guy John L. Lewis. And who is a laborer, the head of the CIO. And so Alinsky sort of thought about organizing the way that Lewis thought about organizing which is that you organize people in a workplace to get power so that you can get concessions from management. So the way that Alinsky thought about organizing was you organize people to get concessions from government. So it's this very oppositional approach to organizing where you do not organize to move the agenda of somebody in office. You organize to pressure that person who's in office. And so throughout Dreams for My Father you see Obama wrestling with these sort of two models. One being the organizing tradition that holds government accountable and the other being the sort of hope in the electoral process. And he kind of has this really interesting relationship with Harold Washington who represents the sort of pinnacle to him of African-American electoral power. So he has this wonderful passage in Dreams for My Father that I want to just as a way of wrapping up where he says, I wanted Harold to succeed. His achievements seemed to mark out what was possible. His gifts, his power measured by my own hopes. And yet in listening to him speak, all I had been able to think about was the constraints on that power. At the margins, Harold could make city services more equitable. Black professionals now got a bigger share of city business. We had a black school superintendent, a black CHA director. But beneath the radiance of Harold's victory nothing seemed to change. I wondered whether away from the spotlight Harold thought about those same constraints. Whether he felt as trapped as those he served. An inheritor of a sad history, part of a closed system of few moving parts. I wondered whether he too felt a prisoner of fate. I'm regretting using all this language of Obama because it makes me feel so profoundly inarticulate. It's also wonderful that we have a president who wrote that. So obviously Obama chose Harold Washington. I mean he talked about the fact that while organizing is here as Robert Moses, Elevator, these organizers are the civil rights women. But he ultimately decided that he wasn't gonna be able to make the kind of changes that he imagined through that model. He was gonna make them through the model of Harold Washington. And many folks said that when he went to law school his ambition was to be mayor of Chicago. So there is this tension I think in Obama and in his election. And I think it's a real mistake. And some folks have pointed this out. But I think it's a real mistake to see him as the conclusion and the pinnacle of the organizing tradition. So when we think about Obama as sort of the... In the narrative of Martin Luther King and Glenn Rowey, a professor at Brown recently kind of ranted about this on the New York Times site. It both weakens the prophetic tradition that King represented. And it asks something from Obama that an elected official just cannot do. And you see here in Obama's own writing his skepticism about that avenue, about the avenue of elected politics. So what's particularly sort of interesting to me is how is Obama going to, how does his election change the tradition that he came out of? Because I have no doubt that we are gonna have thousands of 26 year old Obamas as a result of the 48 year old Obama. There's gonna be so many people who are getting exposed to this profession that's been largely under the radar for the last 40, 50 years. But the question is, how does his election sort of challenge some of the skepticism that is necessary for organizing and the skepticism that you see in his own writing? I'm not all that worried about it because I think that organizing has its own transformative impact. That people who do it can't help but begin to wrestle with some of the questions that he wrestles with. And just to close, I'll close with the passage that he closes this article that he writes when he's like 28 in law school. Where he says, organizing teaches us nothing else the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stups, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching some earn degrees and land jobs that their parents could never aspire to. It is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter that organizers can shape a community not only for others but for themselves. So I hope that that transformation for many, many, many people will be inspired by his election. Awesome, thank you. All right, and last but not least, we have June Cross who is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a broadcast journalist with over 30 years of experience. She was executive producer for This Far by Faith in 2004, a multi-part PBS series in the role that religious faith and conviction of plate in the empowerment of African Americans from 1991 to 1999. She served as the sole staff producer for Frontline creating numerous award-winning documentaries such as Secret Daughter, A Kid Kills and A Showdown in Haiti. Cross has also worked as a producer for CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and the Neil Lerner News Hour. She's received research grants from the Ford Foundation, Kaiser Family Foundation, National Black Programming Consortium, National Down with Humanities and the Hartley Foundation. She's the recipient of two DuPont Columbia Journalism Awards, two Emmy Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Her most recent frontline documentary, The Old Man in the Storm, is about the failures of public policy through the experiences of one extended family from New Orleans. And if you haven't seen it, you can watch it online and it's totally incredible. I know so much good journalism has been done on New Orleans, but I really feel like this is one of the best, most impactful pieces that I certainly have seen. June will be our resident cynic. She is gonna speak to the vigilance required to sustain any movement and her suspicion that some of these folks were active, the 12 million on the email list that Andrew was talking about might have the old American habit of going back to sleep now that we've elected Obama, so take it away, June. Thank you. I hate being introduced as the resident cynic, but I guess I'm the oldest person here. You did describe yourself that way. I didn't put myself that way. But in part because it's like every new, every generation that does something new or sort of experiences the breakthrough that Obama's election represented thinks of themselves as the ones that, we changed it, it's now going to be changed forever. And sort of as the baby boomers who thought that we got the Civil Rights Act passed and we got the Voting Rights Act passed and we entered a war in Vietnam, but that the world was going to be changed forever because we made those accomplishments and then along came the 70s and the 80s and we all got lulled into economic, I don't know what I would call it, into dreams of economic prosperity might be the best way to describe it, given what's going on now. Like we spent all the money, we smoked all the drugs and now we have like AIDS and the recession. So I'm a resident cynic, I told you. I'm a journalistic, comes naturally, it goes with the thing. I'm as happy as anybody to see a black president elected and I was crying from the moment Rita came out with that church hat on on January 20th. But I also see Obama as sort of part of a legacy that doesn't even begin with the baby boomer generation, but it really goes back to, well if you wanted to go all the way back, we could go all the way back to the 19th century, I won't go that far back. But let's say that the dreams that come out of the group of World War II black men who tried to fight for this country in World War II and came home and found themselves unable to participate in society fully. Of whom his dad really, even though his dad isn't part of, isn't a US citizen, his dad is part of that generation of men who sort of see themselves as being able to offer much more than their country can accept either in Africa or here. But Obama is also, and when I look at the sort of the progression of that generation from 45 to the president, I also see like a sort of my generation of reporters and politicians. I mean, I found it interesting that Daniel was citing Harold Washington, who's sort of also the sons of that generation. Harold is probably the first mainstream black politician that gets elected, playing politics the way white Americans have always played them. And it's really instructive. There's a really good documentary on NPR. It's on This American Life, actually. It does sort of Harold. And if you listen to it, you'll hear a lot of resonance with the rules that Obama played by both as a politician and as an organizer as he was working to get elected. So I said this to say that Obama's not the first, he's the first black man to break through. I still think of him as black even now. You can call him biracial. Everybody, I think everybody in the United States is multiracial, so I try not to get caught in that thing. He's not the first. He's the latest of a long line of people who have worked in the system to try to figure out how to change. And then I'd like to dissect a little bit this idea of change. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School, Columbia College, Occidental, he went for two years. But basically, I mean, this is a guy who's forged in the mainstream of the American political elite. So even though he looks different and he's brought in a lot of people who look different, I wanna make a distinction between looking different and being different. And even though I'm hopeful that we're gonna get changed that we can believe in, so far what I've seen in the last month hasn't been giving me a lot of hope around that question. I'm watching the political elite that got us into this mess, try to figure out how to get us out of this mess. There aren't just sort of new ideas that I'd really like to see happening. One of the things that I thought I was sort of hopeful last week when he left Washington and went to Fort Meier that he might begin to activate this group of 12 million, the 12 million on the e-list, I'd heard it was 30, is it only 12? Is it only 12, okay. Well, maybe it's 12, it's huge. But I think there's a, Axelrod has talked about the 12 million send it out to three other people so it gets multiplied, is each person who gets the list is supposed to send it out. But what's happening is in this sort of new media world that Andy talked about, we've now got a thing where you have niche groups and compartmentalized groups who are all talking to each other, talking within their own little bubbles and nobody's talking across the lines. And sort of what you saw in Washington in the last couple of weeks has been a sort of a demonstration of how this happens even just within the Beltway of Washington. Somebody in D.C. never got the bipartisanship memo. And obviously the Republicans are trying to make us sort of draw a manginal line and stand and say, you're not coming over to our side and we don't care how much you talk, all your lovely words are not gonna change our minds. We're gonna, if this is about power, the power hasn't, that message hasn't made its way inside the Beltway yet. And the Republicans are really drawing the line there and trying to see how far they can circumvent him. And whether or not the 12 million can really stay motivated and stay activated, I mean, I think this is the challenge of every good organizer is once you've got those people, once you've won that first major battle, folks get tired, they sort of wear out, they need some time to recharge. And yet we're at a moment in time where you need those people to come out of the woodwork and you need them to keep applying the pressure now even more than getting Obama elected because now they've got to figure out a way to get pressure on the Republicans who really don't wanna share. I was meeting this website, 538.com this morning, which was pointing out that Arlen Specter, who's one of the three Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote for this stimulus is actually looking at, he's getting backlash from his constituents in Pennsylvania who one would think since Pennsylvania is gonna be a beneficiary of the stimulus bill that he would be getting support. He's not, he's getting backlash in part, according to, oh, I can't remember the guy's name, Nate Silver, who writes that website because the Republicans have been, the Democrats aren't giving him credit for coming over to their side and the Republicans are sort of lashing out at him because he did go over. Obama is one guy in the middle of a very entrenched and ossified political culture in Washington. There's a lot of people in Washington who can give a good speech. And the question is, how do you change? What's the transformational thing that you can do once you're inside there and get inside that echo chamber where it's like, it's this feedback loop that begins with the Sunday morning talk shows which I actually didn't hear this morning so maybe you guys can enlighten me what happened it sort of begins with the Sunday morning talk shows and then it's like this beat, this drum beat. It's like all week. It was like, every time I looked on the TV I'm looking at another Republican and I'm like, where are the Democrats? I'm not hearing, the Democrats still aren't making their case. Obama's making a case, but one's not, it's not being reinforced by the rest of the folks. So I'm really, we're in the lack of a sort of unified message by the Democrats in the same way that we're getting a unified message from the Republicans who have basically decided that they're willing to all go down together in order to stop the spending as if the last $100 billion is gonna stop after we already gave the banks a trillion dollars. I'm not quite sure where that thinking comes from, but whatever. In the absence of sort of a cohesive message if they keep putting all the weight on Obama what I'm fearful of is that all of the fault lines that began to emerge and which were demonstrated through the campaign, all of the sort of the different ways that Obama can be dissected can in fact, I think begin to become a liability unless he figures out some way to sort of mainstream his message in a much broader way. There's just this differentiation and compartmentalization of all everybody's opinion into little silos on the internet and we just read the ones that we agree with and we all get reinforced and we think, oh yeah, we're winning, we're winning, we're winning. Well, go read some of the Red State newspapers one day if you wanna check back into reality. I mean, I check in with the Times-Piky-Yung and Louisiana was the Red State, the Times-Piky-Yung is supposedly a liberal newspaper in a Red State. It's scary. I mean, they have a totally different take on everything that's going on here. And those people are all talking to themselves. So if we have all these silos talking to themselves where's the place where we all begin to talk to each other and actually try to figure out how to reach this bipartisan agreement in the absence of a, you know, sort of, in the absence, there needs to be more leaders in Washington than just Obama, I think is what I'm saying. You know, somehow Cantor and Pelosi need to figure out how to get in the room and talk to each other. That said, what I guess what I'm trying to say is that it takes more than one guy. There was after when Jesse Jackson first ran for president in 1984 and arguably Jesse Jackson proved that a black man could win a white state before Obama won Iowa, rather. Jesse came in second in Iowa, won Wisconsin, won West Virginia when he ran in 1984. And one of Jesse's lines used to be, it's not the man, it's the plan. It's not the rap, it's the map. So, I don't know where I am on the 10 minutes but I'm going to stop here. You're pretty good. You're good. All right, great. Thank you so much, Jim. Also, a little known fact, June Cross is Daniel May's aunt. So you can imagine the kind of family conversations that go on. I was basically trying to recreate the holiday dinner table here for all of you. You feel like that's out of the family. Yeah, exactly. And that's not even counting Elaine Tyler May, Daniel's mother, who's a feminist historian. So it's like, it's pretty awesome. So, I have some questions but I'd actually love to open it up to the audience immediately because I think we heard some pretty amazing, I mean, in all sorts of great intersections among what the three folks are saying, I think clearly one of the things that's rising to the top for everybody is this notion of power. And I'm thinking a lot about kind of, is there a way for Obama to use his community organizing background to organize Congress people and create some sort of like bipartisan ship, figure out how to align the interests of people on different sides of the sort of political spectrum. Is there something that community organizing can do in the halls of power to create more sort of effectiveness? And also thinking a lot about this difference between what you were talking about, June the elite sort of political grooming that went on with Obama and kind of the rest of America and wondering if the 12 million people on that email list are actually more informed about politics or just got really excited about a particularly charismatic man. Because the stimulus package has put into great sort of contrast the difference between being excited about Obama and actually understanding what the hell is in the stimulus package and whose interests are being met and how to even as a regular citizen kind of untangle that. So I think there is this tendency to just read the blogs that you think agree with your position because it's so hard to understand all of it, even for those of us who had the like elite educational grooming. So those are some of the things sort of swimming around in my head, but I'm sure you all have a lot of things swimming. So I wanted to open it up to the audience and then I'll jump in with more questions or if you three have questions for each other. The stimulus package. Yeah, yeah. Because both of you guys kind of were extremely skeptical or disappointed. I mean, if you just said two years ago, if a Democrat proposed two years ago, the federal government is gonna spend $800 billion. The Democrats would have left them out of the room as a socialist. I mean, I think that it's, obviously, Democrats are upset that they didn't get a bigger package. But Obama two months ago, people were talking about $300 billion. And Obama said I want $775 billion and I want it to be about 30% tax cuts. We ended up with a package that's about $779 billion and about 36% tax cuts. So we can talk about, maybe it's not a big enough plan from a kind of purely economic standpoint. Maybe it's not, certainly liberals were hoping that they could lay a lot more groundwork for kind of good government to come. But Obama got what he asked for. And it's a huge, I mean, it's literally the biggest federal spending bill in the history of the United States. So I guess just to kind of step back and put it in that perspective. Yeah, totally important perspective for us to have. I guess I was talking more about the lack of bipartisan collaboration that it sort of was such a clear example of like, wow, even Obama's not gonna be able to. But there's no incentives for the Republicans to get on board. If they get on board and it works, then Obama gets the credit. If they get on board and it doesn't work, then they can't say anything about how they were right that it wouldn't work. So I mean, obviously it's deeply cynical of them, but this is politics and they're deeply cynical people. Did anyone watch Saturday Night Live last night? Does anyone still watch Saturday Night Live? No. It's only Nick and I. There was a great intro. There was a great intro skit that was a bunch of Republican politicians sitting in their room talking about how they weren't gonna be involved at all, like they weren't gonna touch it because they knew the second it was a disaster, then they could say they had no part in it, which is exactly- They also don't believe in government. That's actually just their ideology. Yeah, ideology is small government. It's non-government. I guess what I would have liked to have seen was a bolder vision from the outset. So yeah, Obama thought what he asked for, but- You would have liked him to ask for more. It was a small vision, not a big dream. I mean, I think that there's sort of two sort of process questions that I find really interesting. One is, does all this in the first few weeks to sort of reach out to Republicans? So there's all these stories about the cocktail hours and oh, Obama came and he just listened to me. The president just listened to me. So we're seeing in just the rigidity of the lines around the vote, the limitations of that whether you call that organizing principles or whether you call that just Obama's natural gifts. Trying to do what Reagan did with Tip O'Neill and that's we're in a different climate. But the other, and this is sort of the mark from an organizing perspective, the real question is, what Obama's trying to do is invent a new style of organizing, which is a massive organizing project that is connected to a elected official that can pressure other elected officials. And that's never been done. It's like a move on, I mean, this is sort of what all the folks who came out of the campaign are trying to figure out how to do with organizing for America. And it's just a real open-ended question as to whether that is possible. And I think the way in which the story of Spector and just all of the stuff around the stimulus package, the number of calls opposed versus the number of calls for. I mean, the grassroots on the right were just so much more mobilized. And so that's a real question as to what, is it possible to take this sort of new idea and actually have some real muscle and strength and maybe it's just fatigue after the election and people sort of wanna break or maybe, what he's trying to do is just brand new. Yeah, and Andrew, on that point, the grassroots of the right, can you talk about the net roots of the right? I mean, can you just give us a little bit of the landscape of like what's going on? Yeah, I mean, there's a whole, I mean, the Republican base is kind of in upheaval and struggling to kind of, it was comical watching them elect the new chairman of the party, because each of them would get up and say, we need to use YouTube and Twitter. And it was not clear what they were gonna say on YouTube or Twitter, but they knew it over and over. The World Wide Web, yeah. So there's a lot of, I mean, the medium is not sufficient. They have to have something to say and their politics doesn't exist anymore and their answers don't make sense for where we live. So they can embrace these tools, but unless they have something to do with them, Obama's team could have been incredibly good in the technical capabilities, but without Obama's ability to draw people in to use those tools, it's kind of what's the point. So they're still struggling to come up with something to mobilize or organize around. The stimulus helped them a little bit and they had some energy there, but they don't have the votes. It doesn't matter how activated the Republican base is, they simply don't have the votes. And Olympia Snow and Arlen Specter and the other kind of very moderate Republicans don't need the Republican base to get elected. They, and so they're happy to sign on to a bill and be a part of the governing coalition. And another, sorry, last point on this, it's true that Obama's kind of attempts at bipartisanship failed, but by virtue of the fact that he nominally tried and made a big kind of song and dance out of it, it made it so that basically this was a bill that was passed without any Republican votes in the House, without any real Republican support in the Senate, three votes in the Senate. If he'd had done that without doing the song and dance about bipartisanship, it would have been, the kind of chattering class would have been taking him to task. They would have been, oh, the Democrats got elected and now they're doing exactly what Bush did, they're ramming it down everyone's throats and they're completely ignoring the Republican party and oh, we've just traded one kind of partisan tyrant for another. And so I think there's tactical value in seeming to attempt bipartisanship. I really am gonna open it up to you now. Any questions? For anyone in particular or generally, yeah. Hi, Al. Al and I work together. This might get personal. I think you talked about how he was going to engage with the traditional press now. Also, what's significant is the media ecology and the era where Samsung and Huffington Post can be one of 10 calls on as a presidential press conference for CNN and, you know, NBA. Right. I have to say, I know a lot of the people who did his new media stuff and not very many of them watch the White House, which I take to being that Obama draws a bright line between the way he will behave in governing and the way he behaved in running for office. I mean, I basically think that Obama thinks that he has, you know, has gained all this, has gained a ton of political capital and is gonna spend it inside the Beltway. And I think that he thinks that's where the game is now. So I don't, you know, he's doing his week, the presidential weekly radio things. He's now doing them on YouTube. I know that they're doing a lot of different things to kind of open up government and put things online, but I don't think any of it's that radical. I mean, I guess in the context of what's existed before, it's pretty amazing, but it's not that dramatic in terms of the kind of new media ambition of it. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I mean, you don't, you don't think it gives a big impact on the fit, you know? Sure. I mean, I mean, I think with the fact that Obama is keeping you to say, you know, this is a big event, we're gonna do something big, you know, you guys don't all show it on prime time and we're just looking at it. Yeah, I mean, I guess I kind of, that doesn't surprise me at all, that's just being president. And I guess I think that it's sometimes too hopeful to expect presidents to do things that are kind of in the general interest, that like their job is to govern and get things done that they think need to be done. I actually think that the internet bloggers and the new media presence is going to increase. I don't see it, the newspapers are dying. And local news is tagging, you know? I really don't see, I mean, I think that it's gonna trend up, not trend down. But Obama's people themselves may not be as active participating in it as it happens, as I guess in my thinking. Maybe not, but you know, there's so many folks that were working in that campaign that are still outside the campaign, I don't think that they're still outside of DC. I don't see that, I don't see a shutout, I don't see that shutout happening. I see it, there's too many economic forces that make new media outlets more necessary as folks through this, you know, in a way that sort of has outdone Republicans and they really are. The only thing they can say is small government. I mean, they're sort of like, they sound like an echo chamber from 1980. I mean, it's just really sort of sad on a one level, except that they've got enough numbers to sort of make things difficult. Yeah. I feel like this gets a little bit to what you were talking about, Daniel, that he's building this new model which would include people inside and outside creating this like, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that the, you know, I mean, part of the question is, I mean, I think that Andrew was sort of touching on this. The way that the house districts are set up, I'm not sure, you're always gonna have a very, you're gonna have a very active, mobilized base on the extremes that carry an inordinate amount of power or influence and they sort of create this chattering. But if they don't represent the majority of folks, it sort of just pushes, I think, and I think this is what you've seen over the last couple of years. I mean, it pushes the Republican Party so far out of the mainstream. I mean, I remember watching the Republican convention this year and I was like, these, right? Where did they get these things? Well, just like they, you know, that I was like, there's no way that these guys are gonna win because you look out at their delegates and they don't look like the country. And I think that that's part of what is, I think that's part of the phenomenon that you're describing. 90% of the country is in white male. Well, as the resident feminist, and we are at the Feminist Art Center, I wanna bring in this question of gender. And I find one of the most interesting, ongoing sort of how much of this politics changed sort of figures is Michelle Obama and is questions about what she's gonna do with the power she has and sort of the way that she is framing herself in the media. And I was wondering if anyone on the panel wants to address thoughts about sort of Michelle Obama and how she's altering perceptions of gender and power in politics. She's certainly altering perceptions of black women, that's for sure. And to that degree is, I mean, I actually think she's a more revolutionary figure than even Obama. The whole idea that, I mean, nobody that looks like Michelle Obama was ever on the cover of Vogue until Michelle Obama became the first lady. I mean, you know, when Oprah made the cover of Vogue, she was like a size eight, you know? I mean, Michelle Obama is not size eight. Yeah, and she's smart. And she's been a, you know, I mean, she's been, this whole thing that she did during the campaign to sort of selling herself as first mom, sort of like the anti-first mom, actually, you know. She's been a very, you know, a power, I almost say power at Hungary was certainly power driven. Woman who runs a community services department in the lawyer in Chicago. I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how she sort of tapes that and figures out how to do what Hillary began to do, but couldn't never quite got, you know, country wasn't quite there yet. And I think that the door that Hillary and Sarah Palin, frankly, both opened during the campaign has also created a huge archway through which she can walk and really sort of define who she is because there's really, because nobody's ever seen a black woman like that in that job before, it's hers for the, you know, she can mold it hard as long as she doesn't screw up, you know? Yeah, and that's mostly just sort of keeping the lip button a little bit and becoming a little more diplomatic. But haven't the early signs been that she kind of, I mean, I guess her sheer presence is obviously kind of dramatic, but haven't the early signs been that she's not gonna be and that she's kind of actively trying to move against the kind of Hillary Clinton model that she keeps talking about, that she's gonna host cultural events at the White House and that she's not gonna do any policy work. I was like, I can't really believe this. You know, she, it seems like, it seems to me that she, maybe because there's so many other things that are already radical just about her sheer presence, that she's not gonna push it too far in terms of being who she actually is and that she's trying to set herself up as kind of, I'm on the cover of Vogue, I'm kind of glamorous, Jackie-o character. I don't see, I think she's using that as a, what is it? There's a line from Invisible Mind, over writer with yeses and underminer with grins. I sort of feel like that's what she's sort of setting. I mean, frankly, what's been going on with her husbands in the last six weeks has been sort of so intense that I don't think any of it is really, none of us really know what she's gonna do. But she's certainly, you know, when I said, I'm not quite sure when you said she was the anti-Hillary. I was thinking of Hillary during the first two years of playing with one, rather than probably the last of it. But, and certainly more so as Hillary as the candidate that Hillary is, firstly. Anyway, that's her smart two cents. Yeah. Daniel, do you have something on that? Well, just that, I mean, I think that they're really smart. And I think they know that the first narrative has to be sort of, you know, a very, very traditional story. But I will be shocked if four years from now, all she's doing, and all we know her for is hosting the library on the lawn or whatever that Barbara Bush has been doing for the last eight years. I just... Hosted a net fish fry on the fish fry on the fish fry. Oh, that would be a politics forever change. One thing that you remind me though, Elaine, that I wanted to talk about with the panel is that that beautiful story you just told, for example, of Michelle's grandfather, father and that trajectory, I'm really worried about the way that that story is going to be used, both in mainstream media, but also in kind of funding circles and just in the way people think about poverty and race and intersections and the American dream story that we always hear over and over. So, I mean, are the panelists worried about kind of this post-racial America, that there'll be this backlash that like we have a black president, so, you know, things are better now. And sort of that it will give that reinforcement to all those people who have so long sort of touted this unrealistic American dream idea and sort of defund some of the great work that's going on on the ground in terms of anti-racism and poverty, elimination stuff. Any worries there? I don't know. I mean, I guess I don't have enough experience, you know, direct experience with people who are doing the grassroots work, just want to speak to it. I mean, I think that I'm sure some people will say, racism doesn't exist anymore. But I do think that the campaign may have simultaneously given fodder to people who think racism doesn't exist and given tons of fodder to people who want to talk about it. I mean, there was very obvious explicit racism constantly throughout the campaign to talk about. So, to me, it's like just because he overcame it doesn't mean it wasn't there and we didn't all see it. And so, I guess I'm sure some people will make that argument, but I don't. I think that it's easy to counteract. Yeah, I get really cynical about this post-racial. Yeah. I was listening to Tupac Shakur's letter to the president on the train on the way over here. Prep work, prep work. Good prep, yeah, I like that. Nothing has changed. I mean, you can write, you can sing that now. It's the same issues. I mean, we're still dealing with all of those issues of racism and classism on the grassroots level. I mean, yeah, it certainly means something. It means a lot, that a black man or a man who is at least not as white as all the rest of them have managed to get up there to the big house. But there's still a lot, there's a lot that he needs to address, and it's huge for, symbolically it's huge, symbolically it's huge, but you just need to make a distinction between, there's a limit to how much symbolism will get you. Yeah, very well said. You have a thought, I see your mouth. I have a thought. Yeah, I mean, I think that Obama's written in the past very eloquently about one of the challenges of being an African-American politician around how much anger to express. And he has this great little exchange where somebody asks him, he's on the floor of the state senate, and you know, why are you getting more fired up about this? And it was another African-American politician. It's like, well, you have your style and I have mine, you know, is what Obama says in response. You know, but I think that I guess part of the question for me is just how, I mean, it's hard to read something like Dreams for My Father and not see how incredibly tied Obama sees himself to a particular historical tradition around organizing for poor people. And that that's what his political identity is about and connected to. And I guess that's sort of my hope for the stuff like organizing for America. I mean, is there gonna be the political space? And ideally, is there gonna be a movement that is going to allow him to be a president who really talks about those issues? And this is where, you know, I think June's point is so important that one person on their own can't do it because he's not gonna do it unless there is the political space to do it. Because he's still, you know, he's not gonna be labeled as an African-American politician in that sort of prophetic tradition that I think Jesse Jackson, you know, embodied. So, but I think that he, I think that his politics are all, you know, I think that what is going to prevent some of that, you know, what we've overcome this stuff is if there is the space for him to really sort of shine a light and a mirror to the incredible inequality and all the institutional racism that I think, you know, he's very much committed to addressing. The question is, you know, can we create the space for him to be able to do it? Well, fine. Other questions? Sorry, can I jump in? I mean, I think OFA can be a really powerful organization for America, which is basically the people who work in the DNC. They're, you know, funded by the Democratic Party. They've taken over his email list and that kind of infrastructure and they're gonna try and use it as a tool for him to get things passed. So Obama wants healthcare. They're gonna say, I have 14 organizers in your neighborhood. So Congressman, if you don't vote for this, we'll turn on you kind of tool. I think that that will probably be an effective tool for doing those kinds of things. But I also think that, you know, those social networks, not in the technical sense, but in the kind of literal sense of the social capital that was built around this need to be activated for a lot more than just supporting Obama's legislative agenda. The age of the New Deal was also the age of the CIO. And there is not the internet and the kind of, and Obama's infrastructure aside, there is not an organized mass left in America. There are kind of attempts and fragments and new tools that are extremely promising. But to what we have to, I mean, we're in the position of now having to simply come up with a new way to organize the American economy. We have a $2 trillion hole in our economy and the major thing that's driven GDP growth in the last 20 years, the financial institutions have just, they don't exist anymore, they're collapsed. So we're structurally about to undertake a massive thing that Obama will not be able to do from the top and that he will not be able to say provocative enough things through OFA from the bottom. People need to activate and go out and kind of build what enabled Roosevelt to do things that he did in the 30s and early 40s. Yeah, I was looking at the front page of the Times today. They had the article about the unemployment and the strikes all over Europe. What's it gonna take for Americans, for grassroots Americans to begin to do this? Wow. That would be the pressure that... I mean the problem is that the right has just been so successful over the last 40 years of killing the labor movement. I mean that's what moved Roosevelt. That's what made the New Deal possible. So figuring out how do we create, is it possible to create that kind of a massive mobilized infrastructure that's not the labor movement? That's a serious problem. Well, and also in the New Deal, if you didn't get organized, you didn't have food on the table. We don't live in a mass scarcity kind of situation anymore. So we have to come up with new tools to mobilize people beyond... You know, I was talking to a friend of mine, and he said, you know, when people went to the White House to strike and say, you know, we need you to pay back our kind of veterans benefits promises, if they didn't get those, they didn't need, you know, period. And we don't really exist with that amount of scarcity like we did then. So we have to come up with new tools to mobilize people, and we have to come up with new tools to communicate how dramatic the situation is. I also think we've established, we've trained ourselves to feel entitled to be free of discrimination, like around identity politics issues. I think we've generally kind of brought up this next generation to feel entitled to protest against Gina 6. But the idea of actually being entitled to economic security is something that I think because of all the fear around socialism and commun... You know, all of these claims that we haven't raised this generation to think they're actually entitled to economic security. So the idea that they would get outraged about not having it is sort of hard to even imagine in the way that they know they can get outraged if a racist or sexist comment is made. The political elite that got us into this mess has now been in charge with figuring out a way to get us out of it. And it's not possible. That's what I... It needs some kind of... Some kind of outside force needs to sort of lever something. You know, there needs to be some external something. I don't know whether it's foreclosures, just going crazier when people figure out that it already is true that the banks have gotten all the help and homeowners sort of left out here in the cold. Well, enough homeowners get upset about it to go march in the streets, which would be the alternative to the union thing. I mean, we marched to try to stop the war in Iraq. Why couldn't people get out and march on that issue? I don't know. I mean, do we have... I don't certainly feel capable of explaining how I want to organize the kind of post-financial bubble of American economy. I don't think we have a lot of people who do. I don't think we have a movement to sustain them. And I don't... You know, I agree with what you said completely. I just don't have the... I mean, did anyone have an answer? I mean... There's no infrastructure. Yeah, there's not an infrastructure or an answer. And I think, you know, I think to a large degree, the reason that we have to bail out the banks is because of the last 30 years we've built an economy in which literally the banks are too big to bail. I mean, literally... I understand that there's populist anger about it, and I understand it, but it's a structural problem. If we don't put money back into the financial system, no one will be able to get money back out to lend and borrow and do all the things that everyone else needs to do. And we need to figure out how to build a new system that is not reliant on people who are essentially profiting off of that from the top. And I don't know how to do that. Maybe someone... I'm sure there are some economists who have some answers. I didn't ask any economists to be on the panel, so... No, but you know what I mean, like... That's the buck on that one. I mean, maybe we talked to Jamie Galbraith, or we talked to Dean Baker, or some of these are Joe Stiglitz, but... One thing I heard someone say that I thought was so wise, and I hope this can be embodied somehow, in Obama's presidency, once he has, again, the room to do it, once we all create that space for him, is his speech on race, imagine if he had done a speech on gender. What would it look like for Obama to really take responsibility for bringing forth what he actually embodies in a lot of ways, which is a non-traditional sort of gender norm. In certain ways, their marriage is very traditional, and they clearly very conscientiously present it that way to the media. But in a lot of ways, his leadership has been described even as feminized, in my opinion in a positive way, but of course in a negative way, by a lot of the right. So I don't think sexism is over, of course, or I'd be out of a job, a lot of jobs, but I do think there's room, or I'd like, I hope we'll create room for him to take sexism and sort of these traditional gender roles on as a man, and that that in itself will have a really interesting power, or could. I don't know if he'll have the space to do it again, but that's one of my thoughts. Anyone else have thoughts on that? Yeah, well it's interesting because it's a paradox in some ways, right? It's totally traditional in a certain sense, but because you add sort of the racial intersection to it, all of a sudden it's totally radical. And it's also radical in the sense that I think Obama claims a fatherhood role in a very complex way, right? It's not a father's knows best father. This is a father who knows that his daughters have a crush on the Jonas brothers and can talk about it and obviously has a real complex relationship with his daughter. So in that sense, I think it's pretty radical. I don't know if anyone wants to. Isn't there something kind of, I'm trying to figure out a good way to put this, racially condescending about how much they have to perform their normalness? I mean, I find there to be something just so infuriating about the fact that everyone's constantly like, oh, look at them, they're like normal people taking their children to school, you know. I mean, it's like- This is how abnormal it is to be African-American. Well, right, I mean, exactly, exactly. And also, it's funny, a blogger, Tennessee quotes, who writes for the Atlantic, wrote a really funny post recently where everyone was talking about Obama and their normal family and the only people who they can come up with to compare them to is the Cosby family, a fictional family that is 20 years old. There is simply no other image of normal black family life in America despite the fact that a vast majority of black people in this country are middle class and obviously there's all kinds of other things to talk about here, but I just find that their needs to kind of perform their normalness really obnoxious. But do you think- I don't think it's their fault, but no, not at all. You're just saying, because I don't think they're performing or you are- Well, they're performing in the sense that they're having a photo op, they're going to school, they're calling the media, they're telling them to go. It's very image-conscious. On the cover of Us Magazine, I'm a cool dad. Right. But I guess I'm- A bunch of my girlfriends and I were talking about how the two little girls always seemed so, like they never had a meltdown in public. You know, they just like told me perfect. And I was like, yeah, they remind me of me when I was about that age. You know, it's like, shut up. Look perfect in your little dress. And don't you dare say anything or else I'm going to have your skin when you come off of the page. And then I got to be a teenager and I totally went with hogwilds. He has eight years, so we'll see if- He has eight years, yeah. They're too young to know any better. Right. Should we take one more question? Great question. Well, I think I, you know, sort of under the surface of what I was trying to say is that I'm not sure that it is possible. I mean, I think that the tradition that he comes out of is distinctly oppositional in its relationship to government. So he's going to do something that will be shaped by that tradition. But I don't think it makes sense to ask of the president to be an organizer. I do think that they're, I mean, I think one of the big things is just the way that he talks. I was just, when I was thinking about what to say today, I went back and I read the speech that he gave in New Hampshire. And there's this beautiful piece at the end about, this was the speech that, yes, we can't speech after the New Hampshire loss. And he does this beautiful sort of weaving together. You know, when we see that the stories of a kid in South Central Los Angeles is the same as the story of a child in Nebraska whose father just got laid off. And we see that the story of a, in New York is the same. You know, it just sort of picks all these different stories and kind of weaves them together to talk about what he's trying to create. And I think to the extent that just his rhetoric and his language is shaped by this idea of trying to figure out how do we bring together these disparate realities, these disparate stories. I think that's the sort of, that's the mark that his organizing is gonna make on the country. Because what we're gonna talk about in 40 years is maybe the policies, but we're gonna talk about the stuff that he said and the same way we talk about the stuff that Kennedy said and the stuff that Lincoln said. So I think that's sort of where his mark in terms of sort of his legacy as a, and history as an organizer is gonna be made. You know, I think the more concrete answer is just to be written. And I think they're trying to figure out what does that look like? What does it look like to sort of take this focus on individual stories and bring it to a national stage. Take these practices of house meetings and individual conversations that are sort of the building blocks of organizing and do that nationally. You know, it's like what's in my inbox every, you know, come to a house meeting and talk about, you know, your economic crisis story. I mean, that's them just trying to figure out can we organize on a national scale? And, you know, I'm skeptical about it. That's a half answer. I don't have an answer for it as a word. I don't have Daniel begin to have Daniel's experience as an organizer. But the one thing I know about being vibrational is that you learn to compartmentalize and become fluent in cultural languages in ways that most Americans aren't. And Obama's had a really unique, I mean, we talked about his experience as an organizer and as a politician, but you know, he's also lived outside of the United States. He brings a remarkable set, probably more than any other man that's held the office, a remarkable set of life experiences to this job. And it might just be, given the fact that he's chose, he's hanging on to the Blackberry so he can still communicate with the outside world. He's beginning to leave the White House. It's a lot is going to depend on his ability to keep leaving Washington either virtually or literally and engage with those different communities that he's got an understanding of. So in large part it's going to depend on sort of his being able to retain that chameleon-like persona that he perfected during the campaign, I think. Yeah, I mean, I agree with Daniel. I don't think that it's possible. I think Daniel's exactly right, that the narrative, that his ability to weave narratives comes directly from organizing, but that the rest of it, as soon as you get into the position of elected office, is not really useful. You know, I think paradoxically, just like Daniel was explaining in his talk, you know, Obama's narrative, even though he uses, kind of uses community organizing in his creation story, the way Dan put it, his career is actually paradoxically kind of a rejection of that as a real tool for progress. I mean, he basically became a very savvy cynical politician because he understood that the other stuff didn't work. I mean, that's a pretty, I know that a lot of people don't really like hearing that Obama is a cynical politician, but this is a man who redistricted his own state senate district in Chicago so that it would have, on the one hand, rich white people, and on the other hand, poor black people because he knew that the black people could be his voting base and the white people could be his funding base. He specifically redistricted his district because he understood that he had an appeal to upper class, kind of educated white people like us who would kind of buy into his shtick. And so I think in an interesting way, we have to kind of look at his story as a rejection of organizing. Now, he's gonna create a lot of organizers and they're gonna do something. So someone's gotta get out there and start kind of talking about what they should be doing and have some answers. And I don't know what that looks like yet. I think that we have to start, we have to move away from thinking about Obama in the context of Obama's machine and start thinking about what do states do? What do cities do? How are we organizing against? Yeah, how are we organizing against local governments? Because the federal government has kind of had its say now when it comes to the economic crisis. For the next year, this stimulus package is gonna be its say, maybe they'll come back and do more. But the real organizing in terms of saving jobs, in terms of recreating economies has to be done at the local level and Barack Obama to some extent won't have much power over that. And I would bring that even more local, again as the resident feminist, the personal as the political, right? That it's not about just what would Obama do, what would the nation do? What should the state do? What should the region do? But what are we each doing? How did this election forever change you or not? And how is that going to be kind of continually contextualized into your life and made real in daily actions? Whether it is in a really formal sort of community organizing sense or whether it's more of this approach to people's stories and telling your own and gathering others. And for me, really reaching across class boundaries and reaching across race boundaries, which is what we still in this country live in these totally segregated worlds in so many ways. So I guess I'll leave by encouraging you to really think about kind of what is your politics forever changed through this transformative experience and what is that gonna mean in your daily life and the way you're operating and how you can support some of these larger levels. But really the piece we have control over is what we do in our own lives. So think about that and thank you so much for coming and thank you to my panelists. Big round of applause. How do you thank you, June and Jude? I'd like to remind you that we have panel discussions and lectures here every weekend and that March is not only Women's History Month but it's also going to be the second anniversary of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Founder Start. So we're gonna have a lot of interesting and wonderful programming and particularly on March 21st, we're gonna have a speak out which is going to be in the auditorium on the third floor and it's been put together by a group of us, there are 12 of us called Unfinished Business and it's going to be a women's vision for the nation. What's it going to take? And Laura Flanders who is host of GRIT TV is going to be the moderator and see Nicole Milson, Mason, excuse me, who's the executive director of the Women of Color Policy Network is going to be giving the keynote address and it's going to be very interesting and I think it will be very enjoyable because it's gonna open up, it's gonna be a complete audience active participation and for those of us who are and I don't see that many who look like they might be who remember here originally, actually as of yesterday, the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter has in fact aligned with Mars. So hopefully peace will rule our planet and love will steer the stars. Thank you for coming, bye-bye.