Perhaps the reality of Obama's win is unhinging me. I should be, if not jubilantly happy, at least satisfied with the outcome. Yet I remain somewhat gloomy about it.

While everyone celebrates the milestone of Obama's win, I look at the things he probably will not do.

Troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq with any speed.

Troop levels in Afghanistan will probably be increased.

While Obama has said he will pursue diplomacy more actively, I very much doubt that will significantly decrease U.S. military interventions over the next four years. I suspect that realpolitik will be a central consideration rather than compassionate or idealistic generosity.

Whatever actions he takes on the economic front won't happen until after his inauguration. And whatever he does will probably take a long time to take effect.

As I've said, Obama is inheriting a huge pile of problems from Bush: systemic de-regulation, ideological politicization of science, demoralization of career civil servants, etc. The list is extensive and Obama will be hard pressed just to correct the shambles left by the Bushies, much less advance a positive agenda.

To be blunt, I haven't heard anything to lead me to believe Obama is anything but a centrist. While this is an enormously refreshing change from the extreme bellicose hard-heartedness of Bush, I remain unconvinced we will actually see substantive changes quickly in an Obama administration. I may be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

"But," you sputter, "This is a historic moment, a shining beacon of achievement that renounces racism in America and affirms the highest aspirations of our Constitution! We have shown that America has moved beyond racial divisions!"

Uh-huh. That and US$3.50 will get you a latte. (For now.)

Even with the "mandate" Obama received from a large majority of the voters, his path will be enormously hard. He's an excellent rhetorician, an eloquent speaker who clearly articulates the desires of many Americans but it's difficult to judge how effective he will be.

However much I want Obama to succeed and accomplish a re-invigorated liberal agenda, he will be constrained by enormously powerful economic and political forces. I am certainly not pointing a finger at some vague free-floating racism but at the resistance of the system itself to change.

I hope for change but my expectations are exceedingly low.

If he doesn't accomplish some major items quickly, I strongly expect all that wonderful goodwill flowing from the electorate in these celebratory moments will turn to resentment.

No one falls faster than a hero.

I'm sorry if this all comes across as harsh or overly judgmental of a man who hasn't been President-elect for even 24 hours. I'm sorry to rain on this golden parade of optimism and bright visions of the future I see blooming everywhere. I'm sorry to cast doubt on accomplishments yet to come.

My contrarian nature has emerged to spoil the party and I am sorry.

Labels: Obama, politics, President Obama, Presidential race 2008

For some reason I was surprised when the New York Times (NYT) endorsed Barack Obama in the Presidential race. This is, to me, both encouraging and dismaying.

In recent days, a number of people and groups have endorsed Obama: Colin Powell, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, Scott McClellan as well as a large majority of newspapers.

Now why would I find this dismaying? Endorsements like these certainly won't hurt Obama's chances. The NYT's endorsement in particular emphasizes McCain's responses to the current economic problems as out of touch and lacking in forward vision. Yet it also shows the establishment/elite comfortableness with Obama. In other words, Obama will find solutions within limits acceptable to the political and financial establishment. This doesn't mean the solutions might not be painful for them but they are willing to accept the probable parameters and limits of the actions.

If you read about these opinions in the newspaper or see it on the TV, you will be looking at elite opinion, not the opinions of working-class people. Studies have shown that the views aired in these forums are from an incredibly narrow political and social spectrum.

I don't mean to belittle Obama's accomplishments or his ability to inspire. Yet despite all that, my expectations for substantive change after his election remains low and muted.

Part of me wonders if this is some unconscious racism on my part seeking justification but I think not. It's my cynicism about the US political process over the last 45 years. The process is intended to winnow out candidates unacceptable to the established order, not to provide change. Slogans are not change.

Perhaps my attitude is a result of a lo-o-o-oong string of disappointments in the elective arena over decades of experience. I no longer get my hopes up. Then I'm pleasantly surprised when the elected official even minutely exceeds an exceptionally low bar.

I wish Obama the best. I want him to win. I just don't expect to be remotely satisfied by his actions after taking office. He will not be free to take radical action. This is the reality of Presidential politics: There will be political debts to be paid. No one reaches the White House without being bound by these debts.

Labels: media, Obama, politics, polls, Presidential race 2008

The following essay from Starhawk neatly sums up some of my own doubts and thoughts about the coming election. I've taken the liberty of linking some of the people and groups she mentioned to websites and Wikipedia entries but these links did not exist in the copy I got through email. --DemiOrator

Collapse and Elections: My Lessons from Katrina
by Starhawk

I’ve been meaning to write this essay for three years, since I went down to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to volunteer with a grassroots organization called Common Ground Relief. I went to New Orleans because for decades I’ve been part of groups holding a few key beliefs, among them, that this current system is unsustainable and will eventually come crashing down, and the other—that small scale, directly democratic grassroots organizing is the most empowering and effective way to take action. I wanted to see what it was like in a place where the crash had come, and to see if our grassroots, do-it-yourself mode of organizing could work in that situation.

Now, with the Gulf Coast battered by a new round of storms, Wall Street deconstructing and capitalism in meltdown mode, that prediction is coming true. It seems a good time to review those lessons.

In New Orleans, the crash had come. Not just the devastation left by the storm—every major system that was supposed to offer protection, succor or relief had failed. Starting with the faulty levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers, moving on to an evacuation plan that was no plan at all for those without means, to completely inadequate shelter facilities for those who remained, to disorganized and punitive responses for those who survived, nothing official was working.

What I arrived, a month after the hurricane, the only systems that were functioning were the decentralized, autonomous relief efforts. Common Ground Relief was started by a local organizer, Malik Rahim, who lived in Algiers, a neighborhood that had not flooded. He sent out a call that made its way into activist circles.

And people responded. Nurses, doctors and street medics who had honed their skills setting up emergency clinics for street actions went down and set up a functioning clinic long before the Red Cross arrived. Others helped set up distribution for relief supplies, and later, as residents began to filter back, organized groups of volunteers to gut houses contaminated with toxic black mold and to offer other forms of service. I worked on a bioremediation project, using natural methods to decontaminate soil.

The experienced deepened my commitment to decentralized, grassroots organizing. Our ability to move swiftly, without being hampered by red tape, to respond to immediate need and to call on thousands of people to volunteer their time, efforts and money was impressive.

But I also saw our limitations. I remember sitting in one early meeting where we were discussing whether to send supplies across the river to the main part of town, still without power, or out to Houma in the bayou country, or to focus where we were. “What about Mississippi?” someone said. “I hear there’s no relief in Biloxi at all!” The discussion spun down a vortex of overwhelming need, and I remember thinking, “There should be someone or something who could send a team into every county and parish, assess the need, set up distribution…”and then…”There is an agency that’s supposed to do that. It’s called FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or failing that, the National Guard.”

The National Guard was partly in Iraq, partly in Florida moving military equipment out of the way of the storm. While the military had searched every house in the city for bodies in the aftermath of the flood, they were providing more harassment than relief to those who remained. FEMA was under the control of a Bush political appointee who has become a famous symbol of utter mismanagement. And I couldn’t help thinking, “There are people dead today who would still be alive if we had had somebody even minimally competent in charge.”

Our grassroots efforts were effective, but they couldn’t begin to match the enormous need. Eventually, Common Ground Relief had centers in several different neighborhoods in New Orleans, and along with many other relief efforts, drew on thousands of volunteers who came down over the next year. College students came down on breaks, communities sent down convoys of supplies and helpers, but there was no way we could respond on the scale of the disaster.

Our volunteer efforts were also difficult to sustain over time. While many, many people made personal sacrifices in order to come, and some stayed for a year or more doing unpaid and extremely difficult work, not many people could afford to do that. Efforts like our bioremediation project suffered from lack of consistency. When a person who had enthusiasm for it was there, it flourished. When they left, it died.

Volunteer efforts also depend on people getting along well together. Direct democracy means people make decisions together, and that can be tremendously empowering or tremendously frustrating. Stress, trauma and overwhelming need do not further good group process. Common Ground’s efforts often felt the strain of interpersonal conflicts, which also drained energy and enthusiasm from volunteers.

I came away from the experience with profoundly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I see even more strongly the power of positive, creative direct action—that is, directly solving our own problems, organizing to provide for needs and to exemplify solutions, and doing it in groups where every person involved has a say in decisions. I feel called to help plant the seeds of that kind of organizing in every neighborhood, town and bioregion of the land, and to help further refine our skills in making decisions and handling conflicts.

But I also see the need for big systems. There are problems that need to be addressed on a massive scale, and we face some crucial ones at this moment in history. While my long-term vision is a world of empowered, decentralized communities in charge of their own destinies, there’s a short term problem we desperately need to address: completely transforming our technology, our energy infrastructure, our economy, our food, manufacturing and transportation systems to a zero carbon basis, and doing it in a way that furthers social justice.

I call this a short term problem because we need to begin this transition now, not in some distant, utopian future, not even in fifty years or fifteen or ten. Jim Hansen, the world’s leading climate change scientist, says we are already past the tipping point for irreversible, runaway climate change. That means potentially billions of deaths, from drought, from thirst, from increased and frequent storms like Katrina and like the hurricanes currently battering the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast, the potential rise of sea levels, billions more left homeless refugees, major extinctions and huge losses of biodiversity. Trust me, we don’t want to go there if we don’t have to.

And we don’t have to. We have the technology and knowledge we need to make the shift—possibly with less personal sacrifice than we think. You don’t have to trust me on this, check out the resources at the end of this post and read the folks who have crunched the numbers for us.

But we do need to make the shift on the big scale as well as the small. Changing our individual lightbulbs won’t do it. Organizing our own communities to plan and implement the transition will be a big step, but it won’t be enough. We need massive investment in new infrastructure and major shifts in the policies that have subsidized the current fossil fuel economy along with the failed global casino economy. In short, we need intervention on the scale of government.

If we’re going to have government, it should be well-run, honest, and accountable. Its police powers should be limited and it should serve as a way for us to pool our resources and address issues that are too big to solve individually. It should protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, the honest from the greedy, and use its resources to help mitigate the suffering of individuals from the misfortunes of loss, disease and disaster which can afflict us all.

Instead, we’ve had eight years and more of the opposite—government that has increased police and military power at the expense of every nurturing function, inflated police power and undermined our freedoms, waged illegal wars, favored the rich over the poor and middle class and encouraged such unbridled greed that the whole system is now collapsing. Unfortunately, in such a crash those at the bottom get crushed under the most weight.

We have the Republicans chanting ‘Drill, Baby Drill!” while blocking the extension of tax credits for solar, wind and renewables. If the question is, “Which candidate is more likely to lead us to a solar future”, there’s simply no contest.

Let me just say here that, in the circles I run in, the question is not, “Should I vote for Obama or McCain.” The dilemma is “Should I bother to vote at all, when even Obama’s policies are not nearly progressive enough. Won’t he just sell out and betray us, like every other politician?”

Obama won’t save us. His policies do fall short, for me, in many respects. But he is headed in the right direction, toward the future while McCain and Palin want to drag us back into a feudal, fossil-fueled, fundamentalist past.

If Obama did represent my position, on say, Palestine, he would be unelectable.

Asking politicians to take unelectable positions is like asking ducks to sink. If we want those positions represented, we need to build popular support for them. And we need to make that support mean something in terms of votes, funds and volunteers.

On some issues, progressives have done that. The fact that Obama is running at all is a tribute to the civil rights organizing over decades. No, we haven’t ended racism, but we’ve moved in my lifetime from being a country where Obama and I could not have drunk from the same water fountain in many states to a country where he can run for President. That is an extremely meaningful change, and his election will have a powerful, symbolic meaning that will shift the ground of racism in ways we cannot fully anticipate.

We’ve built powerful opposition to the War in Iraq. Or maybe, the war itself has done that for us. Obama is the candidate because of that opposition. Had Hillary Clinton opposed the war more strongly, she would most likely be the Democratic candidate. Nonetheless, her candidacy, and the fact that conservative Republican strategists turned to a woman to bolster their faltering campaign, are a tribute to the decades of feminist organizing that have changed our collective sense of what women’s roles should be.

On other issues, like justice for Palestine, we have not yet shifted public opinion or built enough support for a truly progressive solution even to be on the table. Why not? In part, because for the last eight years trying to organize in this country has been like trying to walk to the left with a gale force wind pushing us to the right. We’ve done well even to hold our ground and make some small headway.

I don’t think Obama will be our savior. But if he’s elected, the wind will shift. The breeze will be at our backs, pushing us further and faster toward destinations we otherwise cannot reach.

If McCain wins, or steals the election, the right will claim a popular mandate that will propel their destructive programs onward. Progressive causes and movements will suffer.

I sometimes hear the argument that it has to get worse before it gets better, that people will become radicalized when it gets really awful. I’ve been hearing that since Nixon was elected in ‘Sixty-eight, and I’ve yet to see it happen. It is already really awful, and we’ll be lucky if we can persuade most of the people to simply not vote the architects of the awfulness back into power.

People do not become empowered by constantly having their powerlessness rubbed in their faces. In the United States, at least, where the worst possible thing you can be is a ‘loser’, people like to be on the winning side. Increased repression does not tend to make people more radical—if it did, we’d see our movements growing over the last eight years instead of shrinking. It tends to make people give up, or turn their energies toward smaller efforts where they feel they can make some impact. A McCain win would reward the machinery of lies and corruption and cement the power of the police state.

For Obama to win, and to assure that this election does not get stolen like the last two, he needs to win big. To have some hope of implementing progressive changes, he needs to have a supportive Congress and Senate win with him.

I hear arguments from some of my dear friends that voting doesn’t matter, that it’s not empowering or revolutionary. But for the vast majority of people in this country, elections are the only place where they interface with politics or attempt to exercise power, and if we sneer at that, we lose the chance to link together and open up broader channels for change. And for the kids I’ve worked with in the Bayview, who have never seen a flowing river and whose career options range from crack dealer to murder-for-hire, voting would be a big step upwards.

I’m a registered member of the Green Party. I vote Green often, and on a local level, I think the Green Party can have an enormous impact. I also love Cynthia McKinney, whose policies are much closer to those I hold dear. But I hold no illusions that she can win. A Green Party can provide a counterweight on the left to the many pulls to the center and the right that play on candidates. But I would prefer to see the Green Party concentrate on the local issues and candidates that can make a difference, rather than make a weak showing on the national front.

Policy is only one aspect of what we need in a President. A President must be able to garner the power and the backing to get policies enacted.

And on an energetic level, a President embodies a national mood, a zeitgeist, an energetic field. Obama has that magic charisma, that ability to inspire a mood of hope and optimism. In spite of all the attempts by both Clinton and the Republicans to diminish his appeal, he retains that great gift. In these times when so much of what ordinary people have depended on is crashing down around us, mood might actually be more important than specific points of policy. Because if we have no hope, if we spiral downwards into cynicism, despair and apathy, we will lose any power we might otherwise wield.

Obama may or may not be all we hope. But this election, we actually have a clear choice between candidates who represent very different approaches to the huge crises that we face. For the people who’ve lost their homes or pensions in the last months, for the people under fire in Iraq, for the companies struggling to start up solar or wind installations, for the millions without health insurance, for the billions of people around the world at risk from climate meltdown, the decision we make in the next weeks is crucial.

I will continue to work and organize and teach with the vision of a thousand, a million Common Ground-style organizations everywhere. I won’t give up my vision of an ideal world of shared and decentralized power, and the bulk of my efforts will always go into envisioning that world, teaching the skills and understandings we need to bring it about, and agitating to make it happen.

But I’m also going to vote, and to encourage others to do so, to engage with this election, to register the disenfranchised, work in the swing states, volunteer to monitor to assure fair elections, and talk to your friends and neighbors.

And when I cast my ballot for President, it will be for Obama.

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org

Addendum: If you are looking for good, solid, number crunching around energy policy and the transition to a carbon-free society, check out: Arjun Makhijani. Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. Takoma Park, MD. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research www.ieer.org.

It’s not sexy writing, but it’s vital information, very technical and well researched. Makhijani was skeptical that the transition could be done economically, then did the research (funded by Helen Caldicott) and found that indeed we could. I’ll be writing more on this later.

(Feel free to forward and repost this—just let me know where if you post it.)
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This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path. Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.

Labels: Democrats, NOLA, Obama, politics, Presidential race 2008, starhawk

My other commitments have been sucking at my time so I admit my reading of blogs has been severely limited over the last year or two. I'm trying to sample some of my old favorites as well as reach out to some new ones.

This has brought me back to Frameshop and a renewed appreciation of the analysis provided there. I never leave Frameshop without substance to chew over. Some may find it a little abstract but I never do. For example, his recent post Frameshop: The Winning Frame has Emerged examines the various frames used by various candidates in the campaign.

Here's his take on the Democrats' frames:

Opening Frames: 'American Dream' and 'Hope'
The 2008 election started out with multiple competing frames from Democrats and Republicans. The largest opening frames, however, came from the Clinton campaign and the Obama Campaign.

From the start, Clinton set the idea of restoring the 'American Dream,' and idea that was fundamentally economic. During the course of the primary, Clinton arrived at a new way to express her opening frame by talking about 'the invisible.' It was a very convincing idea, particularly as the economy went south. Despite the ideological statements of the Republicans, a majority of Americans felt that the economy had left them behind and that nobody cared about their troubles. The 'American Dream' frame became 'the invisible' and Hillary Clinton won millions of votes as a result.

The Obama campaign offered a different opening frame in the idea of 'Hope.' In many ways, 'Hope' was a much stronger frame than 'American dream' because it spoke to larger questions about the future of the country as a whole. By talking about 'Hope,' Obama was talking about American idealism beyond the mechanics of building family wealth. 'Hope' was also a more forward looking frame because it implicitly acknowledged new challenges that Americans face--such as global warming, conservation, technology, international interdependence, and so forth. The 'American Dream,' was more nostalgic. The problem with 'Hope' as we discovered in the primary, was that it was difficult to re-emphasize in terms of the economy when that became the key issue in the primaries. The middle ground framing of 'more people participating' that was so successful for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, became less successful for his campaign in Pennsylvania. The better frame in idealistic terms, 'Hope' did not readily present a way to ground that idealism in the concrete issues that contingency was forcing into the election.

Obama won the nomination, but the sense coming out of that long contest was that he was left with a very big challenge of finding an economic foundation for his 'hope' frame. And even by the time of the DNC, it did not seem like that new frame had emerged quite yet.

Labels: analysis, blogs, Dems, frames, Hillary, Obama

I've come full circle: It was over four years ago, during the Democratic National Convention of 2004, that I began this erratic blog called DemiOrator. I've slacked off blogging here during the last year or so, my attention focused elsewhere. Still, I have affection for this tatty and ratty personal expression of mine despite the recent neglect.

I started this blog with a cynical eye but with hope that things could be improved. This seems less and less likely, despite Obama's nomination. Superficially, Obama seems like a sign of progress, his nomination by a major party to run for president practically unimaginable just a generation ago. Yet I have seen little evidence of substantial change coming if he is elected. Oh, his administration will probably be head and shoulders above the current administration or McCain's but these are exceptionally low bars to clear.

I've always had little confidence in the US political system above the very local level of participation. Democracy does not thrive well beyond the local representative level where you can actually talk with your rep or attend meetings with them. At a national level, the corruption of power, money and ruling class values dominates discussion and influence. Lobbyists write legislation to benefit their clients/special interests and money talks louder than the voices of constituents.

This is Labor Day weekend and I suspect large numbers of people under 30 have little clear idea what it originally represented. Today, unions have been losing members for decades and the percentage of unionized US workers is at its lowest ebb. The idea of banding together with other workers even seems bizarre to many because we're now acclimated to the idea that we're competing with everyone else.

"Collective bargaining? Solidarity? Aren't those commie ideas? Commies are bad, right? We won the Cold war and I don't want no truck with commies."

So politicians continue to pull our strings to get votes. There are no guarantees that the promises made before the election will be kept after the election. They'll claim new facts and a fuller understanding/briefing on the situation means that there are other factors in the balance.

I'm willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt but I also expect nothing more from him than I expect from any politician: reversals of positions, inaction on many pre-election promises, and equivications when confronted on this pattern.

I never believe slogans or promises; I only believe in actions. I recommend you do as well.

Labels: blogging, cynicism, labor, Obama, politics, unions