President Barack Obama

A More Perfect Union

John K. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317253556
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Barack Obama's "improbable quest" has become a fact of American life and a benchmark in American history. Striving now toward "a more perfect union," Obama and the nation confront obstacles unforeseen at the outset of the 2008 electoral campaign. John K. Wilson tracks the sweep of this progress from the beginning of Obama's political career through his move into the White House. With his critical journalistic eye and his sympathetic "native son" perspective, Wilson shows us a side of Obama we haven't seen as well as a view of the media we need to understand-even more now as the Obama administration begins to govern. The paperback edition of this popular book includes a new introduction, updates throughout, and two new chapters on the electoral victory and the transition from campaigning into governing. New photos and new insights include a focus on the continued importance of race in American politics.

CHAPTER ONE

Generation Obama

The Youth Movement for Barack

Let’s bring a new generation of leadership to America, and let’s change this country together.

—Barack Obama

On December 10, 2006, in his first speech in New Hampshire, Obama said, “America is ready to turn the page. America is ready for a new set of challenges. This is our time. A new generation is prepared to lead.”¹

Obama’s announcement of his presidential run on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, was filled with appeals to generational change. Obama declared, “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age.… And as our economy changes, let’s be the generation that ensures our nations workers are sharing in our prosperity.… Let’s be the generation that ends poverty in America.… Let’s be the generation that finally tackles our health care crisis.… Let’s be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil.… Let’s be the generation that makes future generations proud of what we did here.”

According to fellow Illinois senator Dick Durbin, “I think he represents a generation change in American politics—much like 1960 with John Kennedy. He appeals to younger people and those who want to see real fundamental change in America.”² Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, said, “Obama has already established himself as the paramount leader of the next generation. There’s no one even close.”³

Obama has said that he looks at “some issues differently as a consequence of being of a slightly different generation.”⁴ But there is no strong generational identity in the wake of the baby boomers, and what Obama calls for is not so much a repudiation of the 1960s generation as a fulfillment of some of its ideals. Obama suggested that he may have “a particular ability to bring the country together around a pragmatic, commonsense agenda for change that probably has a generational element to it as well.”⁵ Obama declared in one speech, “America is ready for a new set of challenges. This is our time. A new generation is prepared to lead.”⁶ He promised a new kind of politics instead of the “24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative-ad bickering, small-minded politics that doesn’t move us forward.”⁷

As the first major politician of the post-baby boomer era, Barack Obama appeals to a group of “generation Xers” who have always lived in the shadow of the baby boomers and who have faced the generational accusation that those like Obama who grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s were selfcentered and indifferent to social causes.

Obama has even more appeal to today’s college students, who are the children of baby boomers. For them, Ronald Reagan is a distant memory from the history books. It would be too extreme to suggest that today’s students are rebelling against their parents, seeking a unifying figure who can avoid the political and social schisms that have echoed since the 1960s. But Obama does represent a new kind of politics that seems perfectly tailored for this new generation. The Obama generation will be defined by his presidency, earning financial aid for college by working on community service projects and participating in expanded opportunities to get involved in public service.

Some of Obama’s approaches are about changing the rhetoric of politics, to bring a more inclusive style to political debate. But his aim is not civility for its own sake; Obama believes a more united politics can be more effective at making progress than the political divisions that have become so common today.

Obama and Community Organizing

The time Obama spent as a community organizer had a profound impact on his approach to politics. Obama was the director of the Developing Communities Project in the mid-1980s, spending four years organizing African American neighborhoods on the segregated South Side of Chicago. In 1988, Obama wrote about his experience. Obama recalled being told, “I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.” Obama answered, “It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.”⁸

Obama considers his work in Chicago on political empowerment, economic development, and grassroots community organizing to be the “best education” he ever received.⁹ Obama noted, “Organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people.”¹⁰

From his organizing work, Obama learned that “oftentimes ordinary citizens are taught that decisions are made based on the public interest or grand principles, when, in fact, what really moves things is money and votes and power.”¹¹ This was Obama’s first lesson that fighting against cynicism was a first step in political change.

Obama also learned the concept of “being predisposed to other people’s power.”¹² It is this idea of seeking to empower others, and not simply accumulating political power for himself, that helped Obama develop a new approach to politics.

In 2004, Obama went back to speak at a convention for the project he once worked on. Obama recalled, “I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area. It’s as a consequence of working with this organization and this community that I found my calling. There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public service.”¹³

But progress wasn’t easy. Obama remembered, “Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up. Sometimes preachers said, ‘Why should I listen to you?’ Sometimes we tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn’t show up. I couldn’t tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood.”¹⁴

Loretta Augustine-Herron, a member of the Calumet Community Religious Conference board that hired Obama to run the Developing Communities Project on Chicago’s South Side, recalled his approach: “You’ve got to do it right. Be open with the issues. Include the community instead of going behind the community’s back—and he would include people we didn’t like sometimes. You’ve got to bring people together. If you exclude people, you’re only weakening yourself. If you meet behind doors and make decisions for them, they’ll never take ownership of the issue.”¹⁵

As a candidate and president, Obama still shows his roots—a faith in ordinary citizens, a quest for common ground, and a pragmatic inclination toward defining issues in winnable ways. Reverend Alvin Love, one of the preachers Obama worked with, noted, “Everything I see reflects that community organizing experience. I see the consensus building, his connection to people and listening to their needs and trying to find common ground. I think at his heart Barack is a community organizer. I think what he’s doing now is that. It’s just a larger community to be organized.”¹⁶

Obama was influenced in his approach to community organizing by the theories of Saul Alinsky. In his book Rules for Radicals (1971), Alinsky preached the idea of “agitation,” which meant “challenging people to scrape away habit.” But unlike Alinsky, who largely abandoned electoral politics in favor of direct community organizing, Obama realized the potential of politics to change people’s lives on a mass scale. Obama learned from his four years as an organizer in Chicago about the problems faced by the poor and the difficulty of solving them.

Obama’s vision of leadership is a merger between traditional political activism and the community organizing preached by Alinsky, which eschewed electoral politics. One might call it “community politics.” This goal of Obama’s community politics differs greatly from community service, in which the more privileged members of society volunteer to help the poorer ones. As noble as that may be, it doesn’t create the kind of political empowerment sought by Obama. And community politics differs from the older traditions of machine politics because there is no political bribery involved and the goal is certainly not to use voting as a tool to maintain the power of the establishment. Instead, community politics aims to transform politics using the techniques of community organizing. Rather than top-down management where a politician simply presents policies to the public, Obama’s community organizing approach is to communicate with voters, listen to their suggestions, and convince them to buy in to a common set of proposals. In 2004, Michelle Obama observed, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Her husband responded, “I take that observation as a compliment.”¹⁷

The question is, can Obama’s new approach work? There are reasons for skepticism. No president has ever come from a community-organizing background or tried to bring such activism to an entire nation. The closest anyone has come since the Peace Corps under John F. Kennedy was George H. W. Bush’s lame “thousand points of light” to encourage volunteerism, and Bill Clintons AmeriCorps program that institutionalized community service within American boundaries. But what Obama is proposing goes far beyond the boundaries of traditional community service volunteers. Obama wants to bring the spirit and tactics of community organizing into the political system, and there is no road map out there for how to do it.

Certainly, Obama has made use of the Internet as a new organizing tool. But the Internet is not a magical electronic solution to our problems. As a community organizer and politician, Obama believes in the hands-on approach to politics. He believes that if you want change to happen, you need to show up. That’s why from the start of his campaign, he didn’t rely just on traditional campaign appearances or Internet pleas for fundraising. He held a day of neighborhood meetings, organized via his website, to watch one of his town meetings and discuss it. He also held a neighborhood walk day, to encourage people to meet their neighbors to talk about Obama’s candidacy. But Obama has also recognized that community politics has to be about more than his campaign. That’s one reason why volunteers for Obama went around New Hampshire seeking signatures on a petition for withdrawal from Iraq, rather than making Obama the sole focus of their recruitment efforts.

The first days of the Obama administration provide a glimpse of what community politics will look like under this new president. During the transition, Obama established a website at change.gov where Americans could offer their ideas and personal experiences and apply for jobs in the Obama administration. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to questions from Americans, and Obama’s advisors held town meetings on subjects such as health care. The day before his inauguration, Obama led Americans around the country by participating in community service projects to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day, leading by the example of his paint roller.

The transition included the Citizen’s Briefing Book, where thousands of ideas were proposed by citizens and the best suggestions voted upon. Unfortunately, this approach was mocked in the mainstream press because some people proposed ideas such as investigating UFOs, and the Citizen’s Briefing Book disappeared from the transition website after it was delivered to Obama. However, Obama can’t give up on the idea of public involvement in policy debates even if online voting is not the best way to develop good ideas. He should create a national suggestion box where ideas for government reform and policy innovations can be proposed and receive high-level follow-through. Obama is transforming his campaign structure into Organizing for America to encourage his supporters to help promote his reforms and build a grassroots political movement.

Obama’s campaign (like that of every other candidate) was filled with consultants and advisers familiar with the ins and outs of traditional politics, but there were few community organizers helping him to merge politics with organizing. There are so many jobs already attached to the presidency—commander in chief, head diplomat, administrative chief, even national mourner—that the idea of adding organizer to the list is difficult if not impossible. But fixing a broken political system is one of the most important tasks of this president.

Obama and the Baby Boomers

Jonathan Alter observed in Newsweek, “The campaign will likely have an intra-boomer subplot. Born in 1961 at the end of the baby boom, Obama and his cohort were shaped by a more ironic and less ideological sensibility than those who came of age in the tumult of the ’60s.”¹⁹ Obama is a bridge between the baby boomers and this younger generation, as someone who has seen both the virtues and the flaws of the baby boomers and the 1960s era that (rightly or wrongly) has come to define them.

Obama has written, “I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties.”²⁰ As he noted, “In a sense, I’m a pure product of that era: As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have been impossible, my opportunities entirely foreclosed, without the social upheavals that were then taking place.”²¹ In his youth, Obama tried to follow the 1960s generational values: “In my teens, I became fascinated with the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality of the era, and through books, film and music, I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about: images of Huey Newton, the ’68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift, and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.”²²

Obama realized, “Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses.”²³ This reflects Obama’s most conservative attitudes, his desire to find a middle ground between conventional thinking and mindless rebellion. Obama’s rejection of the 1960s is a product not merely of growing up as part of a later generation, but of persona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 GENERATION OBAMA The Youth Movement for Barack
• 2 ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? Obama and the Media
• 3 RACE AND THE PRESIDENT Is Obama Black Enough?
• 4 THE VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY The Conservative Attack on Obama
• 5 WHY LEFTISTS HATE A LIBERAL The Far Left Attacks on Obama
• 6 “THIS IS MY HOUSE, TOO” Obama and the Liberal God
• 7 FROM QUEST TO REALITY Politics and Policy in an Obama Administration
• 8 THE VICTORY Barack Obama’s Improbable Triumph
• 9 THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Turning Hope into Change
• CONCLUSION Obama’s Hopes and Dreams
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author