Bill McKibben posted a
diary at dailykos today, that might help address your concerns with Obama:
Twice he told the crowd: ‘I can see her arms moving, she’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.’ But other than that he stood on stage, arms folded, watching intently as the medics worked on her. No nervous jokes, no drama, no crack about health insurance. For ten long minutes he was perfectly okay with not being the center of attention—with the attention being where it should have been, on the young woman on the stretcher. When she was wheeled out, he resumed where he’d left off, and it took me awhile to realize that I could think of very few politicians who would have behaved the same way. Who didn’t need to be the focus at all times.
Here’s my guess, then, on what Obama’s talk about unity means: not that he’s a patsy who’s going to split the difference with the opposition on every issue. Instead, that he’s going to try and figure out how to run the political rapids differently, so that he avoids the obvious rocks in the water and instead find some new line through the white water. And there’s really one way to do that—try to engage far more Americans in taking part so you dilute the power of the special interests. For instance: if you’ve got to fight for dramatic shifts in order to deal with medical insurance, you do it less by replaying the precise same battles we’ve fought for the last two decades only harder, and more by figuring out a new way in. Why do we pay twice as much for drugs as Europeans? Why do we pay half again as much for medical care without getting any healthier? These are conversations that only experts have had so far, and that kind of elite dialogue will never build the support we need for real change.
The first key is getting Americans to ask about anything. The pervasive feeling of powerlessness, born of understandable cynicism, needs to be somehow overturned. That’s one reason it’s so hopeful to see high turnout by young people in the primaries. But voting alone is insufficient. Obama spent his formative years as a community organizer, which means he knows more than most of us about how to get people feeling as if they matter. Organizing is tough work—having helped organize 2,000 demonstrations about global warming in the last year, I have some sense of just how hard. Because Americans, by long training, have become cynical about their chance of making a difference.
But organizing always works the same way. You start by making people part of the process. It’s almost the exact opposite of the me-generation personality politics so on display by the Clintons in recent weeks: the idea that they and they alone have the experience and the expertise to solve whatever problems are at hand. This is boomer egoism at its most naked, and those of us who are about Obama’s age or younger are suddenly feeling the possibility of something different for the first time in our political lives. And liking it.
No one can know how any of these people will actually govern. But I hope for a change less in tone than in form. A presidency where, great orator though he is, Obama doesn’t depend on the State of the Union talk to rally people, but instead figures out ways to use the technology of our time. Maybe for virtual hearings or informal referenda; maybe to constantly solicit ideas. And I imagine that he’d be a president in nearly constant motion, covering the country not to hold fundraisers or to meet with other pols, but to...organize. Not to say ‘here’s what I’m doing—back me up,’ but to say ‘how are we going to do this?’.
Then, as noted in the comments to the diary, you can go on over to
Lawrence Lessig's endorsement and read the nuts and bolts of how Obama plans to start doing that.
Yes, there is both vision and substance there.
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