On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> But I am worried that many of us are getting lazy. Yeah Bush is a dolt
> and a liar, but suppose he's gone come November. What then?
Frankly, I think we have whole new tools to pressure him. Much more important than the actual political content of MoveO.org and the Dean campaign are the tools they unveiled: the ability to mobilize mass amounts of people -- or better yet, to allow them to mobilize themselves from strong emotion to effective action.
Those two organizations were able to channel the fury of the anti-war campaign into electoral campaigns because it was an emotion looking for an outlet. Because after we failed to stop the war we were despartely looking for a way to pursue the same means by different ends -- and to stop the war on Iran where we had failed to stop the war on Iraq. (It will more be more like the second coming of the Chile and the Contras in Iran. But it's definately coming if we don't stop it.)
Well, there will be a similar resevoir of passion available soon if not immediately after Kerry gets sworn in. And IMHO the internet as an organizing force has barely been tapped into. I personally think the power it has so far shown as a nominating and funding source is only a fraction of its potential. In that capacity, it is simply automating pre-existing functions, the fund raising equivalent of online shopping. What we have barely begun to explore is its power to affect political agendas. It has the potential to give scattered progressive individuals as much lobbying clout as rich industries or big single issue organizations.
I personally think the perfect issue to push, one for which there is already an opening, and which contains the potential to be a transformative reform, is comprehensive health care. I think we should take the elegant wonkish arguments of Physicians for a National Health Plan, combine them with the ringing political argument of the Labor Party program on the same subject, and push it relentlessly into the public discourse by means of commercials, meetups, phone banks, and new and different methods we haven't invented yet.
And all we need to get started is a couple of computer geeks and a free server. MoveOn started with 2 people. Now at its most bloated, post Soros, it's got 10. And frankly, I think they've got completely tin ears. Their success comes just from tapping into people's desire to do something. So the odds of new groups arising that are even more effective seem to me very high. Pick an issue, any issue, and the means for advancing it are lying right in front of us.
In retrospect, I think it might be a blessing in disguise that Dean didn't get the nomination. If he had, and had gotten elected, all the key people in his campaign would have become his political machine which would have blunted their taste for criticizing their candidate. But now all those people are outside, holding their nose while voting, looking for a way to get this taste out of their mouths, and completely unbeholden. On the contrary -- Kerry is beholden to us, and knows it. He's not making any rhetorical concessions to the base during the campaign. But if he has any brains, he will be quick to respond to implicit threats to withdraw support after the election, just like Bush did from his base, and for the same reason. If you can combine that with a campaign that stirs up national support for the same issue, I think you've got unstoppable leverage. Or at least as much leverage as We the People have ever had.
Michael