Obama and Community Organizing

We now have a new national climate with the election of Barack Obama as President. Obama, with the strategic assistance of Marshall Ganz--and old SNCC and farmworkers' union organizer--developed very sophisticated mobilizing approaches to build a new kind of electoral machine. It was central to his election. But as he has noted many times, "change comes from below."

Obama will be responsive to the kind of agenda that was expressed in MCO [my book is about MCO--the Mission Coalition Organization--a late 1960s powerful community organization]. It is the responsibility of people on the ground to put that agenda front-and-center before the new administration and before countless municipalities, counties, special districts...congress, corporations and major nonprofit organizations. That will require something different from the electoral mobilization organization that played such a large role in electing Obama. And Obama understands this. Asked during the primary whether Martin Luther King would support him or Clinton, he responded, "He wouldn't support either of us. He'd be out in the streets building an independent social justice movement." What Obama does with the electoral organization put together for his campaign is separate from what people who want a small "d" democratic agenda in the country do. Obama's agenda is a presidential one. Community organizing's agenda should be to push the president. There will be plenty of people pushing him from Wall Street, the auto industry and others in elite circles. If there is not a countervailing push, organized independently of Obama, hopefully with his blessing, we will be disappointed in him as a President--and will have ourselves to blame.