The Fierce Urgency of March 5 (and beyond): An Already Energized Bunch of Supporters Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

March 5, 2008

by Robert A. Letcher, PhD

Throughout his campaign, Obama has energized both himself and his supporters by recalling Dr. King’s “fierce urgency of now” and he did have primary elections to help him evince and focus their collective energies. Now that the results of March 4th are in, and with only one major primary, Pennsylvania, left on his campaign calendar before the convention in the seemingly distant future, Obama must now find new ways to sustain that fierce urgency.

I suggest starting with the admonition widely accepted among community organizers, particularly of the Chicago school, that the primary purpose of organizing is to build organizational power. In this view, organizers should choose battles “big enough to be worth fighting, small enough to win.” As I see it, as an organization wins, it builds its own strength–and that allows it to enter BIGGER battles worth fighting.

Well, Obama has entered into a REALLY BIG battle. He’s organizing well. He organized and won in Iowa and South Carolina, and ran strong in New Hampshire (all three relatively small battles objectively, even if they always seem to turn out to be BIG politically). And he has kept on organizing and entered (most of the time, winning) bigger and bigger battles since then, building ‘momentum” (the conventional focus) and building organizational strength (the people-power perspective: people, money, endorsements, talent, access, etc.).” All this led up to the March 4th results in Ohio and Texas.

Which brings me back to my initial question: now what? What is to be done with all that organizational power that we have built? I wish we could bottle it for later. Unfortunately, this kind of people power doesn’t store very well: it dissipates quickly. The only way to keep it is to keep using it WISELY (which is to say, in winning, because losing diminishes people power even faster than winning expands it).

One way to do that would be for Obama to pursue an idea suggested by two noted national security experts, former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Speaking for the two of them on Charlie Rose (2/13/2008), Nunn said:

“…We’re talking about how we can cooperate in the world and how we can get people together across party lines and across all sorts of lines. There is a real opportunity in the campaign for the kind of dialog that can lay the foundation for whomever is the next President to really be able to successfully govern.

[…] If we don’t discuss some of these fundamental issues in enough depth to get some understanding out there among the American public, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to govern, no matter how popular, no matter how much charisma, no matter the vote margin their vote is; unless they have some platform that really leads people to be able to say, “Yeah, that’s the direction we ought to go in as a nation; that’s the kind of nation we want to be.” And those are the fundamental problems we’ve got to deal with, including perhaps some sacrifice in the short run in order to have a better future for our children and grandchildren.” [emphasis (italics and bold) added by RAL]

That is, we can direct our organizational resources at generating “the kind of dialog that can lay a foundation” that Obama would need to lay anyway, and we’d have to do it with fierce urgency, because Obama would need that foundation to be built in order to successfully govern–and we can’t afford not to have him succeed.
Indeed, engaging in this sort of dialog would–in the hands of such a gifted orator–allow Obama to start being and doing and, so, looking like the President months before the actual election. If I’m right, that would improve his prospects for being elected AND for, as Sam Nunn argues, “successfully govern[ing]“.

FIRST PUBLISHED
We! Magazine #59, Volume 2, Number 14 Wednesday, 5 March 2008

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Written by Robert A. Letcher, Ph.D. · Filed Under Politics

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Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.
Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.
read more at Mother Jones
How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely
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