Last week, I began my excerpts from Soul of a Citizen by writing about the costs of cynicism. One reason people despair so easily these days is that we often have little sense of how change has occurred in times past, and of what it took for ordinary people to persist until they prevailed. The Rosa Parks story offers an example that we all think we know, but where the story as usually told omits the key context and blurs the key lessons.


* * *


We can learn a lot from the tales we tell about our heroes. I once had the privilege of appearing on a CNN show with Rosa Parks. "We're very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn't go to the back of the bus. She wouldn't get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of 'mother of the civil rights movement.'"


I was excited to hear Parks's voice even though I didn't actually meet her, since we were being interviewed from different studios. Then it struck me that the host's description -- the story's standard rendition -- stripped the Montgomery boycott of its most important context. Before the day Parks refused to give up her bus seat, she had spent twelve years involved with her local NAACP chapter, along with E. D. Nixon, an activist in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union who was the head of the chapter and first got an initially reluctant Martin Luther King involved; local teachers; and other members of Montgomery's African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists, like Septima Clark, and discussed the Supreme Court's recent decision banning "separate but equal" schools. In the process, Parks also became familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, had successfully eased some restrictions; and a bus boycott in Baton Rouge had won limited gains two years before. The previous spring, a young Montgomery woman who worked with the NAACP's youth section had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the organization to consider making her the centerpiece of a legal challenge -- until it turned out that she was pregnant and unmarried, and therefore a problematic symbol for a campaign.


In short, Parks' decision didn't come out of nowhere. Nor did she singlehandedly give birth to the civil rights movement. Rather, she was part of a longstanding effort to create change, when success was far from certain and setbacks were routine. That in no way diminishes the personal courage, moral force, and historical importance of her refusal to surrender her seat. But the full story of Rosa Parks reminds us that her tremendously consequential act, along with everything that followed, depended on all the humble, frustrating work that she and others had undertaken earlier on, and on the vibrant, engaged community they had developed in the face of continual hardship and opposition. Her actions that day also weren't accidental, the product of her feet being tired, as we've so often heard, but rather a deliberate effort to challenge injustice. What's more, the full story underscores the value of persistence; had she given up in year three or seven or ten, we'd never have heard of her. Finally, it reminds us that Parks's first step toward involvement -- attending a local NAACP meeting -- was as critical to altering history as her famed stand on the bus.


Heroes like Parks shape our images of social commitment -- of how change actually takes place. Yet when I speak throughout the country, most of those who hear my talks don't know the full story of her involvement. In this instance, the conventional portrayal may actually make it harder for us to get involved. It suggests that engaged citizens emerge fully developed and socially adept, to take bold and visionary stands. It implies that we act with the greatest effect when we act alone, at least initially. It assumes that change is instantaneous, as opposed to a series of incremental and often-invisible actions that gradually -- and taken together -- gather momentum and influence events. Depicting Parks as a lone pioneer reinforces the romantic but ultimately false idea that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least a fruitful one, has to be a larger-than-life figure -- someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess.


Our culture's misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage, hope, and conscience. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders -- and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." How many of us recall how the union movements ended 80-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages, or helped pass pivotal legislation like Social Security? How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail?


As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today.


In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.


By elevating Parks on a pedestal, the myth then obscures the story's most powerful lessons of hope -- that when we begin to act on our beliefs, we set out on a journey whose rewards we can't anticipate, that seemingly modest initial steps can lead to powerful results, and that any of us can contribute to bringing about change, in small or large ways. She attends a meeting, then another, helping build the community that in turn supported her path. Hesitant at first, she slowly gains confidence as she speaks out. She continues despite an unpredictable and hostile context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with frequent setbacks and little certainty of success. Her story suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental, and persistent action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts by Parks, her peers, and their predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruit. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of collective courage and heart -- as happened with Parks's arrest and all that followed. We ca n never know beforehand the consequences of our actions.





Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Timesby Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”


Loeb also wrote The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, the History Channel and American Book Association's #3 political book of 2004. HuffPo will serialize selected sections of Soul every Thursday. Sign up hereto see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org .

From Soul of a Citizen by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin.

If the Democrats don't get the youth vote, they're toast. That happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where young Obama voters stayed home in droves. It's an ugly conceivable future portended by a new Harvard poll that shows forty-one percent of young Republicans planning on voting in November, compared to 35 percent of young Democrats and 13 percent of independents. A recent Pew poll showed a similarly disturbing pattern: Young voters still prefer the Democrats, but their margin is slipping and their enthusiasm level is worse.

Some reasons and some solutions:

The Democrats need to tackle youth joblessness. They've passed important changes in student financial aid, like income-contingent loan repayment. Most students and recent students don't know about them, and they need to. But with youth unemployment at near-record levels, it's understandable that young men and women would feel angry and frustrated. If the Democrats want to keep this generation, they need to pass major jobs bills, probably through reconciliation, since the Republicans seem to be only too eager to leave young voters demoralized and unemployed. It would be nice if the Obama administration were leading on this more strongly, but since aren't leading strongly enough, the push to make jobs the top priority has to come from the grassroots. This happened in the 1930s under Roosevelt. Seventy-five years later, I can visit a Works Progress Administration-created library or go for a run on a Works Progress Administration-created boardwalk, and reap the benefits of programs that also gave millions of people desperately needed jobs. We need to make equivalent investments now, targeted at those who need jobs the most. It also wouldn't hurt to address the drastic lack of health insurance among all but the most affluent youth, to avoid a further Afghan quagmire, and to stand up more strongly, and with less apology and with less apology and deference toward those who have no interest in solutions, on all the other issues that matter.


But we need more than specific programs. We need to give people a renewed sense of why involvement matters. Absent a sense of how social change has occurred in the past and can again, it's tempting to give up when you've barely begun, all the more in an instant attention and instant gratification culture. Given that few of us know the stories of how previous citizen activists persisted and prevailed, it's understandable that many who were acting so passionately just over a year ago feel adrift and unable to make an impact. That's true of more experienced activists, but it's particularly true of those for whom the Obama campaign was first step into trying to create a more humane common future. Those of us who've been involved longer (including veteran youth activists) need to offer this perspective, to help those more recently involved avoid cynical resignation and withdrawal.

We need these lapsed activists and particularly lapsed youth activists, because they're the ones who will reach out to their peers. During the 2008 election, you could go anywhere in battleground states and find efforts to engage young voters. In the Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts elections, the campaigns largely ignored them and the parallel independent efforts that might have filled the gap didn't exist. Without being reached by these more personal approaches, young voters were left more isolated, more readily manipulated by 30-second ads, and more likely to simply stay home. As I explore in my Soul of a Citizen book, change works best when people approach those they already know, within familiar contexts. And when campaigns, movements, and their supporters reach out in ways that offer a chance for genuine dialogue. Some of this can be through social media--we need the texting, Facebooking, and other networking that helped the Obama campaign bloom. But these approaches work best when complemented by more visible public actions and more direct personal dialogue. If we're going to enlist those who once acted and speak to their legitimate discontents, we're going to need to recreate this one-on-one reach, and begin to recreate it now, not just in the last two weeks of the campaigns.

As the recent surveys imply, the stakes in this are huge--not just for now or for November, but for the ongoing allegiance and participation levels of a generation. Whether citizen activists can help the Obama administration and the Democrats reengage those who carried them to victory in 08 will shape American politics not just in the coming year, but for decades to come. The Obama administration can play a critical role in demanding action on issues that affect young voters' lives. The Congress can use all available options, including Reconciliation, to pass them. But it's up to the rest of us to offer the examples of connection, context, and continued commitment.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See www.soulofacitizen.org To receive his articles directly emailsympa@lists.groundwire.org "> sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles. To sign up for the weekly excerpts of Soul that HuffPo will be running on the book page each Thursday visit www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb

With over 100,000 copies in print, my book "Soul of a Citizen" has inspired thousands of citizens to make their voices heard and actions count--and to stay involved for the long haul. I spent the past year writing a wholly revised new edition, which St Martin's will publish March 30, and which HuffPo will serialize each Thursday for the next several months. I like to think of it as an antidote to the political demoralization, paralysis, and despair that so many people are feeling these days. Here's the first excerpt, adapted from the chapter called "The Cynical Smirk."

When America elected Barack Obama, cynicism seemed in retreat, beaten back by a wave of ordinary people staking their time, money, and spirit on the prospect of significant change. We seemed to have reached a major historical turning point, offering the chance finally to address our country's root crises. Now, cynicism and despair have bounced back on steroids, as if to mock any new hope that we can help create a better world. Last year's soaring expectations seem distant memories, leaving a bitter taste. Obama's campaign made grassroots participation central, and he's invited us to help him do the right thing in office. But his compromises and the failings of Senate leaders to overcome the resistance of their obstructionist colleagues have destroyed much of the grassroots enthusiasm that existed a year ago. Meanwhile, those of us whose passionate engagement helped elect Obama haven't stepped up to help define our national debates (while the Teabaggers have). Most of us have done little in the past year beyond signing online letters or petitions, and watching shell-shocked from the sidelines as the country's politics spiraled steadily downward. Yet I still believe that we can help transform America through what Nelson Mandela called "the multiplication of courage," as I explore in "Soul of a Citizen." But for that resurgence of courage to bloom, we need to get past the cynical resignation that assumes change is impossible.

* * *

What happens when we decide that our politics is so corrupt, bought and paid for, that all talk of ever changing it is naïve? "Everybody lies," says a veteran newspaperman quoted in the Utne Reader, "but it doesn't matter, because nobody listens." In an extreme personal example, imagine a man who tells his young son to jump from the stairs into his arms. The father catches the boy twice, but the third time steps back and lets him fall. "That's to teach you never to trust anyone," he explains, "even your own father."

We've come to expect comparable betrayals when we think about changing our society. A long-powerful strain in our culture posits all businesspeople and politicians as corrupt, all religious leaders charlatans, all journalists hacks--and all who'd dare to try to work to change their society naïve fools. Increasingly, it's come to occupy the mental and psychological space we could reserve for hope--at least for the kind of hope that might inspire us to take larger political stands. Better to expect nothing, in this view, than to set ourselves up for certain disappointment. Taken far enough, this kind of cynical resignation can become as great a barrier to meaningful public action as all other obstacles combined.

Cynicism wasn't always so disempowering. The first Cynics were a group of ancient Greek philosophers, most notably Diogenes, who caustically denounced the established culture of their time. Monk-like ascetics who preached simplicity, self-discipline, and self-sufficiency, they offered a moral alternative to the empty materialism, legalism, and religious hypocrisy that had come to dominate Greek society. Back then, to be a Cynic meant to stand up for one's convictions.

In our time, however, cynicism comes in the guise of an all-knowing attitude that working for a larger common good is the vocation of the terminally innocent, leaving no likely outcome except heartbreak. So what's the alternative? It's not blind trust, as the disastrous regime of Bush and Cheney made all too clear. We need to be skeptical of the lies and distortions that permeate our culture. But too many Americans, convinced that the greediest must always run our country, have responded by retreating into private life, whether the admittedly difficult challenges of economical survival, or the distractions and comforts we embrace as modest respite and recompense. Meanwhile, we bury whatever qualms they may have about our national direction, hoping against hope that someone will take care of things.

Barack Obama campaigned to reverse this course, blasting cynicism as "a sorry kind of wisdom." His message resonated to people hungry for something better. It's still too early to say that he'll inevitably fail, because the outcome depends largely on our own actions. Yet the very expectations he raised have combined with compromises from Afghanistan to health care to the bank bailouts to sour the national mood. The result: pervasive dashed hopes and disillusionment--not just with his administration, but with public engagement in general, particularly in the electoral sphere. Add in the grim results in the Massachusetts Senate race, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections and an appalling Supreme Court decision that risks making our elected officials even more direct bought and paid hirelings of Exxon. No wonder those who so recently thought they'd begun to reclaim their country are feeling bleak.

Corporations like Exxon, Goldman Sachs, and UnitedHealth do profoundly deform our public discourse. Too often politicians follow their lead. But once we decide that we're powerless, our passivity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a habit of mind that's harder and harder to shake. We decide we can do nothing about key common issues, large or small. Then we withdraw from public life before giving it a serious shot. If enough of us withdraw, we hand power over to the greediest.

A "radical" political scientist once explained to me loftily, "We're fooling ourselves if we think government doesn't serve powerful economic interests." True enough, for the moment. But he framed this as inevitable, as if history were something that only happens to us, rather than something we can have a hand in making. He gave his students no vision to fight for--only only the prospect of joining him in the ranks of the all-knowing witnesses to human folly. The political scientist also gave his students an all-purpose excuse for inaction and resignation. If nothing worthwhile can be done about the economy, climate change, global violence, or those suffering in our communities, then we bear no responsibility. Like the Kafka creature tunneling ever deeper in his story "The Burrow," we retreat into smaller and smaller spheres of private life, hoping the rest of the world will somehow muddle through.

Ironically, such resignation can happen in people who aren't personally cynical. We still try to be caring toward family and friends. We may even volunteer at a Big Brother/Big Sister program or help at a soup kitchen. And those are good things to do. But when we look at the larger issues, like global climate change, why so many people in America are hungry, or how to fix a greed-driven health care system or America's strip-mined economy, we throw up our hands in frustration. Taking them on just seems too daunting, and our chances of success too elusive. It seems wiser and more practical to narrow our horizons.

Cynical resignation salves the pain of unrealized hope. If we convince ourselves that little can change, we don't have to risk acting on our dreams. If we never fight for what we believe in and aspire to, we'll never be disappointed. We can challenge destructive or duplicitous leaders with contrary information and counter-examples, stories about how the powers that be have misled us. But what can possibly challenge an all-encompassing worldview that, in the guise of sophistication, promotes the bleakest possible perspective on the human condition--the notion that our world has become so irredeemably corrupt, that whatever we do, we cannot change this?

As an alternative to this impotent "realism," I'd like to propose a clear-eyed idealism, which recognizes that these are bad times but refuses to accept that the bad times are inevitable. I'm not promoting a culture of happy talk, nor will I in the "Soul of a Citizen" excerpts that follow. It's important to dissect institutional arrogance and greed, to assess how it damages lives, neighborhoods, communities, and the most basic life systems of the earth. It's critical to hold powerful institutions and individuals accountable, including political leaders like Obama who we may have worked for, voted for, and may still support in many ways. But too many social activists almost delight in rolling around in the bad news, like dogs in rancid fish. If that's all we do, we'll foster mostly resignation and despair. So along with the bad news, we need to convey that which is capable of inspiring hope.

It may always feel more than a little absurd to think that we might be able to change history. Especially when our efforts don't go as planned, it can be useful to recognize that fact--and appreciate the irony in our situation. But that same sense of irony becomes dangerous when it justifies passivity. It becomes what poet and essayist Lewis Hyde calls "the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." Accordingly, we might think of a modern cynic as someone who's given up all hope of finding a door, much less a key. As I'll be exploring, there are better ways to live.



Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of "Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times"by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin's Press, release date March 30, 2010, $16.99 paperback). This excerpt crossposted on Huffington Post.

With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul of a Citizen” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn called it "wonderful...rich with specific experience." Alice Walker says, "The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love." Bill McKibben calls it "a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity."

Loeb also wrote "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear," the History Channel and American Book Association's #3 political book of 2004. HuffPost will serialize selected sections of "Soul" every Thursday. Sign up at Paul's HuffPost home page to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones. For more information or to receive Loeb's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org . From "Soul of a Citizen," by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin.

Are U.S. taxpayers getting stiffed? Pfizer, Viagra's daddy, is using money from taxpayer-bailed-out banks to help buy major pharmaceutical competitor Wyeth in a $68 billion deal. That won't help taxpayers or consumers. Nor is it designed to. It will harm the companies' workers, 20,000 of whom will likely be laid off. It's even likely to hurt small bio-tech companies, drying up potential sources of capital and leaving fewer potential major investors or purchasers.

The deal may be good for Pfizer, helping the company recover from a $2.3 billion legal settlement over misleading marketing on the pain reliever Bextra, and helping them amplify the clout of the $3 million they recently spent lobbying against the right to import cheaper drugs from Canada. But it won't help the rest of us.

So why are banks bailed out with taxpayer dollars furnishing the $22.5 billion of debt financing for this deal? On NPR, a financial analyst crowed about how wonderful it was that major banks were lending this kind of money in the current economy. But it troubles me that among the deal's prime financial backers--Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan/Chase--all but the British-owned Barclays received money from the Congressional bailout. So the funds they lent to this merger won't be available to help smaller (or larger) companies keep their doors open producing and selling products--ideally ones that actually benefit society--and not just to consolidate control over their industry. This seems one more case of public subsidies for private gain.

I'm no economist. For all I know, maybe in some Henry Paulson-Alan Greenspan dream world this will end up boosting America's physical and fiscal health. Perhaps the new combined entity will come up with some miracle drug that neither company would have created on their own. But mostly, it seems just one more example of how a bailout without strong government control, or even oversight, just feeds the same greed-driven abuses that have gotten us into our current predicament. It's going to take more than Viagra to strengthen our economy once more.



Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Like most Americans, I'm guarding my dollars, but when my furnace died during Seattle's coldest winter in decades, I needed to replace it. And when I did, with a high-efficiency Trane model made in Trenton New Jersey, the costs and gains underscored key lessons about what we need to do to craft a stimulus package that actually builds for America's future. My new furnace saves energy and fights climate change. It promotes American jobs, and pays back its costs in a reasonable time frame. It points toward how to genuinely renew America's economy instead of encouraging the same consumption for consumption's sake that has helped create our current problems.

Let's look at what my $5,000 purchased. It supported Trane's factory workers in New Jersey and in their main plant in Tyler, Texas, supported local Seattle installers, and supported beleaguered New Jersey, Texas, and Washington state and city governments through the sales tax I paid and the taxes paid by the companies involved. In my personal economy, it meant I'll save more than a third of my yearly gas bill and a commensurate amount of my CO2 emissions. My old furnace was a thirteen-year-old 70% efficient model that was down to barely 60% because single-cycle furnaces lose 1% a year as their burners corrode and heat exchangers get less efficient. The new one is 97% efficient and will maintain far more efficiency because its variable speed motor is much easier on its components. I live in a relatively small and well-insulated house in a generally temperate climate, and I keep my thermostat low, but I've still been spending $850 a year on gas heat (solar panels take care of most of my hot water), and if I add in savings on my electric bill from the furnace's extra-efficient fan, I'll save roughly $340 a year at current gas prices, and more as fossil fuels of all kinds become scarcer. If natural gas costs continue to increase at their recent rate, 61% in the past five years, my investment will pay back in roughly nine years--a far better and safer return than I could get from any bank account or roller-coastering stock market investment. If I lived in a colder climate or had a larger or less-insulated house, the furnace would pay off sooner still. I'll also prevent the release of roughly three tons of CO2 every year.

So how do we make similar choices affordable for everyone, whether or not they have the savings to do this on their own? Imagine if the pending stimulus package helped people make such investments nationwide, combining direct incentives with low or no-interest loans, along the lines of those long advocated by Al Gore. Imagine if it prioritized energy efficiency and investment in renewables, particularly those that are American-made.

I'm not saying high-efficiency furnaces solve all our economic or environmental challenges. Plugging building leaks, adding insulation and switching light bulbs give the maximum energy efficiency for the least expenditure of dollars. We need solutions that move us toward eliminating fossil fuel use altogether, like solar thermal, industrial-scale wind, advanced geothermal, ultra-efficient green buildings, and smart electrical grids. The 300,000-person Swedish city of Malmo already gets 40 percent of its residential heat (and 60 percent of its electricity) from a municipal incinerator plant and is steadily extending its district heating to the suburbs. We could do the same. But adding a high-efficiency furnace buys time--like scrapping a Hummer to drive a Ford Focus. It takes us part of the way--and if the furnaces are American-made, does so while keeping money in our domestic economy. If we could replace every furnace older than 10 years with a high-efficiency model, and mandate the same in new construction, we'd come out far ahead.

Every industry is hurting these days, and they all have their hands out. But if we spend seven hundred billion or a trillion dollars to jumpstart the economy without simultaneously addressing root problems like fossil fuel dependence, we may not have the resources to do so later on--or when we do, they'll require far more sacrifice. My furnace upgrade was from necessity, but it symbolizes a fundamental choice about the direction of America's economy, and therefore about the stimulus package aimed at reviving it.

We can continue to support consumption for its own sake, and that's what we've been doing. But although $5,000 granite countertops look swell, they don't solve global warming, heal our trade deficits, or move us toward a more sustainable society. Nor do endless truckloads of Chinese Wal-Mart goods for those at the bottom or the $3,000 suits, $100,000 necklaces, and fifteen-million-dollar mega-mansions for those at the top whose choices have steered us into our present crisis. At some point, we need to shift incentives and priorities. We probably need fewer people working at mall stores, and more manufacturing furnaces or wind turbines and retrofitting houses. Even if this means we won't be able to buy as many cool toys as some Americans did during the boom, we'd actually be investing in the future instead of cannibalizing it. If we make enough of these investments we might even look back on this moment as a national turning point--much as we do now to the wise choices made during a comparable economic challenge, from which we emerged with a far stronger and more equitable economy than ever before.



Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

On election day four years ago, I was canvassing in home state of Washington, alternately knocking on doors for gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire and breaking to call Ohio and Florida. After three recounts, Gregoire won by 129 votes. I had no idea my state election was so close, but I did get three people who wouldn't have otherwise voted--one forgot it was election day, one needed a ride to the polls, and a third didn't know how to turn in her absentee ballot. If you multiply my efforts by those of thousands of other volunteers, we clearly helped make the difference.

The same happened in 2006. During the election's final weeks, I spent about 30 hours calling through MoveOn's Call for Change program, contacting voters in Virginia, Missouri, Montana, and other states with key Senate and Congressional races. Grabbing spare moments where I could, I dialed my way across the country, convincing maybe 20 people who wouldn't have otherwise to back the Democratic challengers. Some initially resisted saying, "They're all the same. They're all corrupt." Or "My vote won't matter so why bother." But I convinced them to vote, and added a few with election-day reminders. Later I read that MoveOn had 120,000 volunteers. If each had half the impact of my efforts, that meant over a million votes, in a season when US Senate seats swung on margins as close as Montana's 3,500 votes, Virginia's 9,000, Rhode Island's 29,000, or Missouri's 48,000. Our common efforts again tipped the balance.

It's easy to think of our individual election volunteering as insignificant. But when enough of us act even in small ways, we can have a powerful impact. Studies have found that if you talk to a dozen people by going door-to-door, you'll likely add at least one new voter for your candidate, a ratio that tends to hold true from local to federal elections, so long as you're working in reasonably receptive neighborhoods. Phone outreach can have a similar impact, though you need to talk with more people for a comparable result. Imagine what a few hundred more volunteers could have done to shift Florida's 537-vote official margin in 2,000, even with all the Republican machinations.

Individual actions can be multiplied on both sides. In 2004 a friend was overseeing a cluster of Florida precincts for John Kerry. He'd exceeded his target for turnout, and was feeling guardedly hopeful. Then a couple hundred people showed up en masse, many holding Bibles. They'd been mobilized by Los Angeles and Omaha phone banks, calling fundamentalist congregations. Those who called had every right to do so, and their efforts, alas, helped reelect George Bush.

So why don't more of us participate, or participate more? Between now and the election, far too many of us will spend plenty of time reading political articles, blogs and polls, obsessing on the latest twists and turns in the headlines, and rooting for our candidate as if for a favorite sports team--while doing relatively little to change the outcome. We can do more than be passive spectators.

Many of us live in states where the presidential race is largely settled, although the popular vote mandate will matter in terms of political leverage, there are numerous close Senate, Congress and governor's races, not to mention important state ballot initiatives. Even if you don't live in Virginia or Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina or Pennsylvania, you can go to the campaign websites and find lists of people to call in key swing states, scripts through which to call them, and step-by-step explanations to walk you through the process. You really can do it from the comfort of your home or apartment--or as part of a group phone bank, if the support makes it easier. Getting involved is more challenging in some states than others, but still an opportunity to affect the long arc of history at a potential key turning point.

Even in the ground-zero battlegrounds, I've met people who passionately follow the contest, yet hold back from actively participating. When I was in Cleveland last week, a woman raised her hand and said "I've been walking neighborhoods for Obama, but my friends don't want to join me, even though they care just as much about the election. They say they don't like rejection."

I asked if anyone in the audience enjoyed rejection. Surprisingly, no one did. But the woman who had canvassed said the time she spent was actually pretty decent. She got some butterflies at first--it's always hard approaching strangers. But once she got into the swing, she enjoyed it. She even had some thoughtful conversations, once she left the necessary training wheels of the script.

Many of us also hesitate due to a perfect standard where we feel we need to be totally eloquent or our efforts will be worthless. My retired neighbor considered calling for Obama, then worried that he wasn't as articulate and persuasive as he used to be, so decided not to. But our efforts don't have to be perfect, they just have to be heartfelt, and we have to keep at them.

With Obama opening up a steadily increasing lead, it's easy for those of us to support him to get complacent. But this is a volatile electorate--a little over a month ago, McCain led with his Sarah Palin bounce. So while the polls are encouraging, given economic meltdown, attack ads, racial issues, and potential voter intimidation and suppression, we'd be wise to view this as an election where our actions really could determine the outcome.

Most of us reading this essay will vote. And maybe most of our friends will as well. But in a politically divided nation, victory may well go to the side that turns out the greatest numbers of more marginal supporters, including those who are newly registered and uncertain about the process, or who doubt their vote will matter. Particularly when reaching out to those who haven't traditionally voted, getting people to the polls isn't something that can be done by just running more ads. We have to make the phone calls, knock on the doors, and remind people as many times as necessary of the differences between the candidates and the impact they could make with their vote. This election may well be won with presence and persistence. It might just be in our hands.


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it sound a compliment—portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any cost. But do we really want a potential President whose prime trait is an eagerness to bite your throat at any pretext? We already have that: Dick Cheney.

There’s a reason why pit bulls have been banned for their lethal belligerence from England, Norway and France, to Miami and Springfield Missouri. They attack indiscriminately, whether other dogs or children or an elderly Seattle-area woman two of them nearly killed this past week. There’s a reason you don’t say, “Great, a pit bull just moved in. How nice for our neighborhood.” Even people who want some protection usually pick other breeds, like German Shepherds, because they know pit bulls might turn on them.

Now some of us admire their tenacity, and that’s a virtue, but other dogs are also tenacious—you can pick them up by the sock or rag they’re playing with. But they aren’t loose cannons that just might maul your neighbor’s five-year-old. You don’t want pit bulls running your block, much less the United States. Pit bull presidencies don’t work for issues like terrorism, global warming, our declining economy. You can’t solve them by simply ripping your enemy’s leg off.

Pit bulls have their uses, as junkyard dogs, but most of us reject them for our home. We’ve seen all too much what a “my way or we’ll destroy you” approach has done to our country in the past eight years. The single-mindedness of a pit ball can be useful, but it can also be disastrous. The Cheney crew had this in their obsession with attacking Iraq, even as they were dismissing Clinton-era reports of the threats from Bin Laden. If they hadn’t been so focused on attacking their enemies, we might never have embarked on the disastrous Iraq war.

Yet Sarah Palin seems to relish the pit bull role, with an attack dog’s taste for blood. Her high school classmates called her Sarah Barracuda. She won her first race as mayorby bringing in the state Republican Party to a nonpartisan contest and focusing on guns, abortion and how she was a true Christian and the incumbent wasn’t in a race that normally focused on roads and sewers. She fired the Wassila librarian who resisted her suggestion that some books might have to be banned and the police chiefwho didn’t support her candidacy. She fired the head of the Alaska state patrol who wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law. She sat laughing while a shock jock interviewer mocked one of her political opponents (a cancer survivor and fellow Republican) for her weight, and called the woman a “bitch” and a “cancer.” And then there’s the convention speech that catapulted her to superstardom. Not only did it repeatedly distort the truth, it embodied every character assassination scenario from the past 30 years—taking the polarizing politics of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, and dressing it up, with lipstick, in Palin’s charismatic package. She even attacked the very idea of citizens working for change when she mocked community organizers.

If we read the polls, Palin’s pit bull approach may well be working. Pit bull politicians can be great campaigners—especially when their prime goal is to bloody their targets whatever the cost to truth, U.S. politics and ultimately, to our country. But do we really want a pit bull as vice president?

We should already know, because we’ve had one for the past eight years. Palin is younger, more attractive, and a better shot. But she has a similar ruthlessness, bellicosity, and eagerness to destroy anyone who gets in her way. She’s similarly secretive and controlling beneath the disarming charm. Despite her image as the outsider reformer, she has her own ties to pay-to-play politics from serving as one of three directors for the political action committee (PAC) of corrupt Alaska Senator Ted Stephens, to fighting for the Bridge to Nowhere before it became politically untenable, to hiring a lobbyist (when Mayor of Wassila) who not only was a former Stephens Chief of Staff but also worked for now-convicted crooked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And she’s just as beholden to a hard political right that denies reality: from global warming to seeking to ban abortions for rape or incest victims.

Not every Republican embodies the pit bull ethic—I’ll be voting for a Republican Secretary of State who’s meticulously fair and has played by the rules even when he’s taken heat from his own party.

Likewise, many once respected John McCain across party lines for what we thought was a departure from the Karl Rove, Lee Atwater politics of personal destruction. We assumed he’d learned its cost after the Bush campaign defeated him in a South Carolina primary by doing push/polling phone calls about his role in the Keating S&L scandal and spreading rumors his having two illegitimate black children. He was the rare current Republican who spoke out against torture and condemned reckless tax giveaways for the rich. Now he’s disavowed all this and hired one of the prime architects of the Bush campaign’s South Carolina attacks on him to help prepare Palin’s now-fabled convention speech. His own speech was also full of repeated falsehoods. He even embraces the chorus of contempt toward Obama for daring to say that America is better of when we observe international rules like the prohibition on torture. And his encouragement of Palin’s distortions speaks worlds about his prizing politics over country.

Let's hope we finally reject the pit bull approach this time around, no matter how shiny the lipstick looks.


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org ">www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email mailto:sympa@lists.onenw.org ">sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

What does it say about John McCain that he not only picked the least experienced Vice Presidential nominee in America's history, but picked someone he really didn't know? Departing so far from any normal concept of appropriate background, he should at least have had a sense of why this individual is so special. Meeting Palin once at a Republican governors' conference and having a single phone conversation on the eve of her selection just doesn't pass muster -- particularly for the oldest presidential candidate ever, who's had four malignant melanomas.

What makes Palin such a cynical choice is that McCain doesn't know her and doesn't know what drives her. Until she was selected by the Karl Rove types running his campaign (like campaign manager and Rove protégé Steve Schmidt), McCain might not even have recognized her on the street. Instead, she's a category selection, made for the crassest reasons by the same kinds of political operatives who brought us George W. Bush.

Their motives are obvious: Palin is an energetic and attractive woman who just might pick up some disgruntled Hillary supporters. She's a westerner and a hunter who might appeal to rural voters. She might energize a previously tepid base of hard-shell religious conservatives through her opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Hard right king-maker James Dobson just said that because of her he'd vote for McCain.

These attributes may indeed prove Palin's worth as a vote-getter. But except for an abortion position that seems a stunning denial of reality (and a major affront to women), they have no relation to Palin's fitness for the job. McCain can't have any sense of what lies beneath the facile marketing categories -- like who Palin actually is, what she could contribute to the Vice Presidential office, and what it would be like to work together. He doesn't know her and has had no chance to. But because she fits the Rovian categories, none of that matters. Echoing so much that the Republicans have done for eight years and more, it's a choice likely to produce grave consequences, yet based overwhelmingly on political expediency.

Leave aside all the other troubling questions about Palin: her extreme abortion position; her backing the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" while campaigning for governor, then later claiming to disavow it; her support for teaching creationism as science; her Cheney-style vendetta of firing the Alaska public safety director who refused to fire her former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper; her laughing during an interview at the jokes of a radio shock jock who mocked one of her political opponents (a cancer survivor) for her weight, and called the woman a "bitch" and a "cancer" on the state.

You can even leave aside that in a week where Hurricane Gustav threatens another Katrina and the Arctic ice cap separates from the adjacent land for the first time in human history, Palin insists that the jury is still out on whether humans are changing the weather of the planet.

In fact, leave aside Palin's actual record, because John McCain barely knows it. His vetters didn't even bother to go through the archives of Palin's local newspaper or talk with the former public safety director she fired. What choosing her shows instead is a politics that once again subordinates any greater common good to a raw pursuit of power. It echoes McCain praising Jerry Falwell after once calling him an "agent of intolerance." Or embracing Bush's campaign and administration after Bush's political hitmen defeated him in South Carolina with Swift Boat-type lies. Or when instead of challenging Obama's ideas, the McCain campaign tried to caricature him as one step up from Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Karl Rove's minions may be smiling at the brazen gamesmanship of this pick: but if Americans fall for it, they should know all too well what to expect.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email mailto:sympa@lists.onenw.org ">sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

I don't know when Hillary Clinton and her advisors started channeling Karl Rove, but it's happened and it's ugly. If you want to stop them from tearing the Democratic Party apart, then get on the phones today and volunteer to turn out the Obama vote in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Her campaign's been sleazy since Obama first emerged as a serious challenger. I've written about it hereand here. But in the past week, it's escalated. She's just run a radio ad on NAFTA that pretends to be a news report. Meanwhile, Canadian television reported that Clinton's campaign offered the same disavowals she just accused an Obama advisor of making. Her 3:00 AM ad echoed the worst of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. When asked if she'd "take Senator Obama on his word that he's not a Muslim," she left the door open to the right wing lies by saying "there's nothing to base that on. As far as I know." She just handed McCain his campaign script by saying, "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

The longer Clinton stays in with these kinds of attacks, the more damage she will do, because she seems willing to destroy the Democratic chances in November to maintain her shot at the nomination. If you think this is a bad idea, please join me, get on the phones, and help increase the Obama vote in today's critical races. It just might make a key difference.

I admit it. I'm addicted. Since the primaries and caucuses began, I've spent practically every free hour reading article after article, and poll after poll, charting the shifting sands of the Democratic presidential race. As I've become inspired by Barack Obama's potential to engage ordinary citizens, and its roots in his organizer past, I've written articles I've hoped would help, talked incessantly about the campaign, and donated repeatedly--most fruitfully in a program that's allowed me to encourage other new small donors by equaling their contributions. But as I've cheered each successive victory and each new gain in the polls, I worry that my stance is just a bit too reminiscent of rooting for my favorite baseball team. It's time to do something seemingly more mundane, but always a bit nervous-making, and that is to get on the phone.

I've made phone calls in practically every election, and it matters. In 2006, I volunteered roughly 30 hours with MoveOn's CallForChange program, working my way across the country to call states with key Senate or House races. I convinced about a dozen people to go to the polls who wouldn't have otherwise, including some who at first said their vote didn't matter, and others who simply forgot it was election day. I was hesitant at first, but the web-based system that gave me the phone numbers prevented people from getting called multiple times. The script gave initial talking points that I later replaced with my own. So long as I was polite and low-key, the people I spoke with seemed to appreciate the conversations, or at least not to mind. While a dozen votes sounds pretty minimal, given the time I spent, 100,000 fellow MoveOn members were also participating, and if their efforts each bore similar fruits, we're talking a million votes . So when John Tester won by just 1,700 votes, Jim Webb by 7,200, and Claire McCaskill by 42,000, I felt proud to have done my part.

So I've just now started calling for Obama. He's tied or ahead in Texas. He's gotten strong new union endorsements from SEIU, The Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Chris Dodd and civil rights icon John Lewis have backed him and more superdelegates are switching. But nothing's guaranteed. Clinton could still come back if she does well enough in Texas and Ohio, and as she launches attack after scattershot attack, I fear that she'll give legitimacy to just enough Republican talking points to damage Obama come November if indeed he is the candidate. So the March 4th votes are critical. Whether our own states have already voted or have yet to, the Obama campaign voter calling program gives us all a chance to make an impact, as do the MoveOn voter calling parties this Sunday. I know there are Democrats still on the fence because I've talked with them, both within my own friendship circles and in the initial calls that I've made. I've even convinced a few and reminded others that we need to support whichever candidate becomes the nominee if we're to have any shot at reversing Bush's disasters. To hold back because I'm busy, distracted by the political horse race, or afraid that people will disagree, would be to abdicate my chance to help shape history.



Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, and Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org

I gave John Edwards more money than I've given to any candidate in my life, and I'm glad I did. He raised critical issues about America's economic divides, and got them on the Democratic agenda. He was the first major candidate to stake out strong comprehensive platforms on global warming and health care. He hammered away on the Iraq war, even using scarce campaign resources to run ads during recent key Senate votes. He'd have made a powerful nominee—and president.

I've been going through my mourning for a while for his campaign not getting more traction, so his withdrawal announcement didn't shock me. But sad as I am about his departure, I feel good about being able to switch my support to Barack Obama, and will do all I can to help him win.

I've actually been giving small donations to both since Iowa, while hoping that the Edwards campaign would belatedly catch fire, and exploring ways the two campaigns could work together. With Edwards gone, I think Obama is the natural choice for his supporters, and that Edwards should step up and endorse him as his preferred nominee. All three major Democratic candidates have their flaws and strengths—they all have excellent global warming plans, for instance. But Edwards wasn't just being rhetorical when he said that both he and Obama represent voices for change, versus Clinton's embodiment of a Washington status quo joining money and power.

Here are a dozen reasons why I feel proud to have my energy, dollars and vote now go to Obama:
1. The Iraq war: Obviously, invading Iraq remains the most damaging single action of the Bush era. Obama spoke out against it at a public rally while Clinton was echoing Bush's talking points and voting for it. Obama's current advisors also consistently opposed the war, while Clinton's consistently supported it. It's appropriate that Clinton jumped to her feet to clap when Bush said in his recent State of the Union address that there was "no doubt" that "the surge is working."
2. Clinton's Iran vote: The Kyl-Lieberman bill gave the Bush administration so wide an opening for war that Jim Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." Hillary voted for it. Obama and Edwards opposed it.
3. The youth vote: If a Party attracts new voters for their first few elections, they tend to stick for the rest of their lives. Obama is doing this on a level unseen in decades. By tearing down the candidate who inspires them, Clinton will so embitter many young voters they'll stay home.
4. Hope matters: When people join movements to realize raised hopes, our nation has a chance of changing. When they damp their hopes, as Clinton suggests, it doesn't. Like Edwards, Obama has helped people feel they can participate in a powerful transformative narrative. That's something to embrace, not mock.
5. Follow the money: All the candidates have some problematic donors—it's the system--but Hillary's the only one with money from Rupert Murdoch. Edwards and Obama refused money from lobbyists. Clinton claimed they were just citizens speaking out, and held a massive fundraising dinner with homeland security lobbyists. Obama spearheaded a public financing bill in the Illinois legislature, while Clinton had to be shamed by a full-page Common Cause ad in the Des Moines Register to join Obama and Edwards in taking that stand.
6. John McCain: If McCain is indeed the Republican nominee, than as Frank Rich brilliantly points out, he's perfectly primed to run as the war hero with independence, maturity and integrity, against the reckless, corrupt and utterly polarizing Clintons. Never mind that McCain's integrity and independence is largely a media myth (think the Charles Keating scandal and his craven embrace of Bush in 2004), but Bill and Hillary heralding their two-for-one White House return will energize and unite an otherwise ambivalent and fractured Republican base.
7. Mark Penn: Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, runs a PR firm that prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is aggressively involved in anti-union efforts, and has represented villains from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.
8. Sleazy campaigning: Hillary stayed on the ballot in Michigan after Edwards and Obama pulled their names, then audaciously said the delegates she won unopposed should count retroactively. She, Bill and their surrogates have conducted a politics of personal attack that begins to echo Karl Rove, from distorting Obama's position on Iraq and abortion choice, to dancing out surrogates to imply that the Republicans will tar him as a drug user.
9. NAFTA: Hillary can't have it both ways in stoking nostalgia for Bill. NAFTA damaged lives and communities and widened America's economic divides. Edwards spoke out powerfully against it. Clinton now claims the agreement needs to be modified, but her husband staked all his political capital in ramming it through, helping to hollow out America's economy and split the Democratic Party for the 1994 Gingrich sweep.
10. Widening the circle: Obviously Obama spurs massive enthusiasm in the young and in the African-American community. I'm also impressed at the range of people turning out to support his campaign. At a Seattle rally I attended, the volunteer state campaign chair had started as Perot activist. The founding coordinator in the state's second-largest county, a white female Iraq war vet, voted for Bush in 2000 and written in Colin Powell in 2004 before becoming outraged about Iraq "I've always leaned conservative," she said, "but Obama's announcement speech moved me to tears. The Audacity of Hope made me rethink my beliefs. He inspires me with his honesty and integrity." As well as inspiring plenty of progressive activists, Obama is engaging people who haven't come near progressive electoral politics in years.
11. The story we tell: Obama captures people with a narrative about where he wants to take America. His personal story is powerful, but he keeps the emphasis on the ordinary citizens who need to take action to make change. Clinton, in contrast, focuses largely on her personal story, her presumed strengths and travails. Except for the symbolism of having a woman president, it's a recipe that downplays the possibility of common action for change.
12. Citizen movements matter: Edwards not only ran for president, but worked to build a citizen movement capable of working for change whatever his candidacy's outcome. Obama has taken a similar approach, beginning when he first organized low-income Chicago communities and coordinated a still-legendary voter registration drive. His speeches consciously encourage his supporters to join together and constitute a force equivalent to the abolitionist, union, suffrage, and civil rights movements. Like Edwards, he's working to build a movement capable of pushing his policies through the political resistance he will face (and probably of pushing him too if he fails to lead with enough courage). In this context, Clinton's LBJ/Martin Luther King comparison, and her dismissal of the power of words to inspire people, is all too revealing. She really does believe change comes from knowing how to work the insider levers of power. Edwards and Obama know it takes more.

That's why this Edwards supporter is proud to do all I can to make Barack Obama the Democratic nominee and president.


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email mailto:sympa@lists.onenw.or ">sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Hillary Clinton has now been campaigning in Florida and arguing that the state's delegates should count, along with those from the Michigan primary. This would sound fair enough, unless you know that both Michigan and Florida moved their primaries up after the Democrats agreed that the only states to vote before February 5th ("Super Tuesday") would be Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina (picked because they were relatively small states, representing different demographics). The Democratic Party agreed that votes from the two renegade primaries would not count. The major candidates made an explicit agreement not to campaign in either state. Florida law required that all candidates keep their names on, but Obama and Edwards pulled their names from the Michigan ballot.

Now Clinton is trying to change the rules mid-game. She's arguing that her delegates from Michigan should count after all. (Running essentially unopposed, she still got only 55% of the vote, since 40% voted "uncommitted" and Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel--and Chris Dodd, who'd already dropped out--split the remaining 5%.) She's campaigning in Florida with a wink and a nod (doing closed talks and photo ops, not public rallies), while trying to get those delegates to count too. She seems to be banking on the hope that a Florida win, even if only symbolic, will erase Obama's momentum from his massive South Carolina victory.

Now you can argue the right or wrong of the Democratic decision to put teeth into the agreement that the primaries should have some kind of structured sequence, and not just be a mad dash to see who comes earliest. And the Florida situation was created not by state Democrats but by the Republican legislature. But I can find no evidence that Clinton raised objections when the initial decisions were made. And now she's trying to change the rules in the middle of the game. Her surrogate Bill overtly supported a similar attempt when allied teachers union officials tried to ban special caucuses on the Nevada strip after the Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama. Ironically, Clinton won a majority of these caucuses, but her contempt for the rules was the same. She was a team player only when she thought it would benefit her.

We actually saw the same pattern in 2006. In a season when Democratic candidates were scrambling to raise enough to finance an ever-expanding array of competitive races, Clinton made a conscious decision to raise $52 million for a Senate campaign that she could have won in her pajamas, spent $40.8 million (to beat a token opponent who spent less than $6 million), and transferred the rest to her presidential campaign. Only the self-funded Jon Corzine has ever spent more for a Senate race in our history.

You could say she was just playing the game, but Barack Obama and John Edwards, in comparison, campaigned throughout the country to support worthy Democratic candidates, while doing negligible fundraising for themselves. Obama emerged with less than a million in the bank and the Edwards campaign ended up still in debt from 2004. Their top priorities really did seem to be helping other Democrats win a critical election, instead of subordinating all other goals to their own personal futures.

Imagine if Hillary had transferred $20 million into the dozen Congressional campaigns that Democrats lost by margins as close as a few hundred votes. Or into Harold Ford's Senatorial campaign, to help close a $5-million gap with Republican Bob Corker. A few extra ads or mailings might well have tipped the balance But Hillary made different decisions. Much as may have been true with her support of a recent Iran vote so reckless that Senator James Webb called it "Dick Cheney's pipe dream," her priority was election-year positioning.

If we look at Clinton's actions throughout this campaign, they consistently put her right to win above broader principles. Even the tears that turned around her New Hampshire campaign seemed to me to be about her frustration that the nomination she thought was her birthright seemed about to slip away. As Frank Rich has written, even her choice to feature Bill Clinton in the campaign as lead attack dog risked bringing up enough old ghosts to sharply increase the likelihood of Republican victory in November. No one runs for president unless they are ambitious, but once you think you have the right to rewrite the rules in mid-course, or subordinate every opportunity of your critical allies to your own personal gain, you set up a precedent unsettlingly like the administration we have just endured for the past seven years. And I don't think we want to go there again.




Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org

Politics can be a rough game. Candidates need to hold their competitors accountable and challenge distortions and lies. And God knows, we need a Democratic nominee who's willing to fight. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has included far too many cheap shots, sleazy manipulations, and unsavory players.

New questionable actions emerge daily. You're probably familiar with many. But it's the broader pattern that disturbs me--how much the Clinton campaign seems to nurture questionable actions from her operatives, supporters, and surrogates. And how the campaign's actions go beyond drawing legitimate political lines to an all-too-Rovian instinct to do whatever's deemed necessary to take down those blocking Clinton's potential victory. Here's a representative list of actions that, taken together, offer a troubling portent for her candidacy and presidency.

Start with the hiring of chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn. He's CEO of a PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, that prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is advising the giant industrial laundry corporation Cintas in fighting unionization, and whose website proudly heralded their union-busting expertise until it became a potential Clinton liability and they removed that section. B-M has historically represented everyone from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

Then there are Clinton's campaign donors. Any major candidate has some dubious supporters, but Clinton's gotten money from particularly noxious sources. Start with her donation from Rupert Murdoch, who's given to no other Democrat. Add in massive amounts of money from Washington lobbyists and from industries like defense, banking, health care, and oil and energy providers (though Obama's also gotten a lot from some of these industries). Then there's Norman Hsu, who brought in over $850,000 to Hillary's campaign after returning to the US following his flight to evade a fraud conviction (Hsu was subsequently rearrested, sentenced to three years, and is facing further federal charges, and the campaign eventually returned the money he'd raised). There's the Nebraska data processing company InfoUSA, whose CEO, Vin Gupta, used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal, and campaign trips, gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract, and is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly diverting company money to his own personal uses. Mississippi attorney Dickie Scruggs recently canceled a major December 15 Hillary fundraiser (with Bill Clinton headlining) after being indicted for trying to bribe a judge. Major international sweatshop owners, the Saipan-based Tan family, have given Clinton $26,000, complementing their previous massive support for Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. That doesn't even count dubious supporters from the past, like Peter Paul, the convicted con-artist turned event producer who coordinated a massive Hollywood Clinton fundraiser during the 2,000 election. Taken together, it's a pretty tainted constellation of backers.

Like most candidates, Clinton spends the bulk of her money on ads and mailings, and she's taken some pretty problematic approaches there too. I wonder how many of the New Hampshire women who voted last minute for Clinton were swayed by a mailing claiming that Obama wasn't really committed to abortion rights because he'd voted "present" on some abortion-related legislative votes. Except that Obama had done so as part of a strategy devised by Illinois Planned Parenthood to protect vulnerable swing district representatives. New England Planned Parenthood's Board Chair strongly refuted Clinton's letter, pointing out that Obama had a 100% record on all the votes that really mattered. But the mailing may still have damaged his support.

The distortion of Obama's position on abortion echoes Hillary's audacious argument that Obama really wasn't against the Iraq war and betrayed his promises by failing to vote against war appropriation bills after the Democrats couldn't override Bush's veto. I wish Obama had bucked the Democratic leadership and taken a stronger stand. But it's a gross distortion of history to equate his positions with Clinton's overt support for the war authorization, refusal to apologize for her vote, and claim that she was really doing it all to promote more diplomatic solutions.

We can find further distortions in a mailing sent out before the Iowa caucuses by the independent expenditure committee of a key Clinton ally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The AFSCME mailing attacked Obama on his health care plan by using a John Edwards quote that was featured so prominently that recipients could assume that his campaign was the source of the attack piece. This and other actions so disturbed a group of seven AFSCME International Vice Presidents wrote a public letter to their union president, saying that although the union had endorsed Clinton on a split vote, the political committee had no mandate to attack Obama. They demanded the committee stop what they called "fundamentally dishonest" attacks.

Other surrogates have attacked Obama's character. Twice they've tried to raise Obama's early drug use as a campaign issue--despite his having addressed it directly and frankly in his book Dreams From My Father. Hillary's New Hampshire campaign chair, Billy Shaheen, mentioned it first, claiming that he was only worried about how the Republicans might use it. Sheehan resigned from the campaign after a storm of criticism, then Black Entertainment Television CEO Robert Johnson (who's backed Bush on issues like the estate tax) raised it again, with Clinton standing next to him at a South Carolina rally. After Johnson's words drew major heat, Clinton belatedly distanced herself from them, but the smear still stands, along with the disingenuous claim that those making it were just neutral participants, only trying to serve the Party's best interests.

Clinton's campaign also attacked the John Edwards campaign for appearing in New Hampshire with the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient who died after CIGNA refused her a liver transplant. Clinton press secretary Jay Carson claimed that the US needs to elect "somebody who's actually going to help people and not use them as talking points." Never mind that the Sarkisyans had initiated the chance to speak out by contacting Edwards about appearing at a Manchester New Hampshire town hall campaign appearance. To the Clinton campaign, their appearance had to be suspect, because they were supporting Edwards and his ideas.

The campaign has also attempted more directly to discourage participation by voters who might support Clinton's opponents. A judge just shut down the lawsuit filed by the pro-Clinton leadership of the Nevada teacher's union, which sought to prevent long-scheduled caucuses from being held at central locations on the main casino strip, where workers largely represented by the Obama-endorsing Culinary Workers Union would find it easier to attend. When asked, Hillary Clinton claimed to have "no opinion on the lawsuit" and Bill Clinton overtly supported it.

New Hampshire saw parallel voter suppression tactics, as the campaign encouraged the New Hampshire Democratic Party to evict Obama get-out-the-vote observers from the polls. In Iowa, the Clinton Campaign tried to discourage out-of-state students from returning to their campuses to participate in the caucuses. In the Michigan primary, Clinton kept her name on the ballot after the state violated Democratic National Committee rules by moving its primary ahead of the Feb 5 "Super Tuesday" vote, while Edwards and Obama took theirs off.

Campaigns can have either closed or open information styles. Clinton's comes far too close to the Bush-Cheney model, as when the Clintons successfully killed a major story in the national men's magazine GQ about Clinton campaign infighting. Author Josh Green had written a long critical previous piece on Clinton for The Atlantic, and campaign press secretary Jay Carson threatened to deny the magazine access to Bill Clinton for a separate cover story on his international foundation work. GQ acquiesced and pulled the critical piece.

The flip side of trying to stop negative coverage is manufacturing praise. Clinton's campaign did this when they gave planted questions to Iowa student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, and according to Chasanoff, to other students as well. After being driven to a public event by Clinton interns, Chasanoff was introduced to a Clinton staffer who showed her a list of suggested questions to ask, one of which she used at Clinton's forum. It's not quite like Bush inviting the softball inquiries of former male-prostitute turned right-wing blogger Jeff Gannon. But it isn't so different either.

Taken together, these examples echo the Bush's administration's tendency to attack anyone who challenges them. They echo Clinton's refusal to apologize for her Iraq war vote or for an Iran vote so reckless that Jim Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." They hardly bode well for reversing the massive erosions of transparency of the past seven years.

The list could go on, but it's the pattern that's important. It's true that one person's cheap shot artist is another's fierce competitor. Obama himself has called politics "a full-contact sport," and used legal maneuvers to block a long-time state legislator when he first ran for office. And Democrats will need to be fierce in their campaigning if they're going to defeat the right-wing Swiftboating machine that gave Bush the last two presidencies. So maybe I'd be more charitable if I didn't disagree so strongly with Clinton's Iraq and Iran votes, and utter failure to take leadership in standing up to Bush when he was riding high in the polls. But I think I'd still have a problem. I look at the actions of her campaign, and see an ugly example, a ruthlessness not remotely equaled by either Obama or Edwards. I'll vote for the last Democrat standing, because the Republicans will continue the current administration's disastrous priorities. But Hillary's scorched-earth approach threatens to fracture the party if she does get the nomination, and to leave a trail of bitterness even if she wins. We can do better for the Democratic nominee.


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Obviously Barack Obama and John Edwards are competing with each other, but the caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, and Washington State give the two campaigns a chance to also coordinate to maximize the delegates they gain. Edwards and Dennis Kucinich actually did this in 2004 in Iowa and it played a real role in Edwards's Iowa unexpected Iowa success. At this point he and Obama are competing with and even sniping at each other, but if they don't stop Hillary Clinton, she still has the inside track to the nomination. And for all that Obama and Edwards have differences, I think they're closer politically (and more progressive) than either are to Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War, supported the Kyl-Lieberman Iran vote that Jim Webb called "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream," and feel no shame in raising as much money as she can from Washington lobbyists. (Plus the regressive Democratic Leadership Council still features Hillary as part of their core circle). Both Obama and Edwards would gain by doing this, and the 2004 precedent suggests it's perfectly legal.

How would it work? The same way it did in 2004. At least in Iowa it takes a 15% threshold in any given precinct to gain a delegate. So both candidates will inevitably have people left over in most precincts who don't quite get them to that threshold. But what if both publicly pledged (and sent out instructions) that wherever that situation occurred, they'd try to combine so whichever of the two had more unrepresented attendees after all the efforts to convince stray delegates would get the additional delegate. If they had equal numbers left unrepresented, they could combine and flip a coin. It may sound like it would have a minimal impact, but multiplied by precinct after precinct it could matter.

Some of this will happen anyway, but it's be a lot more likely if Obama and Edwards openly embrace it, saying explicitly that they're doing this because although each thinks they'd be the best nominee, they also think that the other represents change more than does Hillary Clinton, which is true. If they teamed up explicitly, it would probably gain some headlines, and done right (maybe with a joint press statement or even a joint press conference) would seem less like their piling on a front-runner than drawing a necessary political line. I think it could only help.

It is a calculated risk for both in helping one of their likely opponents, but the first priority seems still stopping Clinton's momentum. And this also sets the stage for Obama and Edwards and their supporters to keep on working together in other ways, like on the convention platform. Then they can go back to laying out their areas of disagreement.

Ideally, again, they'd do this at a national level, but even if they don't, those of us participating in the caucuses can do what we can to forward this approach. My personal sentiments? Whatever the outcome, I'd be delighted if one of the headlines read "Hillary Clinton finishes third."




Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

I know Kucinich supporters don't like Hillary Clinton. When I write about her, they respond, again and again. "She's a bought and paid corporatist." "She backed the Iraq war from the beginning." "She supported the regressive bankruptcy bill." In fact, many say, "If she's nominated I'm staying home." Or. "If Hillary gets the nomination, I'll change my registration to Independent and vote third party."

So think about how you'd feel if the headlines after the early caucuses and primaries read "Hillary places third," and you were part of that process. Imagine if those losses helped stop her nomination, the party ended up with either Barack Obama or John Edwards as the nominee, and one of the two became America's president. I suspect you'd feel a whole lot better than having Hillary as president. And way better than our enacting Bush revisited through her losing to Guiliani, Huckabee, Romney, Thompson, or even the reborn John McCain, who's not only promoted the Iraq war since before it happened, but even got caught on video singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" to the words of the classic Beach Boys song, as if war with Iran were some kind of joke. I'm sure you'd rather see Edwards or Obama than any of these.

But of course you'd rather have Kucinich. He's the most progressive, you say, and that's true. He opposed the war from the beginning and even organized Congress against it. He's got a great platform, and is strong on every issue, the antithesis of a corporate tool.

But he's also not going to be the nominee. No one has come from polling one or two percent at this late date to capture the presidency. No Congressman has won since James Garfield. There are just too many other candidates at this point with too much support, momentum, and money. If Kucinich hasn't captured America's imagination enough so far, there's just not time for this to happen fast enough to win. I also think his message plays better with already committed progressive audiences than with those less political, one reason it hasn't resonated more in the polls. And my guess is that America's just not ready for a vegan, which while it shouldn't make any difference, offers prime fodder for the Carl Rove types about how he's so out of the mainstream he's going to try to take away people's macaroni and cheese.

So if Kucinich can't win, supporting him in the key early races means valuing a symbolic educational campaign over one that has the capacity to actually affect who is nominated.
I think Kucinich people can make a difference, and that the tradeoffs are worth it to support Edwards or Obama.

Right now Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are all running virtually neck-and-neck in the Iowa polls. Any of them could win. Any could come in third. In the latest averages, they're within five percentage points of each other, between 25% & 30%. Whatever the outcome, it's going to set the tone for subsequent momentum, media coverage, money, and everything else that makes such a critical difference in who wins. Because the primary and caucus schedule is so compressed, and quite possibly over by mid-February, whoever emerges from those first few primaries with major momentum will likely be the nominee.

So how could Kucinich supporters, with their candidate polling at 1%-2%, even make a difference? First, because it's a caucus system, this favors groups that are organized and enthusiastic. Only 125,000 people attended Iowa's Democratic caucuses last round, but they sank Howard Dean's candidacy when he was the clear favorite going in. If Kucinich supporters could get out 12,500 people that's 10% of the vote, if 6250, 5%. Neither would be enough to qualify under the 15% threshold for representation, but if they could account for even just a few points difference in how the delegates are allocated, that might shift who comes first among the three leading Democrats. It might make the difference between Hillary being the nominee and Edwards or Obama.

A bit more on Hillary's dangers: I've writtenabout her potential to shatter the Democratic coalition and bring about a Republican resurgence even if she gets in. Recent polls actually show her losing or in a dead heat with McCain, Giuliani, and in some polls, Romney and Huckabee, Even if she does get in, progressives are likely to be fighting her on half the initiatives she proposes. She also spent more money in 2006than in all but one Senate campaign in America's history—to win a race she could have won in her pajamas, and at a time when shifting dollars to other Democratic campaigns would likely have gained a few more seats.

So are Edwards or Obama any better? I'd say Edwards is a whole lot more progressive now than in 2004—sometimes major life crises will do that to you. But even back then, he was progressive enough that the Kucinich campaign instructed its supporters to team up with those of Edwards and tip each other over the Iowa vote thresholds wherever possible. Edwards isn't perfect, but I've seen him go into a room of trade union activists and lead not just with economic justice issues where he knows he's going to get a strong reception, but with the Iraq war and global warming—the opposite of pandering to his audience. I've also seen him use scarce campaign money to run ads asking Congress to stand up to Bush on the war. And he was the first of the three major candidates to have a strong and comprehensive global warming plan, and the first to have some comprehensive universal health care plan. He's spent a lot of time addressing issues like poverty that are hardly political winners. And yes, he's a bit wealthy for my tastes, but at least he made his money fighting major corporations. He's speaking out enough about their power on the campaign trail, that this makes him my first choice, though Obama also has a lot that's attractive. In contrast with Hillary, neither of them are taking money from corporate lobbyists, and neither voted for the awful Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran.

Obama's also got some pretty progressive history. He spoke out against the war before it started, and has continued to do so, even I would have liked his voice a little louder. Both he and Edwards are clear that it is unacceptable to keep American bases in Iraq, while Hillary Clinton has equivocated. Equally important, Obama began as a community organizer, working in low-income communities, then returned to represent social justice advocates after his graduation from Harvard Law School, foregoing far more lucrative opportunities. Obama's also watched his mother spend her last months while dying of cancer having to read through the fine print on the forms of an insurance company that was trying to drop her coverage. That's an experience that could resonate with America. Finally both Obama and Edwards talk explicitly about the links between past movements for justice, and the need to build their successors in the present—while Clinton, I believe, sees current activists mostly as a troublesome threat. To me those are significant differences.

It also matters that both Edwards and Obama also beat the Republican candidates in most major polls. That's important if for no other reason than because one more Supreme Court Justice like Alito or Roberts, and we'll spend the next thirty years with courts that would have make Mussolini proud. And because the Republicans will do little or nothing on the most critical threat of global warming (even John McCain recently absented himself when his vote could have broken the Republican filibuster on the most progressive energy bill in 30 years). And because pallid the Democrats can be, and they can be pallid, they won't appoint people like the National Labor Relations Board officials who have been busily reclassifying nurses as supervisors so they can't join a union, and prohibiting the use of workplace emails for union-related concerns. So winnability matters as well.

Over the next six weeks you're going to have a choice. You can vote for Kucinich in your primaries and caucuses, make a symbolic point, and maybe give him a shade more clout to stay in the race. But whether he gets 1% or 5%, his presence when they're done is going to be minimal, and his coverage negligible as well. Your other choice is to do what you can to try to make Edwards or Obama the nominee, and potentially help tip the balance in who ends up president. To me, that's the greater political impact

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email mailto:sympa@lists.onenw.org ">sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles