The Occupy movement has done something amazing, getting Americans to start questioning our economic divides. It's created spaces for people to come together, voice their discontents and dreams, creatively challenge destructive greed. It's created powerful political theater, engaged community, an alternative to silence and powerlessness.

But it also faces major challenges. I'm fine that this new public commons isn't offering detailed platforms for change. We can find plenty in almost any Paul Krugman or Robert Kuttner column. Instead the movement has highlighted the destructive polarization of wealth while voicing what one young woman called "a cry for something better." And that's a major contribution. The movement and its allies now need to keep spreading this message to that majority of Americans who are sympathetic but have given up on the possibility of change. To reach those more resistant, who might respond if seriously engaged. To make the physical occupations not just ends in themselves, but bases where more and more people can participate, and find ways to publicly act. To keep momentum building even in the winter cold, and when media coverage fades. To find continuing ways for people to act without dissipating their energy in an array of fragmented efforts. And, although some participants would disagree, to become part of a broader movement that without muting its voice help bring about a better electoral outcome in 2012 than the disaster of 2010, when corporate interests prevailed again and again because those who would have rejected their lies stayed home.

One solution, which is beginning to happen, is for the movement to move to the neighborhoods, building on its existing efforts in hundreds of cities and towns. This doesn't mean abandoning the current encampments. At their best they've created powerful new centers for conversation, reflection, and creative action. People talk, brainstorm ideas, make posters and banners, draw in the curious, including those just passing by. In Seattle, even tourists riding the amphibious tour buses broke into cheers as they drove past. Participants tell stories of lost jobs, medical bills, and student debt, putting a human face on how they and so many others have been made expendable by a country that seems to care only for the wealthiest. Self-organized committees plan creative tactics, handle donations of food, address medical needs, reach out to the media, create innovative art projects, clean the occupation grounds, and ensure physical security. Common meals become a form of communion. The gatherings also convey a sense of festival, inviting in those not yet involved with puppets colorful banners, drum circles radical marching bands, signs saying "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one," and people dressed up as predatory billionaires, Lady Liberty and dollar spewing zombies who chant "I smell money, I smell money." The spirit of play echoes the defiant folk and hip hop music of Tahir Square and the Gandhi meets Monty Python approaches of the Serbian youth movement Otpur, who helped train the initial Tahir Square occupiers.

But for all the value of creating visible protest communities in the centers of our cities, for all the powerful stories and Dadaist humor, most Americans are still watching from a distance, at most passive spectators. So maybe the rest of us. who are about these issues but aren't ready to sleep on the hard cold ground, need to build on the opening that this movement has created to consciously reach out to the rest of America. To the degree that the occupations have led the media to even briefly question America's fundamental divides is a victory. But it's not one that we can count on indefinitely. So we need to find creative ways to take the key issues that the movement's placed on the public agenda to every neighborhood, community, workplace and campus, even those that don't seem natural hotbeds of change.

This could mean extending the existing protests to places they haven't yet reached. Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo and Citibank branches are everywhere. So are Exxon/Mobil stations, symbols to challenge that corporation's avoidance of taxes and massive funding of climate change denial. So are the offices of regressive elected officials and candidates. Local Harlem residents just met at a local church to launch Occupy Harlem. In my Seattle neighborhood activists criss-cross a major intersection every weekend holding banners and talking about the Iraq war and unaccountable corporate power, and our main Occupy encampment recently shifted from a downtown plaza to a community college a dozen blocks away, where their presence has grown to 150 tents and they've coexisted amicably with classes, campus events, and a weekend farmers market. For the movement to make progress, it's going to have to do more along these lines--not just hope that if they build enough tent cities and hold creative enough marches change will come.

The people camping don't have to be the same ones working in the neighborhoods. That may be a task best suited for long-standing activist organizations, whose participants have deeper local roots--organizations that might also help find resources to shelter the Occupiers in visible sympathetic churches or union halls as we head into winter. Whatever happens to the physical occupations if we're to build on the powerful momentum that they've created, we're going to need to take the issues they've raised into face-to-face communities, like local businesses and churches, cafes and clubs soccer leagues and Rotary associations. The occupations have played a powerful role in highlighting America's profound economic disparities. But it's up to us to take this message to all the diverse communities we ultimately need to reach. We can't trust capricious and compromised media outlets to adequately translate it and relying on our own social media gives us far too narrow a reach.

Fortunately, models exist for the kind of systematic grassroots outreach that could fuel the movement's next stage. Here are a half dozen that might offer lessons:.

• Many of us went door-to-door or made phone calls during the 2008 Obama campaign. Most who participated soon lapsed into becoming passive spectators, and then retreated still further as cycles of disillusionment grew. Whatever Obama's flaws, the one-to-one conversations people had while working to elect him were powerful, and we could begin to replicate them for a movement with goals larger than the platforms of any individual political leader or candidate.



• One ongoing network to plug into is the AFL-CIO community organizing affiliate Working America. Drawing on a mix of volunteers and paid canvassers they've been reaching out in culturally conservative working class neighborhoods for the past eight years, focusing particularly on the unemployed. They talk with people about core economic issues, offer practical resource information and give ways to act on issues like unemployment benefits and investment in job-creating infrastructure. By connecting previously isolated individuals with a broader engaged community they both give them a voice and leave them far more resistant to greed-driven lies.



• Since the economic crisis hit, the Boston community group City Life Vida Urbana began using official foreclosure lists to engage people at risk of losing their homes or apartments. They offer free legal advice as a way to encourage people to come to their meetings then invite participants to join their protests at foreclosure auctions and the offices of mortgage-holding banks, mustering enough public pressure to repeatedly force these institutions to write down loans that people owe.



• Another fertile approach comes from Seattle peace activists.Shortly before the Iraq war, people from all over the region met in the gym of a local high school and divided themselves up by neighborhoods, including those in far-flung suburbs and smaller outlying cities. The local groups then met together to find ways to act in their specific communities, under the umbrella of what they called The Snow Coalition. Eight years later, many of these groups continue raising issues in contexts where people are more likely to know them as neighbors, coworkers, or friends.



• Odd as it may sound, the Tea Party also offers lessons in balancing outrage and organizing, though for a vision that would give the top one percent even more power and control. Of course the Occupy movements don't have the Fox News echo chamber or the dollars of billionaire backers. But the Tea Party's impact was propelled by the impact of its ordinary participants and their actions unquestionably shifted America's political dialogue. They began with visible public protest--first at the health care Town Halls and then with local vigils and rallies on issues they cared about. Their arguments often denied reality, from their obsession with Obama's birth certificate to warnings of non-existent "death panels" to calls to "Get the government out of my Medicare." But they showed up and voiced what they believed in communities throughout the country, while Obama supporters largely stayed home, doing little beyond clicking on email letters and petitions. After the Tea Party's initial public launch, members kept organizing through house meetings, networks of friends, gun clubs, neighborhood groups, and conservative churches. Much like the Occupy movements, their groups were intensely decentralized, even as their talking points mysteriously matched those of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. As the excellent book The Backlash explores, each group made their own decisions, took their own initiatives, and ran or supported a mix of their own candidates and more established Republicans who supported their views, with their volunteer participation playing a key role in the 2010 Republican victories.

• The movements that brought us the New Deal had a similar mix of intensely local actions, intense community building (including powerful mutual aid institutions), and engagement in local and national politics--even as they remained independent enough to push Roosevelt to take his most powerful stands. The civil rights movement mixed courageous direct action with door to door community organizing and voter registration, pushing an initially sympathetic but resistant Lyndon Johnson to put all his political skill and capital into passing the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, even as he acknowledged that the Democrats would consequently "lose the South for a generation." The anti-Vietnam war movements started with small groups of people having the audacity to challenge their government, then began to make an impact when people in every community began to participate. All these successfully melded protest and witness with organizing.

If the Occupy movement is going to find a similarly fertile path as these movements, it's going to have to let go of grandiose revolutionary dreams like the sentiments of a student who told me, "If we're following the Arab Spring model we have to demand that all the politicians step down. Then Americans can meet and decide what to do." Except that Egypt didn't have real elections and we do, however compromised by wealth-driven lies. So while the encampments and marches need to maintain their independent voice, enough of us are going to have to engage the messy electoral terrain to overcome the millions of dollars that will be pumped in for anonymous attack ads by people like Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, the predatory banks and the oil and coal companies. If the Occupiers stay too contained in their familiar enclaves, or steer people away from electoral participation, they risk helping those at the top prevail even more.

That's a real possibility given the blanket dismissal of voting by far too many of the Occupy participants I've spoken with, or at least of voting within the two party system. The constantly repeated phrase "they're all corrupt," has its truths, but it also slams the courageous along with the compromised, and masks the major difference between politicians who disappoint us because we haven't pressed them hard enough, and ones who've been doing their best to make the entire country and planet available for open season plunder. If we want to avoid permanently enshrining the reign of the one percent, we might remember the Citizen's United decision, where five Republican justices opened the floodgates for money to dominate politics as never before. If any of the current Republican candidates get to appoint one more justice, we'll lock in similar decisions for the next 30 years. We might also remember the Disclose Act, which would have at least required corporations and wealthy individuals to visibly put their names on ads and mailers that they funded. Every Democratic Senator voted for it, even those most compromised with corporate dollars, but it fell one vote short when it couldn't get a single Republican backer. The result, combined with a massive drop-off from a disillusioned Democratic base, was a wave of anonymously funded attack ads that swung election after election, from legislative, Congressional and Senate seats to electing governors like Scott Walker, Rick Scott and John Kasich, who promptly disenfranchised voters, gutted education and social service budgets, busted unions, stripped away environmental protections, and handed out ever-more massive tax breaks to the rich.

I'm not suggesting the Occupy movement subordinate itself to Obama, the Democrats, or any other party or individual. Part of the tragedy of the past three years is that we didn't have vital independent movements pushing both parties to deal with unemployment, foreclosures, and America's massive economic divides. But nothing stops the Occupiers and their supporters from can raising their key issues as clearly and powerfully as possible, while reminding people that showing up at the polls still matters. The alternative is a revolutionary purism, where instead of registering voters like the Tea Party did, and reaching out to engage those on the fence, Occupy participants and their supporters stay home and hand the 2012 election to people who represent everything they loathe.

Like participants in previous movements for justice, the Occupiers need to avoid the false choices between protest and organizing, community building and electoral involvement, surrealist theater and the grunt work of change. The criticisms they raise go beyond any single election, Congressional bill, or policy shift. They need to keep raising them, but in ways that keep spiraling out. If they can trigger enough conversations in communities as yet untouched by their voices, they have a chance to prevail. But they have to recognize that the powerful public presence they've created is just a beginning.

Paul Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, with 130,000 copies in print including a newly updated second edition. He's also 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. See www.paulloeb.org . To receive Paul's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org/subscribe.html

Imagine if you were talking on the phone and Verizon or ATT decided they didn't like where your conversation was going. You'd be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly disconnected. Or maybe they didn't like the person you were talking to, or the subject. You'd be unable to connect or your conversation would become so slow and poor quality you'd give up and call someone else. Or maybe you lived in an area of the country where they didn't want to give you telephone service. So you'd be unable to call at all. The telecom companies would justify all this by explaining that the fiber optic lines or wireless frequencies were simply their private property. They had a right, they'd say, to do whatever they wanted with them.

They can't do this because telephone service has long been held to common access standards. The Internet has similarly developed and flourished as a commons open to everyone, through what we've come to call Net Neutrality. But Bush's FCC ruled that all our new communications technologies were in a different category, effectively the property of their physical carriers. In the wake of this decision Verizon refused to distribute a text message alert from NARAL Pro Choice America and AT&T muted singer Eddie Vedder's criticism of President Bush during a live Pearl Jam webcast. The telecom companies are also pushing to be able to sell the right for websites or applications whose owners wanted them to load faster, while relegating other sites to second-class service. Such a shift would devastate nonprofits, small businesses, and all kinds of political advocacy groups, which couldn't afford the rates that the most lucrative sites could pay.

As a candidate Obama spoke out strongly for reversing this policy, promising to "take a back seat to no one on Net Neutrality." His FCC appointees were at first strongly supportive of extending the protections of equal access to online technologies (which would make moot a federal court decision based on the Bush-era rulings). But now, following massive telecom company lobbying, they're seriously wavering. Google is now exploring a private deal with Verizon, where Google would pay for YouTube content to get higher priority delivery to consumers, shifting them from Net Neutrality advocate to de facto opponent. With a final FCC ruling coming any day now, an equal-access internet is now in serious jeopardy.

In the Soviet Union, cultural commissars determined who would see what information and in what context. In the US, it's corporations, and their choke-hold is about to get tighter unless we speak out and act. The fight to keep Net Neutrality has produced some important victories as when MoveOn and the Christian Coalition joined in an unlikely partnership to help block Congress from destroying Net Neutrality four years ago. FreePress.net, who's led on this issue all along, is now organizing now to help people speak out before final FCC decision. But we'd better act while we still have a chance if we don't want to be cut off in midstream from equitable access to all the new media whose promise and power we've come to take for granted.


Paul Loeb is the author of "Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times," recently published in a wholly updated new edition after 100,000 copies and 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. For more information or to receive Loeb's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org . To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks

When we become frustrated in working for change, we might remember how hope can come from unexpected places and historically resistant constituencies. Rich Cizik's efforts to engage his fellow evangelicals on global warming exemplifies this.

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As vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Rich Cizik represented 4,500 congregations serving 30 million members. Considering himself a "Reagan conservative" and a strong initial supporter of George W. Bush, Cizik had been with the organization since 1980, serving as its key advocate before Congress, the Office of the President, and the Supreme Court on issues like opposition to abortion and gay marriage. During the Clinton era, he had begun to expand the organization's agenda by tackling such issues as human trafficking and global poverty, working with groups across the political aisle. Later he'd convinced the organization to take a stand against torture.

But he thought little about climate change until 2002, when he attended a conference on the subject and heard a leading British climate scientist, Sir James Houghton, who was also a prominent evangelical. "You could only call the process a conversion," Cizik said. "I reluctantly went to the conference, saying 'I'll go, but don't expect me to be signing on to any statements.' Then, for three days in Oxford, England, Houghton walked us through the science and our biblical responsibility. He talked about droughts, shrinking ice caps, increasing hurricane intensity, temperatures tracked for millennia through ice-core data. He made clear that you could believe in the science and remain a faithful biblical Christian. All I can say is that my heart was changed. For years I'd thought, 'Well, one side says this, the other side says that. There's no reason to get involved.' But the science has become too compelling. I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I didn't want to be like the evangelicals who avoided getting involved during the civil rights movement and in the process discredited the gospel and themselves."

One day during the conference, Houghton took Cizik on a walk in the gardens of Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's ancestral home. It was a lovely day, sunny and bright. Houghton said, "Richard, if God has convinced you of the reality of the science and the Scriptures on the subject then you must speak out."

"Let me think about it," Cizik responded. He knew he'd meet resistance from his colleagues and board. But Houghton convinced him that the world couldn't solve the issue without serious American participation, and that the Republican Party was the major political force blocking action in the United States (in contrast to Europe, where conservative parties had helped take the lead on the issue). "As evangelicals, we're 40 percent of the Republican base, so if we could convince the evangelical community to speak out, it could make the key difference," Cizik said. American evangelicals, Houghton told him, might literally hold the fate of the planet in their hands.

After leaving the conference, Cizik began reading and learning. Flying over the Sahara, he got a sense of the "tens of thousands of acres that are lost to climate-related desertification each year," which in turn leads to major refugee migrations and potential wars over water. He coordinated a retreat with key evangelical leaders, like Rick Warren, and major scientists, like Houghton and Harvard's E.O. Wilson. Then he took a similar group to Alaska to witness the melting glaciers and permafrost, the disruption of native communities, the spruce trees dying because the bark beetles now survived the warmer winters. They visited Shishmaref, a native village that is being forced to relocate because the permafrost has crumbled beneath it and the sea ice that once served as a storm buffer is gone. "Our first night there, we saw a lunar eclipse, shooting stars, and the Northern Lights." It reminded him of the phrase in the psalm, "Creation pours forth its praise to its creator.... The heavens give witness to God's glory."

His Alaska group, said Cizik, "included those who believe life on earth was created by God, and those who believe it evolved over three and a half billion years. What became obvious to both groups is that this earth is sacred and that we ought to protect it. God isn't going to ask you how he created the earth. He already knows. He's going to ask, 'What did you do with what I created?' If we're leaving a footprint that destroys the earth, we've failed to be good stewards."

The more Cizik learned, the more it challenged him to "treat caring for God's creation as a moral principle," and to continue enlisting others. In 2004, Cizik convinced the NAE to release a paper called "For the Health of the Nation," which urged its members to live in conformity with sustainable principles, talked of "creation care," and stated, "Because clean air, pure water and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation." Two years later, he helped organize the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a major statement from 86 key evangelical leaders, including major megachurch pastors like Warren, the presidents of 39 Christian colleges, and the national commander of the Salvation Army. The statement described climate change as an urgent moral issue for Christians and called for the government to act on it.

Cizik also joined James Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network in carrying a placard to a pro-life rally that said, "Stop Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn" and handing out fliers explaining that most of the birth-defect producing mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. "If you care about the sanctity of human life," he said, "then care about whether people live desperate lives and care about the mercury from power plants."

As Cizik expected, not everyone was happy with his taking environmental stands. "I had people on my board who said, 'Don't touch the issue. If you do, we'll make your life very difficult.'" Twenty-two evangelical leaders signed a letter urging the NAE not to take a position on global climate change. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and major conservative activists like Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and the Family Research Council's Gary Bauer called for Cizik's firing.

Some of this Cizik attributed to "simple ignorance of the science" and some to "bad theology--people who believe the earth is going to be destroyed anyway, so why bother." But he also wondered how much came from people "afraid they'll lose their power, influence, capacity to raise money, what they perceive to be their priorities. They're afraid they'll offend political allies."

But Cizik and the others persisted. "As a biblical Christian," he said, "I agree with St. Francis that every square inch on Earth belongs to Christ. "If we don't pay attention to global climate change, it's pretty obvious that tens and or even hundreds of millions of people are going to die. If you have a major sea-level rise then Bangladesh becomes uninhabitable. Where do you put its 100 million people? Do you put them in India? In China? They'd have no place to go. Britain's Christian Aid talks of climate change impacting one billion people by mid-century, with drought, floods, disease and malnutrition. I've asked African American leaders whether, as a white man, I can call climate change 'the civil rights issue of the 21st century.' Unanimously they say 'You not only can, but you must.'"

Cizik believed he could still preach the gospel while also talking about these kinds of issues. "You need both. To go to bed at night and say that over a billion people live on a dollar a day and can't go to bed themselves with a full stomach, can you live as a Christian happily in your suburban home, driving your SUV? Of course you can't. Not as a real Christian. And if you happen to be a liberal, conservative or centrist, I don't care. The gospel has priority over politics."

Although Cizik and his allies never quite convinced the NAE to take an official stand on climate change, and he eventually got forced out after telling radio interviewer Terry Gross that he was beginning to rethink his opposition to gay civil unions, the organization reaffirmed the moral importance of "creation care," a core perspective that encouraged further dialogue. And Cizik has gone on to start an organization, the New Evangelicals, devoted to issues like poverty and environmental engagement. He called his fellow evangelicals "a slow-moving earthquake. They don't quite understand themselves how they're changing, but they are."

"The issue shook my theology to its core," Cizik told me. "It changed me as much as my being born again thirty years before. This threatens the whole planet, so it raises a basic issue of who we are as people. Climate change isn't just a scientific question. It's a moral, a religious, a cosmological question. It involves everything we are and what we have a right to do."


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, $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. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of ""Soul" every Thursday. Click hereto see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.

For more information, to hear Loeb's live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org . To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From "Soul of a Citizen" by Paul Rogat Loeb

Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.

When we try to engage people politically we never know who will respond, or when someone will shift from reveling in their apathy to taking powerful public stands. With Earth Day coming up, here's a striking example of one such transformation.

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Virginia Tech freshman Angie De Soto didn't vote in the 2004 election. The president, she thought, had nothing to do with her life. She didn't care who won. Instead, she and friends played a drinking game in one of their dorm rooms. Nobody cared who won the election, so they divided into random "red" and "blue" teams, and chugged a beer each time new results on TV favored their team. Angie woke up the next morning hung over and with no idea of the election outcome, but it hardly seemed to matter.

When Angie started college, she focused mostly on her social life and picked her classes almost at random. But midway through a resources geology lecture course, her professor told the students, "I'm going to talk about an issue that's going to change your whole future." For two days, he discussed global climate change, and Angie, who'd never heard of it, was stunned. She called her mother, who worked as a teacher, and said "Mom, I just learned about global warming. What is this? Have you heard about it?" Her mother had no idea what Angie was talking about even after she tried to explain it. "Neither did any of the girls on my hall," Angie said. "I just kept asking myself why I hadn't heard about something this important, and why more people weren't doing anything about it. Didn't they know? Didn't they care? Did they just not know what to do?"

Virginia Tech had a nascent student group called the Environmental Coalition, but Angie had never encountered them. The group's presence was negligible on the school's largely politically disengaged campus of 28,000. Angie was too shy to approach her professor, and she didn't know what to do beyond trying to learn more through searching out related websites and taking an environmental policy class.

Then, while Angie was walking across campus one day, a young woman from the Environmental Coalition approached her to sign a petition for a green fee, by which "students would pay a bit extra to support the campus recycling program and small efficiency projects." Angie started going to EC meetings. Although she liked the people and the effort they were making, she felt they weren't making the impact that they could; they did little to bring in new members, and administrators wouldn't return their phone calls or emails. That changed when Angie received a scholarship to attend a student climate conference. "They taught us everything about how to organize: how to recruit people, plan events, run effective meetings, develop leadership, raise money, and lead large-scale campaigns. I came back incredibly charged up, eager to teach as many other students as I could what I'd learned. For the first time, I began to feel like this was my calling. That one class changed my life with a sense of what we're facing. I felt I finally had the skills to do something about it."

Through her involvement, Angie learned about the Public Interest Research Groups, the PIRGs, which combine campus organizing with neighborhood canvasses and legislative campaigns. After finding a Sacramento, California, PIRG office that was working for a state cap on climate emissions, she accepted an aunt's invitation to stay with her there. Angie worked 13 hours a day as a field manager, knocking on doors to talk with people about the issues. Angie had been working since her first year of high school, including fifteen hours a week in the Virginia Tech dining halls, and "this was more hours for less money than any job I'd had. But I loved it. It was one of the best experiences of my life."

The PIRGs helped pass the California state climate change bill, and Angie returned to Virginia "on top of the world. Before, I was too intimidated to approach people because we just didn't talk about environmental issues on our campus. Now I'd go up to everyone." She kicked the EC into high gear, setting up a major concert with local bands and training members to approach local media, gather names for the email list, and table at the student center. "We'd approach people as they walked by and ask if they wanted to stop global warming. Then we'd talk about the issues and try to get them involved. I had grown a thick skin from getting the door slammed all those times when I was canvassing, so if they didn't respond I just asked the next person."

As Angie's involvement deepened, she found more ways to act on her newfound convictions. She brought over 100 Virginia Tech students to Power Shift, a national student climate change conference held at the University of Maryland. Angie also helped plan the entertainment, and as she looked out from the stage at 6,000 students, "felt for the first time like we really have a movement."

Working with 18 other student groups, the EC also built a Coalition for Campus Sustainability that even included the college Republicans, which delighted Angie because, as she stressed, "this was an issue that should transcend political parties." Meanwhile, the campus recycling department hired her to coordinate and train a team of 30 student volunteers who educated dorm residents on environmental issues and ways to reduce their individual impact.

In the process, the EC became one of the school's largest student groups, with a 1,600-name listserv. And they finally got a meeting with college president Charles Steger. "We went in very organized," Angie said. "We dressed professionally, were professional in our tone and word choice, and brought thoroughly researched proposals." The group members asked Steger to join 600 of his peers who had signed the national Presidents' Climate Commitment. Steger balked at just signing a statement and instead offered to create a comprehensive campus plan, which he said would mean far more. He commissioned a committee of administrators, faculty, and students to draft a plan by fall. The committee hired Angie, and she spent the summer pulling together ideas and highly specific implementation plans from the EC group and from other schools. "This issue can be so overpowering," she said, "but if we bring it down to what we can do as individuals and as a campus, people feel they can make a difference." Although administrators initially said no to some suggestions, "we didn't freak out. You have to keep approaching them, coming up with new ideas, offering reasonable and feasible solutions."

After the group completed the plan, Angie was hired to carry it out as university policy. Among the many changes, the school enacted comprehensive recycling procedures, switched to high-efficiency light bulbs, installed energy-saving occupancy sensors in the classrooms, and took steps to ensure that new buildings would meet strong environmental standards. The campus saved $200,000 in just one month by lowering winter thermostats to a still-comfortable 68 degrees--and would save more by slightly raising the summer settings. The dining halls decreased food waste by 38 percent by eliminating trays and developed a plan for composting the rest. The university also pledged to explore alternative fuels, make environmentally responsible purchasing a priority, and look into additional efficiency gains, including phasing out their aging coal-fired boilers.

"I started out just an apathetic drunken party girl, with no clear path in my life," Angie said. "Now I'm implementing our campus sustainability plan. People change and even massive institutions can change."


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, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Bill McKibben calls "Soul" "a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity." Alice Walker says, "The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love." The Sierra Club magazine writes, "Loeb examines the stumbling blocks--perceived powerlessness, cynicism, burnout--that keep most Americans from participating in the public sphere, as well as the rewards of following a different path."

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. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of ""Soul" every Thursday. Click hereto see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.

For more information, to hear Loeb's live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org . To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From "Soul of a Citizen" by Paul Rogat Loeb

Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.

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