Even when I'm wrong, I'm right

I am far less pessimistic about the Obama administration than many of my friends. Some have thrown up their hands and gone home. Betrayed by Obama's false start closing Gitmo, delays in improved transparency and ending the role of lobbyists in policy-making, and his baby steps taking on equal rights for gays and lesbians. Some of these folks believed that Obama had a pocket full of magic pixie dust and were convinced we'd all be living in a green-powered, multi-racial, gay-positive utopia by now. We aren't and this group is sitting in their neighborhood Starbucks now moping about it. Others are just pissed at him, annoyed by his timidity and his search for bi-partisanship with an opposition that openly admits its only goal is to see him fail. The thing I can't shake: Why can't he understand that anti-gay policies are a civil-rights problem? Violence committed against gays and lesbians is now considered a hate crime. That's a nice step forward. But why do queer Americans have to die to get federal protection?

Yet, in general, I still think the Obama administration has its heart in the right place and is playing a (perhaps overly-) safe political game that promises the achievement of many dearly hoped-for policy objectives down the road. I think it might be time to replace Rahm Emanuel, maybe after getting health insurance reform passed. Emanuel has a reputation for being a bully and an arm-twister. Good qualities in politics. But I don't think he is aspirational, to use a new-agey term. He'd be a better fit in a Hillary Clinton-led White House, where the only thing that would matter is accummulating wins, and actually accomplishing social change would be a secondary concern. We need someone who can twist arms and wants to change the world.

I still profoundly believe some things I said in my series of now discredited, overly euphoric post-election postings:

I see people turning away from a party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems.

And:

Americans have rejected the idea that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money. We can’t sit by while a major American city disappears under flood waters we knew were coming. Government should facilitate scientific research, not suppress it. It should hold our soldiers back, until all efforts to avoid conflict have failed, and never throw them into a slow-motion massacre in pursuit of oil or to establish the validity of a new strategic blueprint.

I still think these comments are right on target. The challenge is beating back (or ignoring) nonsensical bull-shit like this week's tea-bagger march on Washington. 4,500 angry white people who got rides to D.C. on buses paid for by Republican and industry-funded astro-turf organizations does not constitute a "revolution," nor is it anything to "fear," despite what Michele Bachmann says. The overwhelming evidence - from polling and from last year's election results - is that people want responsive government.

The challenge, of course, is engaging public opinion and taking command of the debate (or debates, since we are are talking about several policy areas, from cap and trade to health insurance reform). My number one question: what good was it to build a fifty state strategy in 2008, if we are just going to let the machinery sit idle now? And related: why bring all those teenagers and college kids into the process, and mobilize unions and the poor, and then send them home after you win? I know it's bad strategy in American politics to draw your main examples from Fidel Castro's Cuba, but here goes. In 1961 Cuba mobilized a quarter of a million young people and asked them to eradicate illiteracy across the island. In one year they taught nearly a million Cubans how to read. The Cuban government (and, okay, the Communist Party) didn't ignore those young people after the literacy campaign, sending them home to get back to the business of playing Guitar Hero (or whatever the equivalent was in Kennedy-era Cuba). In fact, efforts were made to preserve their enthusiasm, to channel it, to organize the students, to turn them lose on the nation's problems. Those young literacy workers became the backbone of the revolutionary movement, and became doctors and teachers and engineers and helped transform Cuba.

Now if anyone in the Obama administration says out loud, in public, "We should be more like Castro's Cuba!", it's all over. But - pssst, Obama team - no one can hear you if you just think it, and then act accordingly. People influence people. Take the people who were energized by the Obama campaign and do something with them. So far, the Obama White House's efforts to do so are pathetic.