It’s one of the tensions community organizers live with: how much do you boast about your accomplishments?
On the one hand, if you (and by “you”, I mean the organization and the leaders the organizer works for) don’t take credit for and talk about your victories, your opponents will either belittle them or claim them for themselves, while your followers may feel like all their work was in vain.
On the other hand, if you do take credit for and talk about your victories, your opponents will either say you’re bragging too much, or that you really are the dangerous un-American subversives they feared and warned against.
As a result, in the post-Alinsky era (e.g., in 1980s Chicago where a young Barack Obama worked as an organizer), many veteran community organizers—already distrustful of media hype and the double-edged sword presented by television news—settled into a modus operandi of 1) working to make sure the organization’s stories of victory were told well and often internally, while generally keeping a low profile in the wider political and media universe. This was even more true for victories that represented significant changes in (and therefore threats to) the status quo.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying I’m pleased, but not surprised by the story told in Michael Grunwald’s The New, New Deal about the remarkable success of and ignorance about Pres. Obama’s first major legislative accomplishment: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also know as “the stimulus bill”. I’m not surprised the Recovery Act stopped the 2007-08 recession dead in its tracks. I’m not surprised the Recovery Act was:
- “by far the largest energy bill in history”,
- “included the most dramatic federal education reforms in decades”, and
- “launched the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower”.
And I’m especially not surprised that virtually the entire Washington press corps not only missed the real story about the Recovery Act, but actually got it wrong—swallowing the Republican propaganda campaign that the ARRA failed to stimulate the economy in the short-term and was a waste of money in the long-term.
Grunwald summarized the story in a Monday post well worth reading on Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo.
For its part, the Obama campaign seems to have settled on the somewhat grim and determined sounding slogan of “Forward.” for the fall campaign. Grunwald’s book tells the story of how far we’ve come in the past 3 1/2 years, what “Forward” would look like for the next 4 years, and why it’s a fight worth making for progressives—even, or perhaps especially, for those progressives who are disappointed Pres. Obama hasn’t accomplished more in his first term.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
