Finding Our Collective Voice.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It could be a very short honeymoon for progressives who supported Barack Obama, with all the Clinton Administration officials crowding into the cabinet. We're now talking about a transition that will calm Wall Street, deploy more troops to Afghanistan, and recruit members of Washington's permanent establishment to keep the politics of bailout and military buildup going.

What about "change" propelled by the power of small donors, a huge field operation, and the massive numbers of new voters and newly energized activists who got Obama elected?

Republicans mocked Obama for being a community organizer, and made a lot out of his brief association with ACORN. But Obama's victory was not actually a community organizing triumph. As veteran organizer Bill Fletcher Jr. put it on Grit TV, "When I'm thinking about community organizing, I'm thinking much more about growth and training of indigenous leaders." Obama's field operation was impressive. But it was also a highly disciplined, centralized operation--and, let's not forget, the most expensive campaign in history. Obama's record-breaking contributions from Wall Street came from very identifiable, big-name donors, while his small-donor base was not organized, except for the purpose of electing him. As Fletcher puts it, "You're not beholden to people who have no collective voice."

Now, as Obama works on his transition, progressives are scrambling to work on getting that collective voice together.

Jeff Blodgett of Wellstone Action sees the excitement generated by Obama's victory as an opportunity. "That's the challenge--to continue the momentum," he says. His group is adding more trainings, and he sees a spike in interest both in progressives running for office and in groups that work on global warming, immigrant rights, and other issues.

In other words, activists are drawing energy and numbers from the campaign, instead of the Administration feeling propelled into office by activists.

The task for those groups--to put pressure on Obama--is daunting.

"This will be the fight of the millennium," says Betsy Taylor, the climate change activist who founded 1Sky. She was "gratified" by Obama's talk about green jobs during the campaign, and by his "forceful" speech at the climate change summit in California. But, she adds, "He comes from a coal state and he hasn't figured out the science on coal"--that nothing short of a complete moratorium on coal plants will do to reverse global...