The movement that elected Barack Obama president, looking beyond last
month's hard-earned victory, has begun to chew on a central question:
What now?
"It's like, damn, that was amazing," said Chris Savage, a 44-year-old
chemist and Obama activist who lives near Ann Arbor, Mich. "The question
is, what happens to all this energy?"
Obama supporters nationwide are busy trying to come up with answers,
meeting in homes, bars, coffee shops, and at holiday parties to devise
plans for building on the enthusiasm generated by his presidential bid.
If Obama's campaign was about bringing change to the country, the
post-election period is about defining what that change means and how to
achieve it.
His backers are already using networks developed during the campaign to
rally support for causes including building local neighborhood
organizations and eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice
system.
In Florida, they plan to apply Obama's organizing methods to local races,
including the 2010 contest to succeed retiring Republican US Senator Mel
Martinez. They showed up in droves at the Foggy Bottom Coffee House in
Dexter, Mich., for a postelection meet-and-greet with a newly elected
Democratic representative, Mark Schauer, partly to show they would be
paying attention to what he does in Congress.
"I was overwhelmed," Schauer said of the Nov. 15 event, which drew some 120
people. "I would have thought it was a rally two days before the election."
Obama aides say they are still figuring out how best to use their e-mail
list of some 13 million names. The campaign says it received more than
500,000 responses to an online survey. Over the weekend, it hosted an
Organizing for Change Legacy Conference outside Chicago, an invitation-only
event at which a few hundred field staff members and volunteer leaders met
to "look forward to the future of what our volunteer organization can
become."
"Since the election, the challenges we face - and our responsibility to
take action - have only gotten more urgent," Obama campaign manager David
Plouffe wrote to supporters Thursday to promote "Change is Coming" house
meetings this coming weekend. Coordinated by the campaign, more than 1,500
gatherings of supporters are being held around the country to harness the
campaign energy for governing.
There are already a few hints of how Obama and his administration might do
that. Former US senator Tom Daschle, expected to be named as Obama's health
and human services secretary, said at a healthcare summit Friday in
Colorado that Americans should attend the house meetings and brainstorm on
how to overhaul healthcare and that he planned to attend one himself.
"If I'm trying to move health-care reform through Washington, then the fact
that we have 10 million people on an e-mail list who are ready and willing
to get activated and to help educate their friends and neighbors and
co-workers about the issue - that's incredibly powerful," Obama says in the
January edition of Ebony magazine.
But many in the Obama movement are not waiting for a cue. Indeed, one
lesson they learned from his bottom-up campaign is that they can act
without directives from the top, and they have been exploring various means
of bringing order and purpose to the still-amorphous desire among many
Obama supporters to stay connected and involved.
Last Thursday evening, for example, Savage and nearly 30 other Obama
supporters from the Ann Arbor area hashed out ideas at a pub in Dexter,
Mich. Savage said he hopes to see the creation of a local network that
could organize around anything from watershed issues to taxes.
"During the general election, there was one giant goal, so it was easier to
focus on," said Scott Stoddard, a 34-year-old graphic designer and Obama
activist in Aurora, Colo. "What's happening now and what's going to
continue to happen, you obviously have people who are partial to certain
issues. I think you're going to have small groups sprouting from that."
Some former Obama volunteers have already launched specific projects. Rita
Rogers, a fifth-grade teacher in Akron, Ohio, used the campaign website's
social networking technology to develop a new group called Ohio Teachers
for Obama, which she hopes will grow to influence national education
policy.
Rogers, 55, said she is particularly concerned that the increased focus on
standardized testing is hurting students.
"I knew what we did during the election was too important to drop," said
Rogers, who led a bank of Obama volunteers during the campaign. "And I
thought, while this energy is still buzzing around, we need to mobilize."
Others are relative newcomers to political activism. Mary Coe Corroo, a
70-year-old from Cape Coral, Fla., who works part-time behind the counter
at a Bob Evans restaurant, had never been active in a political campaign
before Obama's. She just gave $5 to Obama's transition effort, and she
wants to participate in reforming healthcare and Social Security, both of
which she relies on and worries about.
"Those are the close-to-home things that we have to work on," she said.
Supporters and activists are also pondering exactly what their relationship
with Obama's administration will be, knowing their job will entail both
supporting initiatives they like and challenging ones they don't.
"What's the dance?" Jim Wallis, a prominent liberal evangelical pastor and
activist, asked at a gathering of civic leaders at the Kennedy Library in
Boston last week. "What's the choreography?"
Those are the same questions supporters of Governor Deval Patrick of
Massachusetts were asking after he won office in 2006 and promised to
maintain ties with his own grass-roots network, a relationship that may
hold lessons for Obama.
Over the past two years, Patrick has regularly met with and solicited input
from those supporters, and some - including a group of Massachusetts dairy
farmers, who successfully pressed for more state financial assistance -
used their organizing skills and access for concrete ends.
But Patrick also found that campaign supporters will not necessarily march
in lockstep behind him as governor. Many, for example, opposed his push for
casinos and let him know.
"Listening to grass-roots supporters is easy," said Liz Morningstar, who
runs Patrick's political committee. "Making them feel heard is the
challenge."
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/
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