Take Back Barack: It's time to reclaim the man we put in the White House

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix; reprinted in the Pittsburgh City Paper; co-written with Deirdre Fulton
Let's be honest: we didn't vote for the Barack Obama his campaign advertised. We didn't vote for an African-American man, nor for a US senator from Illinois, nor for a father, a husband, an activist, or a young politician.
We voted for the Barack Obama we fantasized — the progressive miracle worker. We voted for Change.
Millions of us stood up and shouted, handed out fliers, talked to our neighbors, donated hard-earned money, and drove people to the polls for Change. We screamed, hugged, kissed, and cried when we learned Change had come to America. We knew Change wouldn't come overnight, that it would take time, but we were excited that we had elected a man who was open to Change, who said he wanted to consider real people's needs while in the Oval Office. We eagerly awaited the first hints of Change, as the president-elect's transition developed.
And now, we have reason to worry that Change is not coming to America after all. For nearly two years we were encouraged to "Be the Change you want to see in America." It is now obvious that we have a ways to go toward Being that Change. And so does President-elect Barack Obama. And that, above all else, needs to Change.
It was not the Democratic base, nor the centrists, nor even the center-left, who put Obama where he is today. The progressive movement rose from near death and kept Obama alive in the primary, eventually proving stubborn enough to carry him to victory over the Establishment candidate. And then, in the general election, it was the progressives whose energy infected the nation, whose enthusiasm reminded longtime vote-the-ticket Dems that elections were about the future, and whose contributions, tiny as each individual one was, funded the revolution of Change that swept Obama into the Oval Office.
Now is the time to hold him accountable — even before he takes the oath of office — because once he's in there, he will be surrounded by the trappings of Power, the machinery of State, and the inertia of Bureaucracy. If we are to reach him, we must act quickly. Though he has shown us that he is not who we thought he was (for the record, we did know he wasn't the Messiah), he has also, fortunately, shown us the way to keeping him — and our country — on the right track.
What's gone wrongObama's fall from progressive grace goes beyond the campaign-season disappointment of his support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless-wiretapping law strongly opposed by liberal activists and civil libertarians.
Progressives have a variety of objections, largely relating to flip-flops (warrantless wiretapping), climbdowns (withdrawal from Iraq and taxing the ultra-rich), and betrayals (keeping Bushies like Robert Gates and Michael Hayden anywhere near the halls of power). Many also object to a return of Clintonites, who while certainly Democrats, were hardly progressives in many areas.
While a CNN poll shows that 80 percent of Americans approve of Obama's transition so far, some progressives are unconvinced. They objected loudly enough to warrant a Huffington Post talking-to from legendary Democratic strategist (and Obama advisor) Steve Hildebrand.
"This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren't progressive enough," he wrote. But Hildebrand accused naysayers of being impotent and shortsighted. "After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people — not just those on the left."
But that plea for patience and tolerance wears ever thinner as we watch the transition unfold. Perhaps Obama's most egregious mistake in the eyes of progressives is the president-elect's decision to surround himself with decidedly unprogressive national-security and foreign-policy advisors. In part, that list reads like a Clinton-era roster — which is troubling because, as United Nations correspondent Barbara Crossette wrote in The Nation last April, "The Clinton record . . . is anything but stellar in global or even US security terms. . . . In many ways the 1990s were a wasted decade in international relations."
Most notably, there's Hillary Clinton herself, our soon-to-be secretary of state, who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, who has been called "a hawk among hawks," who pointed approvingly at humanitarian interventionist actions like the one her husband initiated in Kosovo in 1999. Obama's team of advisors includes several other returnees from the Clinton administration, such as Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice (recently named US ambassador to the UN), Richard Holbrooke, Anthony Lake, and Madeleine Albright, all of whom have been neoliberal hawks to one degree or other.
While a return to Clinton-era foreign relations is a certainly a change from destructive Bush-era policies, it is not Change writ large. Not to mention the fact that another segment of Obama's national-security squad is rounded out by center-righties with firm Bush-era roots, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who will stay on as a holdover from the Bush administration, and national-security advisor-designate Jim Jones, a former advisor to John McCain.
What will these choices mean when it comes time to make big decisions about closing Guantanamo Bay prison, or about withdrawing from Iraq, or about increasing troops in Afghanistan?
"Obama's argument — that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so — is denied by recent history," writes Ted Rall in Maui Times Weekly. "The US government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them."
On the economy, as well, Obama has made some critical missteps. It's not just that Lawrence Summers, Obama's pick for head of the incoming White House National Economic Council, is a Clinton-era economist who oversaw the same policies that got us into the financial mess we're in today (or that his record on gender equality is iffy-at-best). Two of Obama's largest policy backpedals have been economic.
First, he adopted a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year — rather than taking the bold step of repealing those, he now says he'll just let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. Then, citing the sharp decrease in oil prices from this summer's record levels, he shelved his plan to tax oil-company windfall profits. Liberal blogger and columnist David Sirota had this to say: "[I]f oil prices are down and oil industry profits are truly down, what's the harm in passing a windfall profits tax? Even if you buy the right-wing nonsense about a windfall profits tax 'hurting the industry' or 'hurting the economy' when it is applied, if there really are no windfall profits to tax, then it won't be applied."
What's going right-ishIt is true that Obama is doing some stuff we thought he would do, although not always in as gung-ho a way as we might like.
Consider "Your Seat At the Table," a special section of the Obama transition team's Web site, change.gov. There, average-Joe Internet browsers can read policy recommendations from high-powered lobbying organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, various environmental groups, the National Education Association, and HIV/AIDS activists. This is obviously in keeping with the team's promise of transparency.
Other bright spots are Obama's weekly YouTube addresses, and the announcement of an Office of Urban Policy, which could have big implications for the economy, the environment, and urban education. He's focused his economic efforts on preventing foreclosures. And while some of his advisor picks are ideologically questionable, there are enough women on the list that some pundits have suggested, as AJ Rossmiller did in The New Republic, that Obama is "ushering in a feminist revolution in foreign policy and national security."
Aside from the fact that, as Christopher Hayes wrote in The Nation, "not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration," some of Obama's choices have been downright heartening. The selection of Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, for example, signals a sharp departure from the days of head-in-the-sand climate change non-leadership from the federal government. Chu, an experienced outsider — seemingly unbeholden to any interest, other than science — is an ideal pick, the type we hoped we'd see more of from the Obama-Biden administration.
And former senate majority leader Tom Daschle, though he is on the surface a classic boys-club Dem, has impressive healthcare credentials to back up his appointments as secretary of health and human services and director of the new White House Office of Health Care Reform. His book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis (Thomas Dunne Books) will come out next year, and will outline Daschle's major reform ideas, including the creation of a Federal Health Board that would make coverage decisions for federally-administered insurance programs. At the change.gov Web site, he's soliciting citizen input on how to fix our healthcare system (though there's one thing we can be sure of: it won't be single-payer). The fact that Daschle pushed to run both the federal agency and the executive-branch office suggests that there will be an aggressive attempt to address this issue early in the Obama administration — and that Daschle is eager to use his wheeling-and-dealing skills (honed in Congress) to make it happen.
But the most important achievement so far is that Obama has managed (mostly) to keep our nation's optimism afloat — despite Blagojevich, despite the auto-industry-bailout mess, despite the public's generally pessimistic outlook, Obama is still enjoying higher ratings and a longer honeymoon period than any recent predecessor. He's courting doubters while making sure that his base gives him the benefit of the doubt. That's Change.
Not there yetThe question becomes whether Obama will be a servant to his advisors, or whether he will learn from their experience, absorb their suggestions, and yet ultimately go his own, progressive, way.
As he rounds out his cabinet appointments, we'll assess his progress. (See how Obama's selections measure up, as they're made, at thePhoenix.com/TakeBackBarack.) With education, Obama was under pressure from conflicting pro-union and reform interests. One of his top transition-team education advisors was Linda Darling-Hammond, who had the support of teachers' unions, and is somewhat notorious for her stances against Teach for America and No Child Left Behind; but on Tuesday he chose Chicago public-school superintendent Arne Duncan — who is more reform-minded (generally favoring concepts such as merit-based teacher pay, charter schools, and high-stakes testing), but has questionable classroom bona-fides.
There's also the whole question of America's relationship with food, eating, and farming — and who Obama picks as his agriculture secretary will set the tone on these issues. While he's said he doesn't want the job, here's what sustainable-food guru Michael Pollan told PBS host Bill Moyers about the decision: "What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area — and that isn't clear yet that he does, at least in his first term — I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education."
Just last week, in a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof suggested Obama "name a reformer to a renamed position" — Secretary of Food and Agriculture, or just of Food, perhaps?
On so many other questions — How will Obama deal with terror-suspect detainees? Who will he appoint to federal courts? How will his administration address the possibly illegal maneuverings of its predecessors? — we will simply have to wait and see. Perhaps, in this case, patience is practical.
"Sure, there's a chance that Mr. Obama, derided this past year by the right as an empty slate who tried to mean all things to all people, has simply been leading the left on and is now morphing into a rudderless pragmatist who will break their hearts," Steve Kornacki writes in the New York Observer. "But pragmatism doesn't have to be rudderless. It's just as easy to portray Mr. Obama's early moves as a sign that he will be pragmatic about pursuing progressive goals."
But there's a fine line between pragmatism and losing sight of one's principles. If Obama turns out to be "more of the same," or more like "more of the same" than he is like Change, the progressives will go back in the closet they came out of to support Obama. A generation of young people might get their hopes dashed and become cynical opters-out of the political system, like the preceding generation.

The way forward

How can we take back Barack?
Fortunately, Obama's campaign of Change has shown us the way to take back Barack. We need to mobilize, to communicate, to connect, even to fundraise — and we need to be sure we get his attention, the way we got the world's attention when we voted for Change.
STEP 1: DECIDE WHAT CHANGE YOU WILL MAKE.
Determine what difference you will begin making, what effort you will start making — beyond any community involvement you're already involved in — and get started. Make the phone calls, send the e-mails, start the conversations, around whatever it is you're going to take on: healthcare, education, hunger, poverty, or any number of other problems facing us.
STEP 2: TELL OBAMA HIMSELF. At the Obama transition team's Web site, there's a page to share "your vision," saying "where President-Elect Obama should lead this country." (It's at http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision.) Make sure Obama knows that your vision is for Change, and what you are doing. But don't stop there. Write letters asking for support, demanding Change, and send them to the Presidential Transition Team, Washington DC 20270 (no street address is needed; and the transition team helpfully informs that only letters in No. 10 envelopes — that's business-size — can be accepted; nothing smaller, no greeting-card envelopes, and no packages).
STEP 3: TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW. Post Change-seeking comments on blogs, forums, social networks, and even meatspace bulletin boards. Talk about what you are doing for Change — and how others can help — at bars, business functions, book-group meetings, and every other social event you attend. (Remember how much you did this before November 4? Just do the same thing again!)
STEP 4: JOIN THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT. Print out "Take Back Barack" logos, make them into bumper stickers, put icons on your Web site and social-networking pages, make signs and put them in your windows or on your front lawn. Host parties and neighborhood get-togethers to talk about your projects. If there are enough of you — and we're sure there are — get a group together to organize a March for Change in your community. Go to Obama supporters' "Change Is Coming" meetings in your community, or start one by visiting barackobama.com.
STEP 5: GET THE MEDIA'S ATTENTION. Call up your local alternative-weekly paper (and the local daily, if it still exists), and the local TV stations, and tell them what you're doing. Invite them to your events, and encourage them to cover the issues that are important to you.
STEP 6: USE TECHNOLOGY TO DO ALL OF THE ABOVE BETTER, FASTER, AND MORE EFFECTIVELY. Create a system by which people can text and e-mail in their hopes, dreams, plans, and actions from their phones and computers, and have that information forward automagically to Obama and his team. At the same time, post that information publicly elsewhere on the Internet, so we can all track the nationwide effort for Change and the increasing pressure on Obama — and gauge the response.
STEP 7: KEEP AT IT. As much as positive energy can come from all this, there's an important negative lesson: we can never let up. Change does not happen and just stay that way. We need to work for Change each and every day of our lives, and enlist more people in the cause at every turn.

Freegans raid Whole Foods

Published in the Portland Phoenix

A group of freegans took what they say are hundreds of eggs, hundreds of pounds of butter and cheese, soy milk and other soy products, and packaged frozen foods from Dumpsters outside the Marginal Way Whole Foods store in the aftermath of last week's ice storm.

The store lost power for 12 hours, according to manager Marissa Perry, putting cooled, refrigerated, and frozen food at risk of spoiling. The store's employees sent "four or five vanloads" of food to the Wayside Soup Kitchen, and tried to move items that needed refrigeration into larger cold-storage rooms. They used dry ice to keep things cool, and were hoping that refrigerated trucks would arrive to help, but ran out of space and time.

What remained had to be thrown out because "it had been out of temperature for more than four hours," and was no longer safe to eat according to government regulations and company policy, Perry says. "If you leave food out for three or four hours, and you don't heat it or re-refrigerate it, you're growing bacteria," she says.

In an interview with the Portland Phoenix, an organizer of the scavenging crew — some of whom regularly recover and eat food thrown away by others — said several carloads of food were carted away on Friday night, but when they returned on Saturday morning, they were ordered to leave the property by store officials and a Portland police officer, and were barred from taking any more food from the Dumpster.

"We wanted them to not take away the Dumpster," says the organizer. "The food is perfectly good," and "some of it was stuff that doesn't even need to be refrigerated" before use, such as pickles and kimchee in glass jars. "I think it's a travesty to throw away tens of tons of food," he says.

"All the frozen stuff we've used so far looked like it never thawed," the organizer says. Perry says the raiders may believe that because of the weekend's below-freezing temperatures, which likely caused the food to refreeze in the Dumpsters.

And while the organizer says no one who has eaten the food has yet gotten sick, Perry is worried that it may happen down the road. She says some of the people she encountered raiding the Dumpsters told her they "are accustomed to eating rotten food," and so perhaps have a different view of what is safe for consumption.

Catie Curtis + Meg Hutchinson: Music Seen at One Longfellow Square, December 14, 2008

Published in the Portland Phoenix

A full-ish crowd sought refuge from the lingering effects of the ice storm at One Longfellow Square, finding enough warmth and electricity to urge them into doing the wave — the wave, at One Longfellow! — not once but twice for Catie Curtis and Meg Hutchinson.

Hutchinson started off with a too-short set of bright yet mellow folk, mostly off her latest album, Come Up Full (2008, Red House Records). Her guitar meshed beautifully with her gently gritty voice — both were playful and lively, and served to showcase her senses of humor (particularly in "Osa's Song," in which she confesses to being "one of those people you know who" has all sorts of silly dog-obsessed habits), dramatic tension (lamenting the meaninglessness of too much of anything in "America (Enough)"), and her abiding hope in the face of adversity.

Hutchinson began what became a night of duets by inviting Curtis to back her on her mournful-but-cheery final song, "Home," and joined Curtis for most of the main set, adding depth and richness to choruses, facilitating audience participation, and serving as a foil for a few of Curtis's song-intro stories. Curtis opened with a solo of the timely "Long Night Moon" (the title track of a 2006 album on Compass Records), and moved smoothly through a set of old and new songs, all with her blues-and-country style of folk music.

Curtis mixed the dignified soulfulness of the traditional Christmas carol "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" with the exuberance of "Be Sixteen With Me," a song by Boston folkie Don White about parents who escape for a joyride, leaving their kids at home to worry.

Several of the songs — including the love-packed "Elizabeth" and the night-ending "Deliver Me" — were audience requests. Curtis's parents, who still live in Saco (where Curtis grew up), were in attendance, and also managed to put in a request that drove home the mostly reverent tone of the night: the hymn-like "Passing Through," a reminder that whatever the planet does to us, we must still care for it.

Press Releases: Looking up

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Thanks to the ice storm, we've all heard them by now: the thrumming, throbbing, foreboding musical themes of the local TV news stations' storm coverage — when the news anchors wear sweaters in the studio, the meteorologists wear parkas in the sleet, and reporters and videographers wear slickers next to snowplows.

All three Portland-based stations are taking their weather forecasting into the 21st century, posting live (or near-live) weather maps and radar images on their Web sites. Some of it is packaging, and some is hype, but there are pretty interesting things going on as well.

The most interesting packaging is WMTW (Channel 8, the Hearst-Argyle-owned ABC affiliate), with a grid on its weather Web page that can be customized to put the seven-day forecast up top and the alerts at the bottom, or in whatever arrangement you like; 18 different ways to slice-and-dice weather information are offered up. (The other stations have the standard choices of radar and other maps, as well as graphical, text, and video forecasts.)

Now, the hype. Everybody advertises "Doppler radar," even though you don't want any other kind of radar for weather-forecasting purposes; Doppler (technically, pulse-Doppler) is the only type of radar that shows not only a storm's velocity and direction, but also its intensity and precipitation rate.

In the Midwest, weather-radar competitions are truly ridiculous, with some stations even having 3-D imagery showing not only precipitation, wind speed, and direction, but also the altitudes at which the clouds are located and how they are moving — it can be an amazing lesson in how tornados form.

We have begun this sort of hype, though; WGME (Channel 13, the Sinclair-owned CBS affiliate) has "Doppler HD," which, it must be said, is not high-definition in the standard TV sense. Rather, it's an assembly of radar data set up so meteorologists can zoom in and out visually during their presentations.

And then there's the useful stuff. WMTW has "Interactive Radar," which lays the radar picture over a satellite photo of the ground, so you can zoom in on any location you like around the country and see what's happening there in near-real time (it's roughly a 10-minute delay).

They all list storm-related closings on their Web sites, but WMTW enhances the service with e-mail alerts; WCSH (Channel 6, the Gannett-owned NBC affiliate) does even better, offering both e-mail and text alerts to mobile phones. (My wife works in a school, and last Friday, her school-staff phone tree was faster than the WCSH text alert, but only by a few minutes.)

WGME and WMTW have a "desktop weather application" that you can run on your computer. It shows real-time weather conditions for your zip code (saving you the trouble of looking out the window), allows you to watch streaming news and weather updates, and provides severe-weather alerts on demand. Both stations' services are identical, which is not surprising, given that they're provided by the same company (myweather.net). In the process of downloading the program, you can sign up for e-mail alerts for various weather advisories (issued by the National Weather Service).

For the real die-hards, though, WCSH has gone fully overboard, digitally broadcasting "News Center Weather Plus," though its current incarnation will end with the year (because NBC bought the Weather Channel). For the next couple weeks, the 24-hour weather forecasts will continue, with local current-conditions displays and five-day forecasts for individual Maine towns, as well as statewide forecasts, local radar, and national displays. WCSH general manager Steve Thaxton says he has not yet decided whether to continue the service in some form into 2009.

Letter to the editor of American Journalism Review

Published in American Journalism Review, December 2008-January 2009

Philip Meyer's "The Elite Newspaper of the Future" (October/November) was very enlightening to me, but perhaps not in the way he intended. I absolutely agree with his assessment that "the newspapers that survive will probably [have] some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web." And I agree that "the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it." Newspapers' core audiences will indeed be "the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie" people who "demand ... quality" that goes beyond "stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts."

But rather than being earthshaking in itself, I would argue that his apparently recent realization of these truths of the modern media market tells us a great deal about what has gone wrong in the mainstream media. Meyer's ideas could have been taken verbatim from the editorial and business plans of any of the hundreds of alternative newspapers around the country – many of which have been flourishing for years.

Now comes Meyer, saying the work we in the alternative press have been doing for years is the "future," even the "elite"! The daily papers that have turned up their noses at our work may now not only acknowledge our existence, but deign to follow our lead in search of what we already have: a sustainable model with extremely high print readership and rapidly growing audiences online!

Which is all by way of saying Meyer is absolutely correct – just incomplete. And in the name of completeness, I want to note that his piece does one disservice to leaders of daily newspapers, by suggesting the solution is a matter of developing "hybrid content." Not quite. The solution, for many of you, is figuring out what is actually happening in the communities you wish to serve, and how to reach people who have long since given up on you. But you'll have to compete with those of us who are already doing it.

Jeff Inglis
Managing editor
Portland Phoenix
Portland, Maine