Progressives Need to Renew Advocacy After Obama Election

(reprinted with permission of author)

Progressives Need to Renew Advocacy After Obama Election

By Fran Quigley

On the night he was elected President, Barack Obama told an international television audience and 200,000 giddy supporters gathered at Chicago’s Grant Park, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.”

Down in the midst of the Grant Park crowd, Dan Pearson was taking the President-elect at his word. Pearson and others associated with the peace and justice advocacy group Voices for Creative Nonviolence were busily handing out leaflets about Camp Hope, a nineteen-day presence from January 1st to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at Hyde Park near Obama’s home.

Camp Hope’s vigil and nightly presentations are billed as a “Countdown to Change,” both a celebration of Obama’s historic victory and a recommitment to the positive messages featured in the campaign. “When I would say, ‘Here is something you can do to make a difference after the election,’ many people at Grant Park seemed excited by the opportunity,” Pearson says.

Camp Hope’s theme is a request that Obama take progressive action immediately upon taking office. Specifically, activists will be calling for Obama to:

· Cease combat operations in Iraq and withdraw 6,000 troops per month

· Suspend deportations of immigrants and end raids at workplaces

· Take all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and work to end nuclear weapons altogether

· Submit the Kyoto Protocol to Congress for ratification

· Issue a 90-day moratorium on all housing foreclosures

· Close Guantanamo Bay and switch detainee proceedings from military tribunals to the U.S. court system

· Establish commissions to develop universal health care and full-employment policies

· Announce a diplomatic initiative to end violent actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Some of the requests are firmly rooted in Obama’s campaign promises, and some represent a hopeful extension of Obama’s rhetoric. But all are key components of change that has meaning beyond symbolic reassurance that better days are ahead. (For more information about the events, see www.camphope2009.org.)

Obama’s appointments of so many Clinton administration alumni worry advocates for non-violence and the poor, who remember too well President Clinton’s bombing of Iraq and dismantling of the safety net for struggling U.S. families. Environmentalists are concerned about the nomination of Sen. Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior. Advocates for gay rights don’t like the elevation of Rev. Rick Warren, who has analogized gay marriage to pedophilia and incest, to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration.

The good news is that none of those people will determine the policies of the Obama administration. And, in many ways, neither will the newly elected man who lives just a few blocks from Camp Hope. For better or worse, elected officials ultimately follow the will of the people. Obama will be no different.

So the children who are the victims of senseless bombings in Afghanistan and the Americans suffering from a lack of affordable healthcare are looking to Obama supporters to keep up the drumbeat for change. If President Obama is to be the transformative leader for peace and justice many of us hope he will be, he will need the support of—and yes, the push from—advocates for the least of our brothers and sisters.

Which is why so many activists will be shivering in the cold at Camp Hope during the first weeks of January. “If you look at history, rarely do politicians by themselves bring about positive changes in the human condition,” Pearson says. “Social movements have a much better record of bringing that about.”



Fran Quigley is an Indianapolis attorney working on local and international poverty issues.
This column is online at
http://www.indystar.com/article/20081230/OPINION12/812300321/1002/OPINION

As I much as I like Obama.. the institutional pressures to conform to the status quo are HUGE. The pressure needs to be kept on.

that status quo regarding healthcare is untenable and not cost effective.

They don't care about the uninsured

of people out there. I'll be there tomorrow and a couple days next week.