With Obama mounting a charm offensive to neutralize enemies and seduce opponents on the right, it seems as if he is running away from progressive supporters. After he met with hard right commentators, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, the first publication to endorse Jackson years back, asked why progressive supporters are being ignored.
Obama came out of the Saul Alinsky tradition of community organizing. While Alinsky's most famous book was called Reveille For Radicals, by the time I met and worked with him in a real organizing school in 1965, he had become a reformer and pragmatist, quiet on the Vietnam war, solicitous of liberal Democrats and hostile to student movements.
Jesse Jackson remains an organizer more in the big tent Movement tradition. He was preaching rainbow for decades before Obama made the idea jell politically.
PUSH is an acronym for People United to Save Humanity, and is firmly pro-peace and economic justice. Obama has so far been eloquent at tapping movement rhetoric, but he seems distant, even dismissive, of movement culture. Many of his most devoted backers want to know if he is married to promoting change or just shucking and jiving. Will he remain an advocate for transforming the system or a prisoner of power? Will he turn his back on King's commitment to non-violence, or has he already?
Can the Obama generation and the King-Jackson culture, one with an outside-in strategy and the other with an inside-out merge or are they inherently in conflict? Will Barack give his predecessors the props they deserve? Can the fight for change that both Jackson and Obama embrace work on many levels? If Barack can reconcile with Republicans, why not with the long marchers of the Rainbow?
These are questions that will soon be tested in a new administration that gets underway in less than a week.
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo, at Amazon.com) He is directing a film on the Obama campaign. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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