Author: Aldon Hynes

Friday, I watched the stock markets plunge, yet again, only to rally, dive, rally and dive with the DOW closing down another 128 points. I read more reports of Gov. Palin trying to cast doubt on Sen. Obama because he had served on a board along side a former member of the Weather Underground as well as a former Nixon aide. The project was funded in large part by a former another Nixon administration official. Then later in the day, I read that a legislative investigation found that Gov. Palin had ‘abused her power by violating Statue 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act’.

Saturday, I wrote a blog post about continued efforts by Republicans to suppress voter registration efforts, and then I stepped away from the computer. I spent the day at a Harvest Festival at the YMCA camp that my seven-year-old daughter, Fiona, had attended last summer. We climbed the climbing wall. We shot arrows in the archery range. Fiona participated in a sack race and painted a pumpkin. Then we all went on a hayride underneath the brightly colored leaves of the trees in Naugatuck State Forest set against a deep blue sky. Other than when my wife Kim painted an Obama Logo on a piece of paper at the Arts and Crafts table, with the word HOPE over it, it was a trip mostly devoid of politics and economics.

I set this backdrop, knowing it will bury my lede, but also feeling that it is important to set a context of a greater perspective. Jon Lebkowsky, Zack Exley and others have been talking a lot about “The New Organizers”. You can see some of the discussion in Jon’s blog post, Zack Exley on “The New Organizers” where he quote’s Zack’s article on Huffington Post, The New Organizers, Part 1: What’s really behind Obama’s ground game.

Win or lose, “The New Organizers” have already transformed thousands of communities - and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation.

Jon writes, “Obama’s people are extending the uses of technology documented in Extreme Democracy“. Unfortunately, the discussion devolves into rehashing strategies of the Kerry campaign, which I believe misses Jon’s point, and more importantly, the opportunity to discuss what we’ve learned and what we still need to focus on, four years later.

So, let’s talk a little bit more about Extreme Democracy, as well as DeanSpace, which is substantially what drew me into the Extreme Democracy discussion.

I became very active in Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign, in part, because his comment about having the power really spoke to me. “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you, is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is, you have the power.” I believed that. I lived that. I helped with DeanSpace, an ad hoc grassroots effort by a bunch of technologists to create a platform to make it easier for anyone to write online and form online organized constituency groups.

Hundreds of online groups and websites formed using DeanSpace. Yet DeanSpace was still too difficult for the average person to use. After the election, it morphed into CivicSpace, an effort to keep alive some of these ideas and broaden it out to the larger audience of other campaigns, non-profits, and anyone that could benefit from some good online organizing.

Yet these days, more and more people have their own blogs. There are strong blogging communities in just about every state covering local politics. For the politically inclined both the Democratic Party and Democracy for America have sites to help groups organize online and some of this was used to help the Obama campaign build its online community. Sites like Ning make it easier for others to set up a community website. Multimedia and mobile blogging is now commonplace. From a technological perspective, many of the goals of DeanSpace and Extreme Democracy have already been achieved.

Yet there is a much bigger issue. At so many rallies, I would hear everyone respond to Gov. Dean saying, “We have the power!” I would look around and wonder how much power people in the crowd were able and willing to wield. I wondered how they would wield it. I’ve seen it carried over into the Obama campaign with people proclaiming, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”. What is this change?

At times, it seems like the change has been in people getting much more effective in their field organizing, in reaching out to family, friends and neighbors of similar political viewpoints and getting them more likely to donate, and hopefully to vote. But is this really making our country better off? Is it promoting open debate in the public sphere?

Are we just seeing more partisan rancor in our political debate as more progressives go to DailyKos and listen to MSNBC, or and more conservatives go to Michelle Malkin and listen to Fox News? Is our media bringing us useful and enlightening information?

Dan Gillmor, who has been a great leader in citizen-media efforts is particularly well known for his quote, “My readers know more than I do.” True, few of us many know as much about establishing an effective field organization to get supporters out as the Obama campaign has.

Yet when it comes to the issues, health care, the economy, and so on, there are many wise supporters out there, that probably know more than operatives for one campaign or another knows, and there are still far to few opportunities to tap into this knowledge and find solutions to our nations problems.

Instead of focusing on building stronger bonds between people of similar political beliefs and getting these people out to vote, we need to be working on a genuine open discussion about what is best for our country. Liberals need to listen closely to hear what valuable insights conservatives might have to offer and conservatives need to do the same.

In Zack’s article, he writes, “Obama must continue to feed and lead the organization they have built - either as president or in opposition. If he doesn’t, then the broader progressive movement needs to figure out how to pick this up.” It is an important point. Too often, people get all tied up in a campaign, supporting one personality or another, and when the campaign is over, drifting off. To the extent that the focus is on field organizing, this is understandable.

However, if we seek to build broader dialog about the issues, then we need, all the more, to figure out how we will do this after November 4th. If we are going to own the power that Gov. Dean proclaimed we all have, if we are truly going to be the change we’ve been waiting for, then we need to start thinking about how we use this power and what sort of change we will be enacting after November 4th.

Yes, technology has changed a lot since Extreme Democracy came out four years ago. The political climate has changed a lot as well. However, the underlying issue of how we engage in a meaningful dialog instead of calcifying current political positions becomes more and more important.

Perhaps, some of that can come in informed discussions about our economic situation. Perhaps some of it can come from visiting a YMCA camp that teaches the importance of everyone working together. Perhaps some of it can even take place in blogs.

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