by Van Jones
The grassroots—led by OFA—could have unleashed a powerful response, by calling for counterrallies and counter demonstrations all across the country.
The basis for a massive response was obvious: opposing the angry, disrespectful vitriol of the Tea Party, which was abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans.
Progressive activists could have used the poisonous negativity of the Tea Party against it, calling for national unity under the slogans “Hope, Not Hate” and “One Nation, Indivisible.” Hundreds of rallies could have explicitly underscored the patriotic value of standing together against the fear-mongers who were seeking to divide America in such an ugly way. After all, E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) is a national slogan, antithetical to the alarmism and divisiveness that already had become the Tea Party’s calling card. Other slogans could have been used to rally the base, including “Yes, We STILL Can” and “We Are One” (the name of the concert that proceeded Obama’s inauguration).
OFA still had 13 million names in its database. Even by mid-September, the Tea Party collectively had probably mobilized fewer than 250,000 people in public demonstrations. The hope-roots had the capacity to respond by putting millions of peaceful people in the streets.
A “thunder on the left” strategy would have fired up the base, given the media something exciting to cover, and instantly eclipsed the Tea Party. The contrast in numbers, dwarfing the tiny Tea Party marches, would have been stunning and undeniable. Marches and protests are the bread and butter of the left, and yet there was never even an attempt to launch public mobilizations to put the last election’s losers back in their place.
The reason for this failure is hard to admit: the forces that ordinarily call and participate in big demonstrations, including myself, had largely gotten pulled into the vortex in Washington. Those pushing for change believed that the levers of power were now in the hands of Washington Democrats; under the new administration, extraordinary amounts of energy were used to navigate the terrain of the federal government.
At the worst possible time, the organizers of the people seemed to forget the power of the people. It takes passion and emotion to beat passion and emotion. It takes savvy theatrics to beat savvy theatrics. It takes a movement in the streets to beat a movement in the streets. We surrendered this territory and paid a price.
BIG MISTAKE NO. 5: NO MASS RALLIES AND CONCERTS FOR HEALTHCARE REFORM
Even if a direct response to the Tea Party’s assault did not give rise to counterdemonstrations, there were other opportunities for mass mobilizations: mainly to win healthcare reform. Instead, all attention was focused on sausage-making in Washington, not on movement-making in the heartland. As the committee process became more Byzantine, and as the debates around the public option ground on, the progressive base got increasingly bewildered and demoralized.
Meanwhile, the Tea Party continued to grow in intensity, as it pivoted from protest to political elections. In January 2010, a Tea Party candidate took the late U.S. senator Ted Kennedy’s seat—breaking the Democrats’ filibuster-proof hold on the Senate.
In the spring, the Democrats finally passed a healthcare bill. Democrats won the vote by a parliamentary maneuver, but polls showed that they lost the public debate. Along the way, they also had lost any sense of being borne along by a popular movement. There could have been a dozen major rallies and benefit concerts in strategically important congressional districts. Millions of President Obama supporters could have collected hundreds of thousands of signatures and millions of dollars worth of donations at supermarkets, shopping centers, and farmers’ markets. They could have held up huge signs at major intersections and on overpasses during rush hour traffic, calling on drivers to honk their horns in solidarity. Organizers could have enlisted major celebrities to speak up for healthcare legislation and speak out against the rising tide of bitterness and intolerance. Beyoncé Knowles could have come out on stage with a sick child or a mother without insurance and moved the nation to tears and action.
OFA, Moveon.org, ColorOfChange.org, and other online dynamos could have declared national days of action on healthcare. The DNC could have converted the OFA website into a site to support collaborations, letting thousands of people co-organize their own rallies, conferences, or conversations. They could have used it to say, “We want a million people out in support of the president’s proposal.” The next week there should have been rallies all across the country.
It was obvious that Democrats were in real danger of losing their majority in Congress. The backlash proved a serious threat to the agenda of progress. The base was, by that point, almost completely depressed, demobilized, and intimidated by the right-wing juggernaut.
BIG MISTAKE NO. 6: NO SPANKS FOR THE BANKS
By spring of 2010, the healthcare battle was over. The new season offered a fresh opportunity for the White House and the old hope-and-change coalition to get back some of its momentum. Next on the Democrats’ to-do list was Wall Street reform—a chance to continue repairing the economy, while educating the public about what was really wrong with the country.
In many ways, financial regulatory reform presented an ideal opportunity for the hope-and-changers to take back the narrative. “We are suffering because Wall Street is abusing and abandoning Main Street,” not because spendthrift liberals were trying to take over the economy and bankrupt the government. After the grueling healthcare war, Wall Street reform presented the first opportunity for a major restart and repositioning.
The problem was that Democratic proposals for financial regulatory reform were highly technical, weaker than needed, and just plain boring. Wall Street was flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions, putting the kibosh on any serious reform effort. The tendency of establishment Democrats was to focus narrowly on what it would take to avoid the next financial crisis, rather than using the moment to address the damage from the current one.
The grassroots might have been able to fix that had it moved quickly. To take advantage of the immediate opportunity, progressives needed to converge on a national set of demands and goals. The challenges were to articulate smart solutions in community-friendly language and use those proposals to propel truly broad-scale organizing—as opposed to timid lobbying efforts and building coalitions of the usual suspects in Washington, DC. Independent of the White House, the grassroots had a shot at crystallizing and energizing a center-left coalition, which could have become a new center of gravity for an independent politics of hope and change.
Banks were mistreating people, evicting American families from their homes at record rates and starving American businesses of capital, while sitting on piles of taxpayer cash. A broad cross-section of Americans could have been brought together to insist that giant financial institutions agree to help the people—or be forced to help them—since the banks were still in existence only because the people saved them. This people-centered approach to Wall Street reform and redress would have fired up the grassroots. It also would have created an alternative to the anti-government populism of the Tea Party. Perhaps with the Tea Party also upset about the bank bailout, such a proposition could have transcended the “left versus right” split and occurred to the public as a simple case of “right versus wrong.”
Sub-demands could have appealed to different constituencies. A Wall Street reform and redress coalition could have proposed:
• Serious foreclosure and mortgage relief (as championed by antipoverty, religious, immigrants’ rights, and civil rights groups).
• Significant increase in low-interest student loans, coupled with debt relief for recent graduates (as championed by national student associations, historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, etc.).
• More money for U.S. small businesses (as championed by local chambers of commerce and national small business associations).
• Restoration of “Recession and Depression Protections,” for example, reinstat
ing the Glass-Steagall Act, which was supposed to keep banks from gambling so recklessly (as championed by practically all educated and disinterested observers).
• More support for community banks (building off the momentum of Arianna Huffington’s “Move Your Money” campaign).
• More money for green and clean energy projects, restating the need for the climate legislation’s Green Bank (as championed by environmentalists, green jobs advocates, and the clean tech community).
• Reinvention and reinvigoration of the Community Reinvestment Act (as championed by community economic development experts).
• Protection against predatory payday lenders (as championed by civil rights and antipoverty forces).
Once established, such a coalition could then have gone to a deeper root of the problem and demanded a break-up of the mega-banks to end their status as “too big to fail.”
Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker (under Reagan) had an elegant proposal. Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times described it in the following way:
Glass-Steagall was watered down over the years and finally revoked in 1999. In the Volcker resurrection, commercial banks would take deposits, manage the nation’s payments system, make standard loans, and even trade securities for their customers—just not for themselves. The government, in return, would rescue banks that fail. On the other side of the wall, investment houses would be free to buy and sell securities for their own accounts, borrowing to leverage these trades, and thus multiplying the profits and the risks. Being separated from banks, the investment houses would no longer have access to federally insured deposits to finance this trading. If one failed, the government would supervise an orderly liquidation. None would be too big to fail—a designation that could arise for a handful of institutions under the administration’s proposal.
From the left, famed economist Joseph Stiglitz agreed with Volcker, saying that the process of briefly taking over banks then selling them back to investors would be much less costly for taxpayers. Robert Reich—another liberal voice on the economy—has called for $100 billion in assets to be the limit for banks, because many studies show that amount to be the limit for efficiencies of scale.
Thomas Hoenig, former president of Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, argued that authorities must set up a procedure that would allow big, nonbank financial firms to be temporarily taken over by the government. Regulators would then replace management, wipe out shareholders, and seek to sell the cleansed institution back into private ownership.
Whether such a hard-hitting solution was possible, we will never know. No serious, national coalition emerged to fight for it.
One could have. The unifying demand was obvious: Obama should make the big banks invest in America and create jobs. Their recklessness caused the crisis, but they were still choking off credit to American enterprises and smothering America’s middle classes with an impossible debt burden. Holding them accountable could have had immediate heartland appeal. After all, the American people had rescued the banks through the bailouts in 2008. Afterward, the banks needed to bail out the American people. In 2010, it should have been Main Street’s turn.
But the moment to build a massive coalition, again, was lost. Despite noble efforts by some street-level activists and Washington reformers, such as Elizabeth Warren, the Wall Street reform effort did not become a vehicle that captured and channeled the frustrations of millions of ordinary people. The bill that passed was a good one—much better than what was originally proposed. But it fell far short of reining in the most serious problems in our financial sector. And the process did little or nothing to reenergize the broader movement for hope and change.
BIG MISTAKE NO. 7: ENVIROS SLIP AFTER THE OIL SPILL
As activists missed the chance to reignite a grassroots movement to battle the economic calamity, they also missed a chance to mobilize in response to ecological catastrophe.
About a month after President Obama signed healthcare reform into law, an oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The April 20, 2010, explosion of Deepwater Horizon, leased by oil and gas giant BP, killed eleven men who had been working on the platform and injured seventeen others. The oil spill flowed for three months, releasing about 4.9 million barrels—205.8 million gallons—before it was capped July 15, 2010. The event was a nightmare of epic proportions for the nation as a whole—the biggest accidental oil spill in U.S. history. For the families, small businesses, and eco-systems that are still devastated, the suffering has been life changing.
This calamity came on the heels of the Upper Big Branch mining disaster, which occurred about one thousand feet underground at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The April 5, 2010, event was the worst mining accident in the United States since 1970, leaving twenty-nine out of thirty-one miners dead.
Tragedies on this scale should lead to a national rethinking of our reliance on fossil fuels. Dirty energy is dangerous, even when there is no oil spill or mine explosion; had all of that oil “safely” reached American refineries and vehicles, it still would have done damage—to the lungs of children living near refineries and freeways and to an atmosphere already overburdened with carbon pollution. Resuming the fight for planet-saving climate solutions would have been one way to honor those who died.
This would have been an important step, because clean energy and climate legislation was dead in the water. In June of 2009, the House of Representatives had approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) by a vote of 219–212. The bill was also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill, named for its authors, U.S. representatives Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts. ACES/Waxman-Markey would have established a carbon emissions trading plan similar to the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EUETS). The program promised to significantly reduce the amount of planet-baking carbon that Americans dump into the atmosphere.
Passage in the House was a hard-won victory, pulled off against ferocious opposition from the GOP and big polluters. The historic win was the result of tenacious work by courageous House members and White House staffers, plus environmentalists and green jobs advocates across the country. It was the first time a chamber of Congress had ever voted on a measure to control carbon pollution.
But the measure stalled in the Senate. The big polluters, including the now-infamous Koch brothers, had spent millions to defeat the bill. The seemingly endless healthcare fight had left many supportive Congress members feeling drained. Ironically, just months before the disasters, President Obama had spoken favorably about the need for more offshore oil exploration, insisting that improved technology made the practice safe.
Even when those predictions literally blew up and collapsed into the ocean, there were no significant protests by environmentalists to insist that Obama reverse his policy or revive cap-and-trade legislation. It was a prime moment for a major presidential address and a national recommitment to the themes on which the president ran. But such a course would have run afoul of the White House strategy for accommodating Big Oil’s “drill, baby, drill” demands. As a result, official administrative responses seemed muted, falling short of the moment.
The fact that the environmental movement and the progressive movement were both largely silent during that whole period represents a huge failing, politically and morally. If George W. Bush or John McCain had been president during an oil spill of this magnitude, environmentalists would have protested coast to coast, and congressional Democrats would have insisted on serious reform.
The opportunity, indeed, the mandate, to put a low-carbon economy back on the table had presented itself dramatically. There are few moments when the world is riveted by a cause, when the public and political elites might listen to arguments afresh. It is political malpractice for social-change advocates not to seize those moments. The months of Democratic control of Congress were winding down; a large enough outcry might have won more safety measures for oil and coal e
xploration, in addition to a clean energy manufacturing agreement or a green bank to finance clean energy production. A determined effort spearheaded by environmental groups with multimillion-dollar budgets might have led to some serious legislation in the 111th Congress, even a mandatory clean energy goal for the nation. Such a push would have been the right thing to do, offering immediate protection for today’s energy workers and opening the door to a brighter energy future for all.
But the window for action closed.
In the end, Congress did not pass a single piece of truly groundbreaking legislation in the wake of the disasters. There was not even a serious uptick in eco-activism. In fact, more than a year would pass before significant environmental protests surfaced on any issue. (In summer and autumn of 2011, Native American groups, climate champion Bill McKibben, young crusaders from 350.org, and other environmentalists helped disrupt plans for the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have brought super-dirty oil from the Canadian tar sands right through America’s heartland.)
Looking back, that failure highlighted a lack of healthy independence on the part of the environmental community. It mirrored a similar weakness throughout the progressive movement. People were so enthralled with Obama that very few progressive leaders, organizations, or institutions were willing to challenge him publicly, even when the health of the planet was at stake. I include myself in that indictment.
SUMMARY: GRASSROOTS HAD WRONG THEORY OF THE PRESIDENCY
The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. OFA did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.