The lessons and limitations of Barack Obama

By Thomas Neumark

It was bound to happen eventually. I’m amazed it’s taken this long. The backlash has started; people are starting to express disappointment with the Obama presidency. For now it is just a few voices but we can only imagine that these voices will spread. As President, Obama will make difficult and unpopular decisions, he will make errors and unforeseen events will knock his administration off track. His popularity will decline. This is not in itself surprising; it is the fate of all major leaders.

Disappointment is not necessarily a bad thing. Disappointment can lead to anger and action and even education. It can also lead to apathy, disgust and withdrawal. The type of disappointment with which America reacts to the Obama presidency will be the deciding factor in the future of the country.

Obama’s campaign for the presidency was, as has been much commented on, highly effective. Huge numbers of people were mobilised, novel techniques were employed and vast sums of cash were raised and spent. Lessons are being still being learned from this campaign and money is still being made. Presumably it represents a template to which political parties in Britain will now aspire. The likelihood of any of them reaching this goal in the near future seems low.

The campaign to get Obama elected was exactly that; a campaign to get Obama elected. It was a modern, sophisticated, well financed get-out-the-vote campaign. Supporters of Obama made phone calls, knocked on doors and held fundraising events. This is what political parties do in Britain. Only Obama’s campaign did it much better.

We should contrast this campaign with the approach used in congregation based community organising which Obama himself was involved in during his time in Chicago and working for Gamaliel. Here the focus is on building up the power of local residents so that they can use this power to influence issues which they define as important. The process of organizing here has as its primary focus empowerment. The ends which follow from this are secondary.

The difference between the two approaches is the difference between building a campaign and building a movement. Now the election is over, and despite some peoples’ best efforts, the energy and enthusiasm around the Obama campaign is slowly dissipating. There is no sense in which Obama is beholden to those in his campaign. There is no way that those in the campaign are now able to insist that he honour this or that pledge. Obama was always clear on this point; in his phrasing he owes nothing to special interests. He uses his enormous email list and moderately popular youtube channel to communicate with his supporters. They sit at their computers and receive this information.

Here the example of Evangelical Christians is an interesting counter-point. Now here was a movement! It was a movement which the Republicans could call upon to help them in their campaigns but it was a movement of its own. A social, religious and political movement with its own committed membership, well organized and focused. It was an empowered movement; worryingly so, for some people. It knew that if it raised its voice politicians listened. Like it or not, they had to.

When Evangelical Christians are disappointed with their political leaders they do not fall into apathy. They demand change of their leaders or they seek new leaders. The same may not be true with Obama. When he fails to deal with the systemic racism in America his black supporters will feel let down, when he continues to keep an enormous occupying force in Iraq his college student supporters will feel let down and when he fails to address the inequalities in power in American workplaces his blue collar supporters will feel let down. But then what?

We might hope that they will organize; that they will build partnerships and alliances and that they will campaign on social justice issues. If they do they will use some of the skills they learned in the Obama campaign but they will have to establish their own organizations to do so. This type of work is not possible within the structures created to elect Obama. If people do not react in this way they will return to the impotent, furious, atomized apathy in which so many of us in Britain and America currently wallow.

One of the inspirations for the style of organizing which Obama employed in those early days in Chicago was Saul Alinsky. He used to say that there are only two important forces; organized money and organized people. We have seldom seen money less organized and more pathetic than it is now. Nonetheless it is far more organized than people. The Obama campaign’s legacy is not yet certain. Only if it leads to greater organization and empowerment of disposed people and communities will we be able to say that change has come to America.