Change beyond the ballot

Primary season sure is exciting, but history tells us that you can't just vote for change.

By Laura Flanders

Read more: George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ronald Reagan, White House, Elections, Opinion, Martin Luther King Jr., MoveOn.org, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Feb. 8, 2008 | The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating and the media loves it. If the ratings records set by the recent political debates are any indication, the ongoing primary battle may yet save cable TV. Super Tuesday -- the night that was supposed to wrap everything up -- didn't (for either party). Clearly, this extended nomination contest is getting people excited, but will that excitement translate into substantive change -- for Democrats in particular? The past offers some hard-knocks lessons worth thinking about.

Give this long primary season credit: It has, at least, turned that overused word "change" from a bumper slogan pooh-poohed by all knowledgeable pundits into a fact-based phenomenon. In the closest thing the nation has seen to a countrywide primary, first-term Sen. Barack Obama overcame Hillary Clinton's double-digit leads in major states and national polls to win a majority of states on Feb. 5 and draw into a tight battle over the delegate count. The two candidates closed out the evening with their spinmeisters already talking up Beltway Tuesday -- the next catchphrase-friendly multiple-primary day -- while promising more debates. Now, their operatives are off to Ohio for a March 4 primary that everyone assumes will be crucial.

The chance to be seen and heard in more than just a handful of quirky early-primary states has already made a striking difference for the Illinois senator, who was the clear underdog when he entered the race. "What was a whisper has turned into a chorus," Obama told his hometown crowd in Chicago on Tuesday night.

But a whisper, many would like to know, of what? For more than 30 years, Democratic voters like those pouring out of their homes to get involved this primary season have doggedly trooped to their polling places with no expectation of having an actual impact. Young voters, poor voters, urban voters, antiwar voters, women, people of color, lesbian and gay (LGBT) folk, immigrants, the Democratic Party's so-called base -- would turn out -- and then be sent home. Come the general election, Democratic candidates typically tacked right, ignoring those reliable old blue-base voters. Thanks to the tyranny of the two-party system, they could remain confident that the base wasn't going to defect to the -- gasp! -- ever-more rightward-tacking GOP. And mostly, they were on the mark.

In normal times, there was only one party season when anyone wanted to hear from Democratic base-dwellers -- this one. Primaries are the one period in the election cycle when contenders suddenly seek to curry favor with the party's most activist -- and progressive -- part. That's one reason a primary season this long is significant; but, for those voters, will it make any difference at the level of policy? The most positive answer is perhaps.

Fueled by frustration with the way the party's been conducting its business and propelled by disgust at the policies of George W. Bush, base-level party activists, with help from liberal bloggers and others, have already pulled off an organizing feat that's changed the face of the presidential race. Helped by online databases and social-networking software, volunteers can have new impact. Unpaid volunteers have been building attendance at local meetings through their own voter-initiated Web sites in red and blue states alike. The most significant result so far has been the record turnout. Democratic turnout was up 100 percent in Iowa and South Carolina, while Georgia witnessed its biggest turnout in a primary since 1992.

The presence of a nominee who was once himself a grassroots organizer and recognizes the value of such work, state by state, has had its own transformative effect. Altogether, grassroots organizers have made the candidacy of Obama, at one time a long-shot nominee, more than viable. And that has pushed party veteran Clinton, whose campaign style is naturally more top-down and disciplined, to invest her resources heavily in the "field." Before Tuesday, the candidates were both openly competing for the label "grass-roots." "We've put together a grass-roots campaign," Hillary Clinton told a rally the Friday before Super Tuesday. "We will call 1 million Californians this weekend." Obama's Northern California spokesperson told reporters: "We are running the biggest field campaign in California since Robert Kennedy in '68."

With the campaign continuing, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton must still compete for local support and influential endorsements. And, at the state level, that's good news for progressives. Party flacks and the traditional "black and blue" organizing machines of black churches and labor unions are no longer influential enough to turn out sufficient numbers of voters. Expanding their reach, both campaigns have been delving into nontraditional territory for community support. In South Carolina, the Obama campaign teamed up with barbers and the owners of beauty salons. The candidates are also competing for support from ethnic groups they never prioritized before -- Latinos, Asians and Native Americans -- and everyone's competing over women and youth.

"This is a moment unlike any we've ever known," Obama said in his Super Tuesday night speech. In spirit, he may turn out to be right, but there are obvious echoes from the past. This is not the first time that the Democratic Party has seen an upsurge in turnout, a newly expanded electorate, and a new generation of trained and talented organizers coming on the scene. In fact, 2008 bears a haunting resemblance to 1964, the last time the party's political maps were remade.

Keelan Sanders is executive director of the Mississippi Democratic Party in Jackson. Until recently, Sanders was the only person on its payroll, and the party's "headquarters" (a renovated family home on a residential street) was open only part of the time; no presidential candidate ever came to visit. In 2004, isolated Democratic voters paid out of their own pocket to produce Kerry/Edwards yard signs. Today, thanks to an investment of funds from the Democratic National Committee, Sanders has a full-time staff -- a beneficiary of DNC chair Howard Dean's drive to revitalize the party in all 50 states. When I asked him why he stuck with the party so long, solo, Sanders responded quick as a flash: "Because of my grandmother."

Sanders' grandmother was a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 1964, she risked her life to register African-American voters in the Deep South; then, she carpooled her way to Atlantic City, N.J., as a Freedom Party delegate in hopes of taking a seat from Mississippi's all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. There, at the height of the civil rights era, she and the vast majority of Freedom Party delegates were locked out.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council (SNCC) organizer Hollis Watkins, who still lives in Mississippi, remembers believing what he'd been told -- if black people registered enough voters, they'd be given a chance to unseat the state's pro-segregation delegation. "It was like being told to scale the walls to the roof of a building on fire, and doing it, and then realizing there were no supporting beams beneath our feet," Watkins told me in 2006. "We wanted to believe it, we believed it, but we were naive."

Next page: Real change relies on movements like the one currently forming just beyond our sight