"Obama and the Left" - what "progressives" are saying... (Brian) by Winston

I still subscribe to The Progressive. It has some good nuggets once in awhile (good toilet reading), and I appreciate its century-old roots...

This month, Ruth Coniff and John Nichols each have an interesting piece on how to "push" Obama "from the left." While they represent largely the advocacy model, it is worth a look, as these are the types of analyses many Obama supporters are using when determining how to engage his administration (in an environment in which these "progressives" are ostensibly "in power" and no longer working with "strategies of the opposition").

A nugget from the Coniff piece:

"We're not so much in protest mode and more in expectations and if-we-build-it-it-will-happen mode," she [Medea Benjamin] says. "Who knows how long we can stay in this mode?"

and from Nichols:

"Obama was nominated and elected in 2008 by progressives, both younger tech-savvy activists who made his candidacy an early favorite of the blogosphere and old-school liberal precinct walkers who saw in his candidacy an extension of the frustrating work of opposing all that was Bush and Cheney. The Senator won the Democratic nomination because he was the only first-tier contender who could say that he had opposed authorizing Bush to take the country to war with Iraq....

These activists formed a base within the campaign and the Democratic Party, centered on but not limited to the Obama team's quasi-open website and blog, www.MyBarackObama.com, which did not always cheerlead for the candidate. In June, when Obama broke with Feingold and other Senate progressives to support Bush's rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senator felt enough heat from his own and independent netroots sites that he was compelled to explain himself, making what Obama described as a "firm pledge" that he would revisit the issue as President to shore up privacy protections....

activists cannot wait for Obama to define the playing field. They must assume that he knows what they know. And this requires a radically different approach than the left took to Southern centrist Democratic Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of his spin-drive communications team.... Don't expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a lesson from rightwing pressure groups...."

"Franklin Roosevelt's example is useful here. After his election in 1932, FDR met with Sidney Hillman and other labor leaders, many of them active Socialists with whom he had worked over the past decade or more. Hillman and his allies arrived with plans they wanted the new President to implement. Roosevelt told them: 'I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.'

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many fundamental issues. He has said as much.

It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it."

So...how do these ideas compare or contrast with recent discussions (on this blog and elsewhere) using a revolutionary democratic lens to examine the question, "What now?" What can we take, and what can we leave on the table? What are the real life implications, now that Obama is in office, of finding allies among these circles with whom we can build dual power? And what are some of the possible unfortuante exigencies or possible obsatcles?