Reply #10: Activism should be smart and tenacious [View All]

Those issues aren't going to get sorted just by who occupies the Oval Office. Putting a Democrat in is a start. It allows for possibilties. Public demand..unrelenting majority demand over a period of years is what can make them happen. Nothing short of that is going to work. Now, as a nation we have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not easy, but it has to happen and that's what grassroots are good for, much more so than national electoral politics. We need a lean and pointed set of objectives and grassroots organization for the issues and then the issues have to be taken to the people and to sympathetic media. Demand side, not supply side marketing of causes is what will carry the day. You can't just insist that politicians support career-ending, unpopular causes. If they're worthy enough, most of them can be popularized. You have to choose your causes for that. We've been talking about outsourcing of jobs for a while now, but it's only recently that the media caught on and now it's a hot issue, as it should be.

The issues haven't been as crystal clear as they are now for 30 years. It sounds as though Dean and maybe some Clark people are going to try to do this and that together with kicking some Republicans out of office, whether it be for Democrats or, on the more local level, other progressive parties and we might see some progress. We just have to stop eating our own and hang together, the way the right has done.