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Over the last few week or so, plenty of other blogs in the progressive blogosphere have posted "must read" links to two fairly old articles about Obama. Both were pieces I hadn't seen before, but it has been a busy week, and until today I haven't had the time to sit down and give them the attention I'd been told they deserve.

Then I read this post from Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings and realized I couldn't wait any longer.

After detailing some of Obama's recent moves in the Senate (the innovative Iraq bill and the anti-voter suppression law are just two examples), she turns to the two linked articles themselves. First the excerpt, and then her reaction:

Obama, from the Chicago Reader, December 8, 1995:

"The political debate is now so skewed, so limited, so distorted," said Obama. "People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change. "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer," he wondered, "as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.

"The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.

"Now we have to take this same language--these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society. Let's talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more."

Now Hilzoy:

I have always had the sense that Obama is up to something very interesting -- a political experiment whose exact nature I'm not completely clear on, but that certainly includes an attempt to enlarge our national debate while consistently appealing to the better angels of our nature, and to do so not by talking about e.g. our need for values, but by enacting them. It has also always seemed to me that he is quite clear on the difficulty of what he's doing, but thinks it's worth the attempt. These articles clarified it, and him.

I'm not sure I could possibly agree with her more.

The thing about Obama is that everything about what he does - his choice of language, his demeanor, his choice of issues - it all seems deliberate. Purposeful. Chosen with great care and foresight. And yes, at the same time, authentic. Most importantly, none of it ever has seemed to me to be accidental. It has always seemed to me to be aimed at something very specific, very concrete, and most importantly, very long term.

This is why, to be honest, I've felt since his DNC keynote speech that he has the potential to be a transformative political figure. He knows the game he is playing. His methods are deliberate, and they are designed with an express purpose: to take the structure that the right has built, transform it, and move us beyond the false choices of the 1970's, Baby Boomer-centric identity-oriented politics we've been laboring under for far too long. From the beginning, I've felt that he's quite consciously working to create the very same sort of reconstructive politics that Stephen Skowronek demonstrated are at the heart of political realignments in this country.

Here's more from the same article:

Obama thinks elected officials could do much to overcome the political paralysis of the nation's black communities. He thinks they could lead their communities out of twin culs-de-sac: the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation--which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks to "move up, get rich, and move out"--and the equally impractical politics of black rage and black nationalism--which exhorts but does not organize ordinary folks or create realistic agendas for change.

Obama, whose political vision was nurtured by his work in the 80s as an organizer in the far-south-side communities of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens, proposes a third alternative. Not new to Chicago--which is the birthplace of community organizing--but unusual in electoral politics, his proposal calls for organizing ordinary citizens into bottom-up democracies that create their own strategies, programs, and campaigns and that forge alliances with other disaffected Americans. Obama thinks elected officials--even a state senator--can play a critical catalytic role in this rebuilding[...]

What makes Obama different from other progressive politicians is that he doesn't just want to create and support progressive programs; he wants to mobilize the people to create their own. He wants to stand politics on its head, empowering citizens by bringing together the churches and businesses and banks, scornful grandmothers and angry young. Mostly he's running to fill a political and moral vacuum. He says he's tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up--at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit--and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change.

Remember now-Governor Deval Patrick's "Together We Can," bottom up, grassroots campaign this past fall in Massachusetts? That was Obama's playbook, run by many of Obama's own people. Back in 1995 this may have just been a theory, but today it has been put to the test; and it doesn't just work, it works brilliantly. Will it translate to the national level? I don't know. But I do know that we are all about to find out.

The second article is one Obama wrote himself. "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City" was first published in the the Fall of 1988 when he was still a Harvard Law student. First an excerpt, then some thoughts:

In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.

This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education cam paigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to commu nity needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequi sites of any successful self-help initiative.

One of the criticisms I frequently hear from the left about Obama is that he can be too "Clintonian," criticizing both the right and the left in an effort to find a "false" third way. Most of the time, I hear that his effort cannot possibly be genuine, that a "real" Democrat or a "real" progressive wouldn't feel the need to criticize his own people, and that as a result, it must all be a political ploy. Well, if it is, it is one he has used his entire life, even when his primary mission was organizing communities, not asking them for their votes. It may be deliberate, but it is not disingenuous. Unless, of course, you're willing to believe that someone would give up a Supreme Court clerkship to work on Chicago's South Side as apart of a great political ploy.

That said, it is quite clear that he has always been a student of politics. Now that I know he was a polisci major as an undergrad, it all makes much more sense. Anyway, here's one example of what I'm talking about:

Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches success fully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority.

This is a theme that he returns to over and over again, including in his new book. Rather than simply complain about what his political opponents have done, he has worked to figure out how to both copy and improve on their methods and techniques.

You don't reorient politics by rejecting the past. The momentum of history is simply far too great to overcome. Instead, you transform the past through your own actions, taking the work of others, reinterpreting and re-imagining it to make it your own.

An example, inspired by EJ Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics ...

Neo-conservatism worked as an ideology precisely because it was born out of liberalism. It could destroy the liberal order because it came from within it. It understood both its strengths and its weaknesses, using the former to its advantage against the later.

Welfare programs, we must never forget, began as family assistance programs. From the time of FDR forward, the language of "family values" was at their very center. But as history moved, and as the world changed, the paradigm liberalism had built began to encounter tensions it could no longer resolve. The well meaning efforts of the New Deal and the Great Society began to hurt some of the very same people they were designed to help. And as they did, they lost their connection to that underlying language of values. With the results of the programs in dispute, the underlying agreement about the values they were designed to serve could no longer hold.

The neo-cons of the 1950s and 1960s saw this far earlier than anyone else. Although foreign policy became their calling card, it was this disconnect between liberal institutions and liberal values that first set them on their way. Think Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: the Case for National Action, and you'll see what I mean.

Although Moynihan would quickly leave his new neo-conservative brethren behind, as they moved forward they took the language of values liberals had for so long employed and made it their own. If the programs designed to promote certain values weren't working, the problem was greater than failed policy. The values, they argued, couldn't be promoted by government at all. Only by removing government from the equation, by shrinking it and enlarging the private sphere, could those same values ever truly take hold. Thus... "government isn't the solution to our problems; government is the problem."

It was only because liberalism was failing to promote its own values that they could be deployed against them. And worse, it was only because liberalism didn't fight this theft that the right was able to make people believe that these values had always been their own.

Which brings me full circle to the game Obama is playing. He clearly understands this. The endless citations of what the religious right was doing are no accident. The claims of false choices and betrayed values are not happening by chance. I've long suspected this might be true, but then wondered... am I just projecting my hopes onto someone I barely know? But here, in his own words, more than a decade ago.... its all there.

Now to be clear, I have absolutely no idea if he will be able to pull this off. Nor, to be honest, do I have any idea if, should he pull it off, he will make a good president. But I have no doubt that I am more than willing to take a chance and find out. Because yes, I am sick and tired of top down politics. I am sick and tired of being forced to fight within the political framework created by my parents' generation. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Pro-business. Pro-environment. Pro-gun. Pro gun control. My ethnicity. Your ethnicity. My race. Your race. My gender. Your gender. My identity. Your identity. And on and on and on...

Our choices are only so narrow if we choose to make them so. We can be, and we have been, so much more.

At its core, leadership is not about what you can get other people to do for you; it is about what you can get people to do for themselves. Call on their better angels and they will respond. It is not too late... It is never too late...

UPDATE: I got a request or two for Obama's DNC speech. For those who haven't seen the moment that launched this man into the stratosphere, here you go. It took him about 3 minutes to dial it in, and by 5 minutes he had the room locked. And by half way through? He had my jaw on the living room floor.

If you only have time for one, head straight to Part II. And if it is more limited than that, the real magic starts 2 minutes in.

Part I:

Part II:

Think that was good? Imagine what it would have sounded like if he had been talking about himself instead of John Kerry. Assuming, of course, that he wasn't.