More on Obama’s Secret Weapon
Todd Gitlin on how Obama must use his list of 13 million names and e-mail addresses - he needs to deploy his “batallions” to “resist the default privatism of American life” in order to “muscle reforms through”:
Roosevelt had radio; Obama has, in addition, both the Web and the stadium. He can deploy his supporters to muscle reforms through. He can fill arenas, get supporters to bombard Congress with phone calls to break filibusters, and otherwise stir them to action—to overcome Big Pharma’s obstruction of a new health insurance system, say, or the fossil fuel industry’s objections to cap-and-trade emissions-cutting policies. He can pit them against the right-wing media who will surely pounce on his every mistake. He needs to keep them pumped up to resist the default privatism of American life, the cynical inertia, passivity, even paralysis, of the public will. He must “fire up” his big battalions and regularly keep them “fired up” if he is to deliver results. Several times since his moment of triumph, he has said in just about so many words that he intends to keep doing just that.
But didn’t FDR also have television, on which he got in 1929 to tell the nation the stock market crashed because of Wall Street’s greed?
(Via Abe Greenwald.)
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