It Takes a Movement 2

Jim Wallis, getting closer to making an appeal for local manifestations of the movement … and he won’t go far enough for me until he pleads with Christians to raise up the banner of justice in the context of the local church, but I see here a move away from advocating through the halls of power and turning back to the people.

What do you see? Be civil.

It’s time for this president to find the political equivalent of the black church’s call and response. He needs to be engaged with the movement that elected him, over the heads of the special interests and elites that now run this country, and even over the heads of Congress and their leaders from both parties. We need presidential leadership that can break through the 24-hour news cycle and connect directly with voters even when he isn’t immediately looking for their votes. It would require meeting with key constituency leaders and groups, including the faith community, not just to get their support for the White House political agenda, but to actually help shape a deeper social agenda and strategy. Part of this requires a change in perspective — to see an independent social movement on the outside as necessary and worth supporting (i.e. calling for it), rather than seeing an independent social movement as a threat or as constituencies that must be appeased or simply mobilized for e-mail campaigns on behalf of the administration’s agenda. Most White Houses have been incapable of a wider and deeper perspective, but that is what we need from the Obama administration.

Real social movements also reject the rigid partisanship that has come to dominate Washington. They stick to their core principles and realize they have neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, but rather, permanent issues. The kind of social movement we now need will not focus on Democratic or Republican victories in the next election cycle, but in finding allies wherever they can for a set of moral principles and issues.

Such presidential leadership would, of course, seem a very risky strategy — which many or even most White House aides will likely tell the President.  But if Obama’s own “calling” is to really lead the change we can truly believe in, he might come to see that a bolder leadership style is the best, or even only, way to accomplish that vision; or at least give it the best shot he possibly can.

Just as Lincoln needed Frederick Douglass, Roosevelt needed a pressuring labor movement. And just as Kennedy and Johnson needed King and the black-church led civil rights movement, I believe that Barack Obama now needs the kind of social movement that is always necessary to make real change in Washington. He can’t do this by himself, which he must painfully realize by now.