Reporting & Essays - Politics

Local gatherings here and across the nation try to capitalize on the Obama opportunity

By D.D. Delaney

Over the weekend of Dec. 12-15, while the mainstream media picked through a garbage heap of scandal and gossip headlining Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Wall Street rip-off artist Bernie Madoff, nascent politician Caroline Kennedy, and shoe-ducking George Bush, a political story with potentially far-reaching consequences unfolded across America almost completely beneath the radar.

Guided by the Chicago-based Obama for America campaign organization, more than 4,000 “Change-Is-Coming house parties” were hosted by volunteers nationwide to solicit citizens’ opinions on the issues most important for the incoming Administration to address. The results of these polls are to be delivered to the Obama transition team by house party hosts.

The idea was not so different from similar nationwide meet-ups organized last month by MoveOn.org. But the Obama team’s agenda takes a further step, asking house party participants to dedicate themselves to some form of local social action between the weekend of meetings and Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

At www.my.barackobama.com, I counted eighteen of these gatherings scheduled for Hampton Roads alone, excluding several more in Williamsburg.

Among them was a gathering hosted by Ocean View resident Patricia Coale on Dec. 15 at the Pretlow Branch of the Norfolk Public Library. Coale, director of therapeutic recreation at the non-profit Up Center in Norfolk, volunteered for Obama during the campaign and also participated in registering voters. Among all area volunteers who registered more than 100 new voters, she won a drawing for the privilege to have her picture taken with Obama when he appeared at Harbor Park.

She also agrees with two-thirds of Obama campaign volunteers who, when surveyed by the campaign organization after the election, “said they wanted to continue to volunteer.”

But aside from Coale and her husband Streett, none of the five others who attended the Pretlow meeting had worked on the Obama campaign.

“I showed up to put my money where my vote went,” says Kim Burrell, from Wards Corner. “I’m excited about Obama. I’ve never been involved before, but I want to be involved now.”

Burrell’s issue of choice is to “do away with the electoral college system. It was founded in slavery. There’s no reason for it now. It’s not as major as other things we’re looking at, but things would have been different if it had been done differently in (the election of) 2000.”

Diane Maia, a physician at DePaul Medical Center who favors “Medicare for everybody,” learned of Coale’s house party in an email from Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates a single-payer health-care system. “More and more physicians are coming around to this,” she says, because so many patients are without health insurance. “At least with Medicare you get paid something.”

“No other civilized country in the world lets insurance companies run their health care,” says Mary Picardi of Virginia Beach, a retired physician who is now involved with the League of Conservation Voters and the Lynnhaven River Now preservation project.

Picardi wants to press Virginia state legislators to adopt bipartisan legislative redistricting. “The majority in the House does the redistricting” after every census, she says, drawing the maps to favor conservative Republicans. “It can’t be that way. Having districts (which are) community oriented would make a big difference” in passing more generous policies on health care, the environment, and the economy.

Picardi invited group members to join her in Richmond on Jan. 19, Martin Luther King Day, to lobby legislators on the issues which most concern them.

Tray-cee Peterson, of Ocean View, has both a brother and a sister serving in Iraq, “I want to bring them home,” she says. “That’s my primary issue, along with health care.”

But her choice of projects to work on in the community “is to get in on a book drive” to collect and redistribute books at little or no cost to those who can’t afford them.

Coale herself is interested in organic food locally grown in community gardens. Her husband, an educator at the Virginia Zoo, favors conservation of natural areas and eco-systems.

What the reconstituted Obama campaign will make of all such input is uncertain. But it appears that the President-elect is using the energy and enthusiasm generated in his campaign to develop hundreds of thousands of community organizers across America, all serving the common good as defined by his campaign. Foremost on that list, according to a video downloaded from the internet which Coale showed at her meeting, are “energy independence, health care, and a responsible end to the Iraq war.”

“Changing Washington is not enough,” says Obama spokeswoman Mickey Sutton in the video. Real change must come “from the bottom up.” She urges supporters “to clean up a local park, volunteer in a soup kitchen, collect toys for children—commit a day or whatever in yourcommunity to do it.”

But Pretlow group members were uncertain about how to work together as a unit to fulfill a common community project. Under pressure from library staff impatient to close up for the night, they finally decided to form a Yahoo email group to continue the discussion while each will reach out to contacts among friends and colleagues to involve them in the movement for change.

Coale envisions the group meeting on a monthly basis, linking up with participants in other Hampton Roads house parties, and fulfilling the group’s unanimous consensus to seek a town hall meeting with newly elected Second District Congressional Representative Glenn Nye to open a dialogue on these and other issues.