Barack Obama's administration:

Friends for Democracy adopt Action for Change for Democrats in Roosevelt County:

A.	Support the goals of the Campaign for Change
	1.	Link economic recovery to energy independence and universal health insurance. Each of us do this in conversations and look for other opportunities to support the goals for change.
	2.	Invite a friend to ride along to Democratic meetings and to get involved in achieving the goals for change.
	3.	Help reorganize College Democrats at ENMU. Gene Bundy will take the lead, but we all need to help.

B.	Harness the energy and enthusiasm of the volunteers in the Obama campaign by involving them in a recycling project. Joan Brown will take the lead in this endeavor.

Friends for Democracy, 2120 S. Ave. I Place, Portales, NM 88130, 356-5980, dolorespenrod@msn.com

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THE COLUMN

The Election is Over, Now What?
(posted December 16, 2008)

by JAMES LEE
Chair, Roosevelt County Democratic Party

We have entered that murky, gray twilight zone between the election and the swearing in of New Mexico's Congressional delegation and the inauguration of our new president. In the campaign Democrats did the hard work that resulted in a celebration, and now face the opposite: the celebration of taking office that will result in the hard work. Time to switch from the silly convention hat to the proverbial thinking cap. We now have to shift from rhetoric to reality.

This new reality requires acknowledging the valiant efforts of the Roosevelt County Democratic Party and recognizing our roles in the journey toward decent, responsible, and effective government, and it requires a practical attitude toward the presidential transition.

Although Barack Obama won the presidency while all five Democratic candidates won the state's new Congressional delegation, many Democrats must be bitterly disappointed in Roosevelt County. Despite all that work and all those (apparent) declarations of support, this county went to John McCain by over 2,000 votes out of a total 6,555 votes cast (65.37% for McCain). Republicans Steve Pearce and Dan East also carried Roosevelt County in a year in which "Democrats couldn't lose."
We should look at the results in a positive way. Because of the hard work of some dedicated, hard-working Roosevelt County Democrats, Roosevelt County contributed 2,270 votes to Barack Obama's New Mexico total. Without all that effort, the county's total would have been much less and possibly help defeat our candidates in this state. Roosevelt County may well have been significant in putting New Mexico's electoral votes in the Obama column. Our county also contributed to the winning totals for Senator-elect Tom Udall and Representative-elect (Third Congressional District) Ben Ray Lujan. Incidentally, the First and Second Congressional Districts will also be represented by Democrats for the first time in many years. Roosevelt County can be regarded as a winner because RCDP volunteers helped New Mexico come out a big winner in Election 2008.

This victory puts us in a new place in our political environment. Instead of limiting ourselves to criticism of those in office, we now must prepare to support our office-holders in governing wisely and fairly. We now have the responsibility that was so abused and mishandled by the Republicans (no Democrat in the White House for 20 of the past 28 years, and a Republican Congressional majority six of the past eight years). As of January 2009, January 3 for Congress and January 20 for the White House, we will no longer reside on the outside looking in. In short, we must shift from opposition to advocacy. This begins with reason overruling ideology.

This does not mean we give up our principles. It means we need to create practical possibilities based on our beliefs. Among the many gems my friend Dolores Penrod has taught me is the starkly simple reality that "politics is the art of the doable." Nowhere does this statement fit better than the appointments to the Obama White House team at this point. These choices may not appear to embody the big change the campaign promised, and our president-elect appears more centrist than the progressive we supported for the office.

We need to consider a very basic reality before drawing conclusions we could live to regret, particularly judgments about "Obama's Clinton retreads." If President-elect Obama wants Democrats with White House experience, he has to appoint people who worked in the Carter administration or the Clinton administration. Carter and Clinton are the only Democratic presidents to take office since Nixon was inaugurated nearly 40 years ago (January 20, 1969). Do we want Clinton "retreads" with reasonably recent White House experience, or do we prefer Carter "retreads" from 28 years ago?

Also, do we want our new president surrounded by "yes-people," or do we want a variety of views from which the president may select his policies? If his advisors automatically agree with him on everything, why does he need advisors? The absence of disagreement means the absence of deliberation. Without deliberation we have reaction rather than decision. Do we want the ideology-driven automatons that have headed the executive branch for the past eight years (and the legislative branch six of those years)?

The executive branch must no longer be ruled by ideologues controlled by knee-jerk reaction rather than intelligent decision-making. An effective leader must have a vision and a plan, not just the ideology that spawned it. The vision should embody principle, and the plan must spark a policy that can be accepted by the nation. The policy of our new president will be one of progress and decency, but when he assumes office on January 20, he should be the only progressive advocate in his administration. The president must be the only guiding force. His cabinet members should administer their respective departments within the confines of the policy established by the chief executive. These department managers, along with advisors, must submit their honest, independent opinions during the decision-making process because alternatives are needed if the president is to choose a reasonable policy. Once the policy is established, however, it must be implemented by the president's administrators whether they agree with it or not.

This is why Barack Obama needs independent thinkers with practical experience to head his departments and serve as his advisors. "Yes-men" and "yes-women" would provide validation, not information. Rather than contributing to the deliberative process, it would feed the emotional need to be right rather than the thoughtful intention of doing the right thing. Obama will not need people who agree with him all the time. He has said himself he wants strong, smart people. It looks like Cheney/Rove-style sycophants may be gone, at least for the next four to eight years. Instead of whining about his cabinet choices leaning too far toward the center, or even to the right, we should celebrate the triumph of reason over the dominance of reaction.

The election is over. The candidate had the pressure of getting everyone to agree with him in order to get enough people to vote for him. That's over now. It's time to organize a dynamic new administration. Time for information instead of validation. No more team to get the job, now the team to do the job. As he puts his policy together, Obama has to put the team together that will make it work. So far, he certainly seems to have done that superbly well. So let's not pick on the progressive because he has centrist administrators. He will still be the progressive we got elected, and those centrists will make his ideas realities.

The Column, by James Lee, will appear periodically on this website. James is chairperson of the Roosevelt County Democratic Party. He can be reached at (505)562-2675 or (505)359-2204. More about James Lee.

THE COLUMN ARCHIVE:
Apathy or Action by JAMES LEE

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LOCAL VOICES

Reflections on Iraq

by KIRBY ROWAN
Portales, New Mexico

Author's note: This was written some weeks/months after Saddam was out of power. As you can see, I had misgivings....not to mention a lot to learn.

It's true, and unfortunate from our perspective, that Iraq until the war was a police state. But it should be heartening that a police state could not prevent dissent and 'perversion' from the influence of the West. This is an implicit recognition of the limitations of a police state regulating a society confronted with modern mass communication technology. Saddam was not actively in the business of suppressing technology as we understand it per se, but rather preventing modernization that would undermine centralized, brutal control imposed over an historically short period. His state didn't fear technology, but what it would inevitably bring to the people--a desire to be more free.

Mr. Bush states that we must bring democracy to the Middle East, but he conveniently leaves out the fact that freedom and democracy are not the same thing. This lapse of judgment is a profoundly ethnocentric and dangerous aim in a world of developing freedom and heterogeneity, a world which includes the evolving political imperatives of the Iraqis. It is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do to impose our kind of political system upon them. This is why there are intractable bloody confrontations all over the world in 'developing' countries. Within a system like ours it would be absurd to regulate dissent as has been done in Iraq for decades. But the answer is NOT 'Do it my way or else' but rather some sort of 'This has worked for us. Would you consider it?'

The aged concept of enlightened self-interest would seem to apply here, both for evolving governments and the individual concerns they profess as their justification. Political systems can and do change, as they learn what does and does not work within their sense of history and possibility. History seems to me to show the 'We're right, you're wrong' frame of mind just breeds endless horrible violence, over and over, as one group or another seeks to impose its concept of justice upon another.

At some point people and governments have to grow up enough to stop the endless cycle of violence, to recognize that the common goals of people are best served with negotiation, accommodation, tolerance, and appreciation of differences of historical perspective. This won't happen in the modern age with outdated notions of 'our' superiority vs. 'their' oppression.

We manifestly cannot slap the Iraqis into democracy as we know it. We can and must talk with them, reason with them, negotiate with them, and COME TO TERMS with them regarding the supreme issues of our day, and the relative freedoms of our two peoples. This is statecraft at its best; for the benefit of all vs. the advantage of the few. It is the unreasonable regime which seeks to impose its view of righteousness upon another. We must not allow ourselves that unreasonableness.

LOCAL VOICES ARCHIVE:
Proud to be a Democrat by PAULINE CLARK