As the process of melding the Clinton and Sanders campaigns/movements begins, we’ll see more and more stories like this one. The National Student Organizing Director for Sanders 2016 has just been hired by Hillary. Kunoor Ojha is a veteran field organizer who worked for Obama’s reelection, did field for a congressional campaign in 2014, and has a recognizably progressive pedigree. She did field work for a movement to amend the Illinois Constitution to provide for redistricting reform. She worked as an intern at Amnesty International, as a volunteer for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, USA, and lists Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Transparency International and the International Rescue Committee as organizations that she supports. At the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she obtained a degree in political science, she served as president and vice-president of Feminists United. In that role, she organized and performed in a campus staging of The Vagina Monologues.
The monologue performed by FU VP of Publicity Kunoor Ojha (PSYC ‘12) presented Memory of Her Face, three stories of women around the world (Baghdad, Islamabad, and Ciudad Juarez) who were victims of sexual violence or mutilation. “It’s a sad one, to say the least… so that’s what i tried to get across in my performance. No shaking my fist at sky in rage, no yelling out about it, just a sort of sad detachment.”
…There was an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the audience, as well. “The turnout was phenomenal! Every seat was taken on the first night! I’m usually really skeptical about student interest but people really responded! I would never have guessed how much we’d raise from it,” Kunoor Ojha said. One audience member was overheard saying “People often talk about penis envy – I think I’m feeling the opposite right now.”
She began the Sanders campaign as a regional field director before taking over his effort to organize students in New Hampshire. After her success in that effort, she was promoted to the national student director.
Pretty soon, she’ll probably be a veteran of a successful presidential campaign with a potential role in the next White House. Of course, I can’t predict her future, but there will be many other rags-to-riches stories of people who started out on a low level and through hard work and a record of success carved out a future for themselves in politics at a high level. Most will have been with Clinton from the start, but certainly not all.
For supporters of Bernie Sanders, this is one of the more important ways in which his campaign can have lasting influence. You make all the impassioned Facebook posts and Tweets that you want, but there’s no substitute for being in the actual arena. To truly influence a major political party, you have to do more than vote. You have to organize, and you have to infiltrate.
I don’t even like using the word “infiltrate” because it sounds suspicious and illegitimate, as if you’re doing something underhanded or even unpatriotic. But, the point is, you have to get yourself into a position of power and influence to actually have any power or influence. At first, these positions may seen quite modest. You’re some deputy assistant for campus outreach or a delegate at the National Convention with a vote on some seemingly unimportant committee. But multiply that story dozens of times, and suddenly you have a small army of progressive-minded people creating a network that can further advance their values within the party and within the national political culture.
Of course, there’s an alternative. The alternative is that you grow despondent and disillusioned because your progressive champion came up short in the primaries and you reject making common cause with a Clinton campaign that you consider impure or hostile to your interests. You go back to being an outsider, an anti-establishmentarian cynic who calls for a pox on everyone’s house.
If you take that route, you may feel that your hands are clean, but you’ll be getting off a still moving bus. The Sanders movement isn’t over. It’s just getting started. And melding with the Clinton campaign is the next stop.
OT: I hope that BT will have a thread for the Muhammad Ali Funeral Service today.
This is where I am skeptical.
Hillary is too clannish for me. Keeping the hangers-on, when there is a lot of fresh meat out there, willing to work hard for a Dem.
We shall see, but her propensity to keep the hangers-on worries me.
Everyone is going to have their inner circle and there will be questionable elements there (Jeff Weaver doesn’t reassure me any more than Mark Penn). But there’s a ton of positions in the highest levels of government and you can’t fill them all with your closest allies.
Oh my. I do look forward to returning here this evening and reading a long string of abusive comments about sell-outs, drinking the Clinton Koolaid, enabling war crimes, and so on.
If you don’t want to get stung, don’t poke a bee hive.
Or triumphalism…”Nay,” responded the Kahn, “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet — to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.”
This kind of thing really excites me. If the entire Bernie campaign gets behind and joins in the Democratic party we’ll have a progressive administration within the decade. If they all go 3rd-party we’ll have a neofascist one within the year, and probably permanently. The reality will be in between, obviously, but I do think it will be far closer to the first.
My hope is that a lot of them take their expertise to the Congress as aides and legislative researchers. The Congress is the place to build a progressive base to improve the output and block the worst stuff.
Just curious: why not the executive branch? (For example, look at what’s happened at the Dept. of Labor in recent years.)
One swallow does not make a spring…
I know one guy from the Sanders campaign that will probably end up back on Tulsi Gabbard’s staff.
These things happen in waves, not overnight or in one big bang. This was what Bernie got my vote for, and I’m glad to see Hillary really seem to take folding in the talent from Bernie’s supporters into her organization. I think we’re going to be pleasantly surprised by who has influence in the Hillary administration; I certainly feel a lot better about it this time around than in 2008.
Hmm, no change in job description, just in the origin of paychecks. Not moving up, yet, I think.
I’m curious how going from a losing campaign to a winning one isn’t in some sense a career advancement.
Likewise, she may revert to the progressive Congressional efforts for 2018, if it becomes a credible force, no? A job is a job in this economy.
In the world of campaign organizing, working on a general election campaign is a step up from working on a primary campaign. (And working on a victorious general election campaign is another step up and virtually a ticket into the winning candidate’s new position. Heck, even Ted Cruz got a job in the W. Bush administration.)
Hmm, not sure you want him as your poster boy for ambitious(?) campaign worker. He obviously had his own power base here in TX.
I so agree. And I feel that establishment types like me, party apparatchiks so to speak, agree with so much of the Sanders vision that it would be easy for us to support any local effort that moved towards the common goals. The Sanders supporters have energy and even “right” on their side. They provide the muscle to those who presently have the control to make the change. So moaning that Bernie lost misses the example of how he has lived his life: constantly staying on message, working his way up through the system (by and large), winning victories in the House and Senate, and energizing/mobilizing millions of people in a run for President. To miss the message of his example, to go home weeping, to vote third party or not at all, is to miss the point of his “political revolution.”
Agree. Really want to see a progressive power base built in both houses of Congress. They are supposed to be the drafters of legislation and they can vastly change our current bad practices.
There is more in common than one might think between the rebels on both sides of the spectrum. Progressives and Populists have been allies before.
If Clinton is right about the state of the country and the party, then this is excellent and exciting news. If Sanders is right, it’s a band aid on a stab wound. (I’d rather have a band aid on my stab wound than not.) You’ve always thought Clinton was largely right about the state of the country and party, so naturally you believe the former.
The visions are, I think, quite comparable. The difference is in the rhetoric of how fast things can be accomplished. This was the problem with the term “revolution.” It suggested an overthrow, which some might feel is necessary. Others believe in progressivism, working step by step toward the goal. In my opinion that’s what the whole primary was about.
I don’t think it’s a matter of speed. I think it’s a matter of discontinuity. (Not quite ‘revolution’, which always struck me as an unhelpful label.) I very much agree that that’s what the whole primary was about.
Yep, Lenin made “revolution” an unhelpful label, or did that not happen until Mao. Certainly by the time of Fidel, Americans were not as revolutionarily excited by their own revolution as during the New Deal and World War II period.
And prior to 1918, almost anything and everything could be a revolution: the Industrial Revolution. After 1925, the ad agencies made even the most minor change “revolutionary”.
In the 18th century sense, it is only a revolution when the world is turn right-side up again.
You’ve always thought Clinton was largely right about the state of the country and party, …
And the state of the party is what?
Just what the doctor ordered.
Yep, Boo. Politico notes that Bernie’s tech staff is being folded into the Clinton campaign as we speak:
We’ll all be helping the Hillary team in the general election in one capacity or another,” said Ken Strasma, the CEO of Haystaq DNA.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/sanders-wind-down-224163#ixzz4BBorwOFM
I suspect hey aren’t worried about working for a neocon shill who is Republican lite, obviously. In fact, I suspect they know Hillary is not an evil Republican-lite neocon, but someone with an agenda not all that different from Sanders. They want to beat right wing Republicans and ensure we don’t get a Supreme Court that could thwart progressive legislation for generations. In other words, they want to be constructive, move the ball forward, and not waste time pissing on everyone else’s shoes while standing ankle deep in puddles. For progressives to win, they gotta be on a winning team and this is how it’s done.
Curious how many campaign workers or organizations are gunslingers taking the opportunity to build a rep and expand clientele? Only superficially invested in policies? Rmoney and Obama techies cashed in, no?
This is a great step, but what I want to see is Sanders campaigning with Clinton.
Interesting, and not unrelated, Taibbi article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with
-bernie
He makes some good points on cooptation.
ah, c’mon. Judd Gregg this morning said that Warren’s endorsement of Hillary shows how FAR LEFT the party has gone since she is an “academic socialist.” Not every election would be so easy as Taibbi suggests. He lives in NYC, I suppose, and only sees things from that metropolitan point of view.
NYC being a hotbed of anti-Wall Street, pro-union sentiment?
I agree it wouldn’t be as easy as Taibbi somewhat hyperbolically suggests. But do you think it wouldn’t be much easier?
LOL. I can’t measure “much”. I’d go with somewhat easier in some places.
The question is how much progressive thought is allowed in a Clinton Administrations. There are enough former Republicans and Wall Streeters to fill up her administration without progressives, thank you. If Kagan is too identified with neocons to be in State there is always his wife, Vicky Nuland.
Of course you have to have people filling this role. But at some point it becomes a resume chase: if you’re too left, you’re no longer acceptable within the policy circles. There has to be people who are not willing to do this in order to create the political space to enact policies with the power gained.
This woman could become the next Neera Tanden, in the sense of one day becoming a chief of staff when she’s 45-50. But along the way and her journey up the power level, her principles will become compromised. And she’ll need a reminder of who and what she’s supposed to represent. Still, at this point, she’s certainly someone who I want in power.
Neera Tanden?
President of CAP (Center for American Progress), likely Clinton’s Chief of Staff.
Yeah, the new and improved Podesta organ that replaced Center for American Progress….
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/11/washington-center-equitable-growth-neoliberalism-reloaded
.html
Kervick is an economist–an egalitarian one, that rara avis…
Please don’t mistake my comparison for praise of Neera. She is certainly NOT someone who I want in power. The comparison was that this woman could be her equivalent in the power structure, not her odious views.
Some excellent observations on what “working within the system” looks like. Getting your ideas in is nothing more or less than conventional office politics in which it is your ideas and not your ego that you are promoting. It involves, strategy, alliances, building wider networks within the organization, and keeping the confidence and support of the “boss” to the extent that the job is compensated.
And that paycheck is your choke-chain.
Those that can do this well should move to the inside game. But they should not forget the movement they came from or the networks and alliances that were part of that outside movement. That is what broadens the base of support for what needs to be done.
Collaboration among equals is how ideas get shared and issues get worked through. Is there going to be hard shells between the Clinton and Sanders vets in this unity campaign? Or is the range of views, the creativity, and the appeal across the electoral going to be broadened? This is as much on the Clinton half of this alliance as the Sanders half. And given the extent to which Clinton represents the recent base of the Democratic Party and Sanders extends support outside the base (if he can hold them with demonstrable policy agreements), movement from the Clinton side towards Sanders’s primary message will pay off in more voters in November than efforts from the Sanders side to move toward Clinton’s positions. That’s just the nature of the two bases — one insurgent and one establishment.