I decided to send you an article of mine which appeared this morning in The Politico.com website--because it presents a way of understanding how it could be that the Right, defeated in the election of 2008, is still shaping the contours of national debate, so that Obama and Congressional Democrats keep on explaining their various compromises and abandonng of principles by pointing to the need to be "realistic" in light of the political debate in D.C. I'm putting this forward not to hurt Obama, but rather the opposite: to help us understand why we need to mobilize a counter-pressure on him and Congressional Democrats--a pressure from the spiritual progressive consciousness articulated by Tikkun and our Network of Spiritual Progressives.

If there had been more space in the Politico.com I would have told the story that Hillary Clinton told me when I met with her in the White House: that when FDR met with labor leaders in 1934, after four hours of meeting, he said the following: "You've convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there and FORCE ME TO DO IT." What he meant, Hillary explained to me, was that the pressures on a President to stay with the status quo and the forces of the economic and political elites of the country are enormous, so that even when a President wishes to move in a different direction, he needs to be able to point to forces from the progressive world that are equally vociferous and pushing him in the direction he wished to go.

So, those who say, "Don't criticize Obama, because he is such a decent person, so smart, and obviously wants the right things" are missing the point: OBAMA NEEDS TO BE PUSHED FROM THE PROGRESSIVE WORLD IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO BE WHO HE WANTS TO BE. He needs our support in this way. That's why we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are moblizing a campaign to support him by pushing him to Be the Obama We Voted For, Not the Obama of Inside-the-Beltway and Wall Street design. Over the next few months I'll be sending you more information about the details of this campaign, but first point is: if you are not yet paying annual dues to the Network of Spiritual Progressives, please do so now at www.spiritualprogressives.org--because we are severely limited unless we can hire organizers to help us implement this campaign. We need to raise a minimum of $300,000 to make this campaign real. So, please make a donation to the NSP and/or Join as a dues-paying member, or renew your membership if you haven't done so yet in 2009. You can do all this at www.spiritualprogressives.org.  Or by sending a check to Tikkun at 2342 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, Ca. 94704. Or call and make a donation through your credit card on the phone at 510 644 1200 (9--5 Pacific daylight time, M-F).  By the way, in case you are wondering, I HATE to have to ask for money for our organizing efforts--but on the other hand, as some people have said to me, it's a "mitzvah" or good deed to provide others with an opportunity to do good in the world, and that is definitely what we will be able to do if we get your support. Please also feel free to send this letter and the article below to everyone on your various email lists, or put it on your website, twitter connections, facebook, or whatever.

And do let me know if you have ideas about how we can best mobilize our Campaign to Support Obama to Be the Obama We Voted For--Not the Obama of the Inside-the-Beltway non-ideological pragmatism that I describe below. Yes, we are reaching out to other organizations and communities to work in coalition, yes we are joining with those who are supporting the campaign to reduce carbon, to support single-payer, to stop the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan, to support Israel/Palestinian reconcilaition, to support a shift from an Obama economics focused on helpng the banks and insurance companies to helping the people thrown out of work or losing their homes because of the economic meltdown, and of course, we are moving forward with our Domestic and Global Marshall Plan. But what is our unique contribution is to link all these in a worldview articulated in our "New Bottom Line" and in our Core Vision at www.tikkun.org, and in our Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org. So even if you don't have any money to donate, you can be an effective ally by carefully reading and internalizing the articulation of this worldview and then spreading it widely, talking about it, getting others to read it and discuss the ideas, the vision, the approach. And then by challenging the cynical realism that makes people feel despair about politics, or at least too passive to join our campaign. The truth is, you, your energy, your thinking--YOU ARE THE NETWORK, and together we can make a real difference.

Love and blessings,

Michael

P.S. I'm on my way toward recovery from the cancer surgery. No chemo, no raditation--the surgeon says that she removed all the cancerous parts of my lung. Unfortunately, there is a 25-40% recurrence rate, and nothing to do to prevent that but to reduce stress, pray, exercise, eat right, and pray some more. I'll learn more about the pre-cancerous stuff in my duodenom and esophogus next month. Meanwhile, I'm at about 80% of my normal energy level, which isn't bad, and still have pain (slowly diminishing) from the surgery itself. Now, please read the article below and support this campaign I've just described in this letter. You can read it on line at www.tikkun.org also.


Barack Obama's Non-Ideological Pragmatism Will Backfire

     by Rabbi Michael Lerner

President Barack Obama's very nonideological pragmatism, which has received so much praise inside the Beltway and which has given him public support in his few months in office, will ultimately be the downfall of his presidency.

This approach and the free pass it generates from the media may indeed allow him to push through programs that here and there make significant advances toward a more generous and caring society. But it guarantees that he will not be able to gain mass support for a coherent worldview that can form the basis for an alternative to "let the marketplace decide," which has been the guiding principle for American domestic politics, and "let our power shape the world," which has been our primary approach to foreign policy.

The nonideological approach implicitly encourages us to believe in Obama himself - he will be our savior, our refuge, our deliverer from the bad times of the Bush administration.

And indeed he may. I believe that we've never had a more brilliant, decent and spiritually grounded president. Yet by failing to educate people on a fundamentally different way of thinking, by eschewing articulation of the spiritual and ethical principles that ought to guide us as a society and showing how his programs flow from those principles, Obama is disempowering those who will have to continue the fight when he is no longer president.

Contrast this with the political right, which has consistently articulated its views that the capitalist market is the ultimate arbiter and stabilizer of our society and that all good things will flow from empowering it to work its magic; and that homeland security can best be achieved by dominating other countries around the world and insisting that they follow our leadership.

Even when their policies fail, or are repudiated by the public, they stay on message, and hence have managed to persuade a solid 30 percent of the country to follow irrational policies and to oppose any serious change.

While I despise the content of their politics, their ideological consistency and willingness to educate the public to their worldview has given them a great advantage over liberals who fear to put forward a coherent alternative lest they be labeled "ideologues."  With that committed base that they've fostered, they push the media in ways that make them far more powerful than their numbers would justify. In fact, at this very moment, and despite the outcome of the 2008 election, they are able to put the Obama Administration and the Democrats in Congress on the defensive, because the Democrats are unable to mobilize their own base around "pragmatism" and a non-ideological "lets be realistic" politics.

I watched how the nonideological perspective of the Clinton White House played out in winning short-term victories by embracing the pro-market and pro-power ideologies of the right. Sure, the Clintons were "pragmatic" and got lots of their legislation passed. But since they avoided a commitment to an alternative worldview, they failed to build an American constituency that would reject the retrograde policies of the Reagan-Bush I-Bush II years.

The result: Even at the moment of greatest economic success, in the year 2000, the Democrats could not hold onto the White House or win back control of Congress, and soon all that had been legislated was dismantled.

The same will happen to the Obama Democrats, unless they are capable of shaping a new worldview and showing how their specific policies flow from that worldview.

In the politics of meaning that I first articulated to the Clinton White House - much to the annoyance of Rahm Emanuel and others who were religiously anti-ideological - I spoke about America's hunger for a new ethos that would transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace. America needs a new bottom line so that corporations, government policies, social institutions and even personal behavior are judged rational, productive or efficient not only to the extent that they maximize money and power (the old bottom line) but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, as well as enhance our capacity to go beyond a utilitarian approach to nature so that we can respond with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe.

We need a foreign policy based on the recognition that in the 21st century, our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet, and hence that a strategy of generosity should replace the strategy of domination (e.g., by launching a Global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care and to repair the global environment). We need a national bank that can provide interest-free loans to help individuals and small businesses, in accordance with the biblical mandate.

Underlying all this is a worldview that gives priority to love, generosity and caring as the central values that must shape domestic and foreign policy. I know from my personal encounters with him that Obama actually shares those values, but until he consistently articulates them as the basis for a new politics and, equally important, uses those values as the criteria by which he encourages others to judge his and all other social policies, he will increasingly find himself falling back on the dominant paradigms of the past.

The more that happens, the more the people who momentarily allowed themselves to hope that something new was really going to happen in politics will fall back into cynicism and despair, and as they do so, there will be no force capable of resisting a right-wing backlash that will ultimately undo all the good that Obama is trying to do.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine and co-chairman of the interfaith organization The Network of Spiritual Progressives.