I just had to post this whole article:
September 17, 2008
Finally, an article has been written by The Nation that truly explains what "organizing" is really about. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/forum Senator Obama has incorporated this and so much more. It really helps in letting others understand. I spent much of my life organizing and the tension and ambiguity is what eventually drives a solution. There are so many levels of problem solving that he gets. Anyway I'm thrilled to see this article.
Keep HOPE shining.
Ben Smith is the article author and Jeffrey Berman the skillful delegate gainer.
A number of months ago I read this terrific article about Ben Smith of the Obama08 campaign who was the "brains" behind Senator Obama gaining the delegates he needed to win the nomination. It is a fascinating article and portends well for the electoral college strategy to come. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10249.html
And this article about pollsters and Electoral College Analyses estimates was interesting too. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-nickolas/the-medias-problem-of-fal_b_118420.html
They are both well worth the read.
Sandy
The Democratic Party has posted the results of recent national platform committee meetings with input from Obama08 supporters around the country. I haven't had time to fully read it, however what I have seen looks wonderful and promising as a way to begin healing this country. Here is the http://www.c-span.org/pdf/draft-2008-democratic-national-platform.pdf
On July 20th and 25th five of us met to develop input for the 2008 Platform. Here are the points that we sent in for inclusion with information from 7,000 such meetings that were held across the country. Many meetings were large and many were just a few folks like our. Thanks to everyone who shared and hour and half of their time on one of the two days. It was fun and each participant expressed true appreciation that we were asked. Here's our input and keep HOPE shining!
2008 Democratic Platform Input
World Standing & Diplomacy
Clean Energy
Health
Education
Veterans
Economy
This information was e-mailed to United Church of Christ conference ministers in CA/NV. Jane Fisler Hoffman indicated that it could be shared with others.
"You may share this with people you know who have questions about all of this. You can also find more from the national UCC at ucc.org. Finally I just want briefly to voice my own experience as a member of Trinity United Church of Christ. (By the way, I have spoken with several reporters about our experience at Trinity but am never referred to in print, I presume because my experience is POSITIVE!) Milt and I are members there very intentionally because it is a Christ centered, Spirit filled congregation where the worship is powerful; the preaching is spiritually insightful and prophetic; the welcome to all is warm and embracing; mission is both local and global ; tithing is encouraged and expected; members bring and read their Bibles; and disciples are nurtured in the faith. Yes, we are among just a few 'white' members. And yes, sometimes in worship I hear a painful biblical challenge to the white privilege that has been part of my own life and to the racism that is so destructive in our culture. That challenge has helped to shape my own journey in following Jesus as I try to live and minister in ways that contribute to a more loving and just world. But never---NEVER-have Milt or I felt unwelcome or unloved at Trinity because of the color of our skin. To the contrary, we consistently have felt loved and embraced because of our oneness with our sisters and brothers through Jesus Christ. Our church family has prayed for us when our granddaughter was ill and Rev Wright has pastored me through some personally challenging times. Milt and I have visited a village in Ghana West Africa where Trinity UCC has helped to build a community center with a library, provided computers for a classroom and a generator for the small hospital and they have strongly supported our UCC related Inanda School, for girls, in South Africa, in addition to significant support of Our Church's Wider Mission. Let me close by telling you one story from our experiences at Trinity that demonstrates the kind of radical hospitality the Spirit offers through the congregation. On one Sunday we went to worship with a group of young Germans, about ten people who had come to Chicago as 'emerging leaders in Germany'. A friend of mine was hosting them and wanted to give them an experience visiting an African American church. We were able to arrange for Pastor Wright to meet with them before worship and after he came into the room he greeted them in German and prayed with us, in German. After sharing some background of the church, the UCC and the African American church tradition, we all went to worship. The service was, as always, uplifting---lively gospel singing by the 300 voice choir, a moving infant dedication service, etc. Then, part way through the service, we noticed that Rev. Wright was again speaking in German, welcoming the German guests (in addition to the usual warm welcoming of all guests). The next thing we knew, the choir was singing God's praise in an anthem in German! (Wunderbar, Sie Nommen Wunderbar!). Tears came to some of the guests' eyes and to mine. Radical hospitality. A reality quite different from the cruel characterization of the church as hateful or separatist.Do I agree with every word from Rev. Wright's mouth? No. (No more than I agree with every word my husband says! ) But I have seen and experienced the dominant direction of his whole ministry which is toward love and justice and peace for all people in the name of Jesus Christ. That is what I respect." Holy Week Blessings, Jane Fisler Hoffman
As some of you know I am a member of the First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ in Elgin, IL. Over the past year I have tried to offer information about the denomination and its history. Today I received some additional and important information about the work and service of Dr. Jerimiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ. I hope that you will take a few moments to read this amazing story about a church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is a portion of the letter written by the conference Minister to his colleagues re: Dr. Wright.
March 18, 2008“The Rest of the Story”To: Clergy in the Wisconsin Conference Dear Colleagues:
"Pastor Jeremiah Wright needs no defense from me. Anyone who has built a congregation from 87 members to some 8000 and whose congregation has modeled ministries to one of the poorest areas of Chicago has provided a body of work that speaks for itself. A recent press release from Trinity UCC, issued by the new Senior Pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, identifies Trinity’s generosity and accomplishments, and then says that on Sunday mornings alone, over 36 years, Pastor Wright has spoken for 207,792 minutes. The video clips represent perhaps 15-20 seconds of that time. Those clips represent .0000012 of his total preaching at Trinity, and yet many are quick to judge him, his church, and, indeed, our denomination, on this statistically ridiculous sample. Would I have chosen the exact words he chose in the clips that are on the airways? No. Most of you know me and you know a conservative and buttoned down person who is cautious about his words and holds opinions close to the vest. Many believe that is a significant fault of mine, and they may be right. But, unlike Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., I have not preached to the same congregation for 36 years and loved a church into remarkable growth in ministry and seen generations come and grow and return to the God who gave them life. I have not ministered in the midst of terrible poverty and been confronted in my study week after week with texts that provide a stark and dramatic contrast to the scene of boarded up buildings and a broken education system just outside my window. I have not faced the challenge of finding a “word from the Lord” to my people, who, no matter their success, daily face the boundaries of racism in our society. I am struck with the Psalm for Easter Sunday, Psalm 118. It begins and ends with these words: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever!” If you go onto the Trinity UCC website, you will hear Pastor Wright’s voice shout these words with great power and warmth. This could have been a “clip” of his preaching just as well as those that media outlets have chosen. But, even this soaring text of thanksgiving goes on to say: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.” Or, the Acts text for Easter: “And Peter …said, ‘Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him…. And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Put yourself in the study at Trinity and look out on a city of African American people stretching for miles in nearly every direction, and juxtapose those texts for Easter Sunday and find your voice in the context of poverty and racism and lack of education and health care. Any word of hope in such a situation will be a ‘hard’ word. It won’t be an easy word to hear. But an easy word isn’t likely to be a saving word, and that is something that Pastor Wright knew. An authentic word of hope will be hard to hear. Good news cuts through life and it can wound, but Easter tells us that God in Christ heals those wounds and “makes us strong at the broken places.” I’ve gone on a long time, but these aren’t really even the words I want to share with you. You can (and some of you will) engage and argue with the above words. You will take a different position, and that is good and in keeping with the freedom of conscience that prevails in our Protestant tradition. What I want to share with you (with apologies to Paul Harvey) is “the rest of the story.” I am reminded of this part of the story, because this past Sunday, Palm Sunday, I was in Milwaukee to share in the 2nd anniversary service of Grace United Church of Christ on north Sherman Avenue. It was a wonderful celebration, and it reminded me of Grace’s story and the significant role in it of Pastor Jeremiah Wright and Trinity. As you know, the congregation of Mt. Tabor United Church of Christ voted to end its ministry, but with the guidance of the Southeast Association, it determined that it would give its building to the Conference with the Easter hope that a new ministry could arise on this location. About a year after we received the Mt. Tabor building, I made an appointment and drove down to 95th Street on the south side of Chicago and visited with Dr. Wright. I told him that the UCC had 21 churches in Milwaukee in 1957 and that at that time there were five. We needed and wanted to start a new African American congregation, but we had no idea how to do it. I told him that we had engaged in a capital campaign and had money to start a church, and that I knew that the financial requests to Trinity must be endless. I said we were not asking for money but guidance and help in identifying leadership for this new church. We met for more than an hour, and as I got up to leave, Pastor Wright handed me a card. On the card was the name of the Rev. Wanda J. Washington, at that time a senior Associate on the Trinity pastoral staff. He indicated to me that he thought Pastor Washington would be interested and would be a good new church start pastor. Not long after this meeting, I met with Pastor Washington and then she and her husband, Wayne, came up to Milwaukee to see the church building and to meet with some members and Association and Conference leadership. She discerned that God was leading her to this new challenge, and we began to make plans for a new church. Once Pastor Washington indicated her willingness to come to Milwaukee, we received a letter from the Mission Board of Trinity, indicating that they would support Pastor’s Washington’s entire salary and benefits for the first year. In the second year they also have given the Conference and Grace another significant gift. As Pastor Washington prayed to discern her call to Milwaukee, there was a group of Trinity women who met with her and prayed for and with her regularly, calling on the Holy Spirit’s guidance in this life-changing decision. When plans were moving forward to have an opening service for Grace in 2006, a carload or more of Trinity people came from the south side of Chicago to the north side of Milwaukee nearly every weekend to clean and paint and sort through files and materials and equipment and to prepare the building for the first Grace service. When Palm Sunday 2006 came, Trinity sent more than 300 people to Milwaukee to insure that the first service would be packed and spirit filled. They sent more than 20 deacons to serve. They sent a team of trained ushers and security people. They provided 15 women who prepared a feast to follow the service. They sent one of their women’s choirs, and for the first months of Grace’s life they sent musical leadership to lend their extraordinary gifts to Grace’s worship. Some individual members of Trinity tithed to Grace for the first year to offer additional financial support. Ann and I went in the fall of 2006 to say ‘Thank you” to Trinity, and we couldn’t have been welcomed more warmly. I was given time to speak at a quarterly meeting of the congregation and we received more appreciation and hugs than we could have imagined. Last Sunday there was a coach from Trinity that brought a group to the 2nd anniversary service. There were trained deacons from Trinity that came to again serve the spiritual needs of the congregation and to support the pastor. I counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 people from Trinity at the celebration. All this support, financial, spiritual, physical, material, came out of one visit to Jeremiah Wright’s office. A new congregation. A critical new ministry to a large north side African American population came from one visit. I might suggest that my hour with Jeremiah Wright was probably even less than .0000012 of the time he spent in meetings over the past 36 years. I wish some clips of grace and generosity he and Trinity showed to us in Wisconsin would make some video clips somewhere. As you know, Dr. Wright was the preacher for our Annual Meeting last June. He was invited, because Grace led our worship and we wanted to show our appreciation for Trinity’s exceptional gifts. Prior to the service, Pastor Wright and I were eating dinner together in one of the dining rooms. His phone buzzed, and he looked at it and discovered a text message telling him that someone in the Trinity congregation had died. He asked my pardon and then for the next 20 minutes made phone calls to his assistant and to members of the pastoral staff. “Who’s on call tonight? Remember, we need to respond to the family in one hour! Who is available to do the service? Let me know when someone has followed through.” Here he was, 200 miles from his church, speaking to us, and he was still fully pastorally engaged to see that the church did what it is committed to doing, that is, surround a grieving family and bring a word of hope and a presence of love. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s preaching, in its totality; in its African-American context; in its willingness to struggle with the hardest of biblical texts; in its recognition of the essential role of confession in forgiveness and judgment in grace; in the middle of vibrant and challenge African American life in a world city; in all of these his preaching helped to build a church. But to me that preaching would not have brought the kind of fruit in the Lord’s vineyard that it did without the absolute clarity of mission that brought a new congregation in another state to life and the deep compassion and clarity of the pastoral vocation that pauses in a busy speaking schedule to see to the ‘going home’ ministry to a family who has lost a loved one. To me, “the rest of the story” is essential to the telling of a fair and just story of ministry. The reflections I shared in opening this letter are up for debate and diversity of opinion. The “rest of the story” is not. It is lived experience, and I will never forget it and will be, as our whole Conference will be, forever grateful. I wish you all a faith filled journey through these days of Holy Week and then the full measure of joy on Easter Day."
Your colleague, David MoyerConference MinisterWisconsin Conference UCC
David Yepsen's blog in The Des Moines Register reveals what the "on the ground" status is today in Iowa. This article reminds us that Iowa where the first votes are cast is a dead heat. If you haven't had a chance to read this article from Yepsen, the Dean of Iowa Caucus journalists, it is well worth the time.
Barack Obama cloaked himself in John Kennedy’s legacy Tuesday as he sought to retake the initiative in the Democratic presidential campaign.
Invoking Kennedy imagery is a delicate thing for any politician to do but Obama succeeded in pulling it off.
The Illinois senator used the fifth anniversary of an anti-war speech he gave in Chicago to draw contrasts with his chief rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. He brought former Kennedy speechwriter and aide Ted Sorensen to Iowa to introduce him for the speech in Des Moines and again in Coralville.
Sorensen invoked parallels with the Cuban missile crisis decisions made by the young President Kennedy.
Obama is playing the Kennedy card because national polls show him trailing Clinton in the national contest. National observers are saying Obama’s not gaining traction and that Clinton is starting to lock up the nomination.
That’s not the shape of the race in Iowa, where polls show Clinton, Obama and John Edwards locked in a statistical tie for first place among likely Democratic caucus-goers. Obama’s spent more time than Clinton in the lead-off state, has plenty of money to deploy here and has built a formidable organization to go up against his two rivals.
Two hurdles confront Obama in Iowa. The first is the criticism he isn’t strong enough in his opposition to the war. The second is that he’s inexperienced. He used Tuesday’s speech to counter both and tweak Clinton and Edwards.
“The war in Iraq should never have been fought,” he said adding the American people were failed by a Congress “that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: Without that vote, there would be no war.”
Edwards and Clinton voted for the war. Obama said “and now we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and not expect him to cash it?”
In other digs at the two, Obama said:
*Americans “should ask themselves: Who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong?”
*Also, “the American people get to decide: are we going to turn back the clock, or turn the page.”
*And “the first thing we have to do is end this war. And the right person to end it is someone who had the judgment to oppose it from the beginning.”
*Also, “we’ll reject torture, without exception or equivocation.”
*And “I wouldn’t be here, if time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation.”
That “torch” phrase was made famous by Kennedy. Sorensen, who wrote many of the late president’s speeches, told the Des Moines audience Kennedy was also criticized for lacking experience when he ran in 1960.
“What the country wants in a president is judgment,” Sorensen said.
He called Obama “the only serious candidate for the Democratic nomination” who opposed the war from the start. Like Kennedy, Obama has spent years of his life living abroad and so understands the importance of world opinion to U.S. policy objectives.
But not all of Obama’s speech was aimed at Clinton and Edwards. Bill Richardson is crowding him by appealing to anti-war activists with a promise to get all the troops out of Iraq.
Obama said clearly Tuesday he would “get all our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months” of taking office. The only ones left will be those guarding diplomats or “carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.”
That may not appease the most rabid anti-war activists who like Richardson for his get-everybody-out stance, but at least it clears up an questions the left may have about what Obama intends to do with the combat forces.
Click here to read all posts from David Yepsen
Thank You once again David. You are the most fair and unbiased reporters of our time. It seems that no one can find anything wrong with Hillary and I believe it has to do with the fact that they are scared of her and her campaign. You are a loud voice of reason that does not skip by the fact that Sen. Obama is a force in this presidential race. I live in rural Iowa and here I see and hear only positive things about Barack. Your articles always include what I consider the obvious. In fact Sen. Obama had 24,000 people show up in Central park in NYC the other day and it was not on any of the day time shows at all, not even the ones live from NY. That is an historic event. Barack is a man that CAN change things and will change things. He is an inspiration to most of the world. Thank you for putting it on paper. You are an inspiration as well.
Sometimes it's not easy to keep a cool head in the middle of a passionate political discussion - and even less so during a campaign when your candidate and his family become the targets of rhetorical propaganda. Well, a couple of us compiled some basic guidelines to help us communicate Senator Obama's message better and respond more effectively to both creditable challenges and unfounded attacks. Todd Smyth provided the first part of the guidelines:
I added the following details:
So, for example, when someone brings up experience in any form, it's important to get a clear idea of what they mean by 'experience'. Ask them directly. You now have a great opportunity to talk about Senator Obama's work as:
Above all, he is a trustworthy leader whose good judgement we have seen throughout his pubic life:
Ultimately, Senator Obama is the best and most reliable source for where he stands, what he believes and what he has done. Get to know his legislative record and his speeches in particular. Quote these speeches, recommend them to others and encourage everyone to listen to him for themselves. In the end, try to always steer the discussion or the argument in the direction of the issues and make sure that the context of any given quotation is always front and center.
The press has worked hard to create the illusion of conflict and strife among the candidates, yet many of these 'dust-ups' are really just rhetorical. There is really no reason we should be starting or getting into fights over the campaign.
I hope some of these tips are useful to you.
