Populism2015’s Upshot – Hillary Clinton Has Her Challenger: It Is Us
4/21/2015

There is one respect in which politics is like investing: You don’t put your eggs in one basket.

The lesson we learned from the Barack Obama presidency is that while it is good to invest some of our hopes in a presidential candidate, no single candidate warrants the investment of all of our hopes. Some of our investment wisely goes to a movement that encourages that candidate to be true to our hopes and discourages that candidate from actions that would betray us.

It’s a lesson worth remembering in the wake of the Populism2015 conference, which brought around 800 activists together under an alliance of National People’s Action, Alliance for a Just Society, USAction and Campaign for America’s Future. Much of the news coverage of the conference revolved around how this emerging alliance will affect Hillary Clinton now that she is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Will the Populism2015 attendees be the foot soldiers for a Clinton challenger?

The answer is yes – but in bigger and more important ways than what some reporters and pundits may be thinking when they ask the question.

The people who attended the conference are not political operatives, even though some of them can be found as campaign volunteers, staffers and even candidates. They are people who have every reason to be fed up and disillusioned by what they have seen in the U.S. capital and in many statehouses around the country, yet fiercely cling to the idea that America’s political structures and economy should function for all of the people, and not just for the rich and powerful. These are the people who on Sunday endorsed a platform “for people and the planet” that will serve as a North Star for organizing and building coalitions, and a yardstick for measuring any candidate running for a major policymaking office – from city council member to president of the United States.

They are people like Eugene Lim, a recent college graduate who joined the community activist group One Northside. He graduated college in the wake of the Great Recession, into the worst job market in generations. Still, “I got angry at myself” for being unable to find work for two years after his graduation, he said during a speech at the conference. “I thought I was poor through some fault of my own.”...

...Sometimes that effort will take the form of marches like the one at the end of the conference on Monday against fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. An estimated 1,000 people took the streets, walking from the AFL-CIO headquarters to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. They carried with them a Trojan horse, symbolizing the dangers the treaty holds for workers, consumers and the environment. (Watch a video of the march.)

They will be pressing demands like those of low-wage government contract workers, who are planning actions this week to highlight their demand that President Obama sign a “good jobs executive order” that will set the minimum wage for these jobs at $15 an hour and insist that companies with federal contracts allow worker bargaining if the workers desire it.

...That is a dynamic that organizers will seek to replicate again and again in the months and years ahead, with campaigns revolving around each of the planks on the Populism2015 platform for people and the planet. There will be chants of “Run, Warren, Run” (or, as there were at the trade protest yesterday, “Run, Bernie Run,” when Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont spoke). But the goal is to encourage an even more potent force into the 2016 political race: us.

In past elections, millions of us have not found our concerns, our issues, our vision for the country on the ballot. What we’ve seen too often instead is a choice between the truly awful and merely bad. It’s time, the Populism2015 alliance declares, that people have the opportunity to vote for themselves, and for the change they seek. That’s what can happen when an independent movement is in motion, on the streets and in the corridors of power.

http://ourfuture.org/20150421/populism2015s-upshot-hillary-clinton-has-her-challenger-it-is-us