A grassroots movement is something that comes from the ground up; hence the name. That should go without saying, but since the phrase has become utterly devalued by the Opossum marketing-campaign-disguised-as-grassroots, I thought I’d better explain it. Especially since we now have a real grassroots movement afoot, a veritable prairie fire called PUMA. And the possums can’t understand it at all. That’s because they’ve never seen anything like it.
The “Obama movement” is not a true grassroots movement. Being popular is not the same as being grassroots. Having a lot of donors is not the same as being grassroots. That’s just market share. The Obama thing is and has always been a top-down, massively-funded, professionally-designed advertising campaign masquerading as a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon. It’s a product. A very slick, carefully packaged product. And, in a deft postmodern move, part of the product is the illusion that people who buy it are creating an actual grassroots movement. You know: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” In truth they’re just unpaid salespeople. They’re Amway distributors, buttonholing everybody to tell them about “the plan,” never realizing that the whole point of the thing is just to make the handful of folks at the top of the pyramid stinking rich.
PUMA, on the other hand, is a genuine grassroots movement: spontaneous, disorganized, and very messy. The name itself was coined by SM in a comment at the Confluence on June 1, but the seeds had already been sown and were germinating weeks before. In my own blogular timeline, I mark this post as a turning point: Why I will not vote for Obama even if he’s the nominee — and why you shouldn’t either. Hillary supporters had been getting angrier and angrier at Obama and at the DNC’s obvious intention to force him on us, and with that post on May 7th I crossed my personal Rubicon. The response was as close to viral as this reclusive little blog ever gets. Other Hillary supporters on other blogs were writing the same kinds of posts, and it soon became clear that we were riding the crest of a wave that was breaking all over the country.
A week later the mainstream media picked up on the phenomenon. Cynthia Ruccia and Kimberly Myers went on O’Reilly, and their appearance sparked an enormous reaction from women all over America. ABC covered the story. A radio jock in Philadelphia started Operation Turndown. If you read through the comment threads from that week on the various Hillary blogs, you can see what would become the PUMA movement taking shape. It was all still speculative at that point, since Hillary was still in the race, but we were gearing up mentally for what lay ahead. The issues we discussed then are the issues we’re still discussing now: how to frame our resistance, what to do between now and the convention, what to do in November.
All of this potential energy was poised and in place by the time the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee held its Unity Square Dance and Jamboree on Saturday, May 31, and proceeded to engage in election fraud right on national TV. That was the moment when SM, in a burst of inspiration, said, “Party Unity My Ass!” A few days later Hillary suspended her campaign, and the potential energy was released. Overnight, it seemed, Hillary’s supporters and fundraisers crystallized into a thousand different ad hoc Yahoo groups and mailing lists and blogs and petition sites, all trying to figure out how to make their voices heard and connect with like-minded souls. SM wrote up a history of those days in Happy PUMA 1-month Birthday! (”Those days” — jeez, it was less than a month ago. I sound like a Latin American revolutionary reminiscing about being in the jungles with Che.)
Riverdaughter did a great job of keeping the “PUMA” coinage up front and center, and it wasn’t long before that became the unofficial name of the whole movement. It’s catchy, it’s funny, and everybody likes seeing the big cat snarl. I know I never get tired of it:
The possums, of course, don’t understand what’s happening at all.
First of all, they really, really don’t grasp the concept of grassroots. They think “grassroots” means downloading a fundraiser widget from MyBarackObama.com to put on their MySpace. The notion of a spontaneous political movement, unled by any leader, arising in outraged reaction to injustice, is beyond them. Somebody, they mutter darkly to each other, must be behind this stupid cat thing. Is it Evil Hillary Herself? Is it the GOP? At the Great Orange Cheeto, possums write indignant posts asking why “somebody” doesn’t stop the PUMAs. They sign petitions to nowhere demanding that “somebody” do something about it. (It reminds me of children writing to Santa Claus, but I suppose that’s cruel.)
Secondly, the possums — as ever — simply cannot comprehend that millions of committed, progressive Democrats look at Barky Opossum and instead of seeing whatever the possums see (the Easter Bunny? Harvey?), they see corruption and sexism and media mendacity and creeping Republicanism. But since the possums cannot, or maybe will not, understand that fact, they’re forced to invent other reasons that Democrats might not want to vote for their hero. “You’re a racist!” is popular, with “you’re a Republican!” rapidly gaining ground. I’ve yet to be called a racist Republican, but perhaps that’s considered redundant.
I do wish the possums would take off the blinders for a moment and try to see what’s happening, because it’s a precious thing. Real grassroots democracy is rare in this country, almost extinct. And after the 18-month-long Pepsi commercial that is the Obama campaign, it’s incredibly refreshing.
Also see:
Archimedes’ Lever
A note on PUMAs and sexism
Posted by Violet in Election 2008, PUMA
