With Barack Obama as the democratic nominee for the presidency, a long and arduous primary season seems to be slowly but surely winding down. Talk around the office between the summer fellows has drawn a lot of parallels between Breakthrough’s ideology and Barack Obama’s message, and it seems that, if not in the same words, Barack Obama is working towards the same asset-based, inspiring politics of possibility that we aspire to bring to society. All this has brought an important question to my mind: what kind of individual, personal actions can help focus each of our efforts on a politics of possibility?
Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, political talk is all talk—shop talk, dinner party conversation, idle chatter, pre-preview movie theater whispers—all anyone talks about is politics. I entered my first year of college in the Boston area last September, and the election and political talk, while not as pervasive, was definitely in the air. This didn’t strike me as all that odd until a friend who grew up outside Boston told me that this level of talk about the political process, in fact any level, was completely new to her. Upon further reflection, I was surprised and encouraged by the level of political conversation that had sprouted up, not just on my campus, but apparently across the country. The candidates were strong willed, and Obama especially seemed to galvanize supporters in a way that had not been seen for a while. Obama clearly reaches and brings to the fore an active, politically interested aspect to many Americans. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Adam Zemel 
