Welcome Party Speech Transcript

            Thank you, Kate, for that very kind introduction, and for entrusting this wonderful organization to a guy from Arkansas.  I also want to thank everyone who has worked so hard to put this party together, starting with Mirit Cohen, who catered tonight’s event.  Mirit is a sous chef in the legendary food service division at Google, and I am also lucky enough to be her boyfriend – I’ll pause here for a moment of collective envy.  Mirit and her colleagues, including Greg, Bobby, Cory, Josh, Jeff, Gabe, Sarah, and many other support staff at Google have worked tirelessly throughout the week to bring you this gourmet, organic, local, and sustainable feast tonight, and let’s give them all a big thank you and round of applause.  [APPLAUSE]  I also want to thank our inaugural recipients of the Leonard M. Salle Memorial Internship, Sean Spielberg and Jon Noronha, for all of their hard work putting this event together.  We’ve had many volunteers helping us out along the way, including Senior Fellow Ian Finseth and his wife Stephanie Hawkins, Elizabeth Lasensky, Maria Simon, Bill Hoeft, Robert Walker, Kris Bobier, Tom Coates, and many others.  Special thanks go to Al Mite Te Dollar, the Billionaire Magician, who has been delighting you all with his magic this evening, thank you Al Mite Te Dollar! [APPLAUSE] And let’s have one more round of applause for Sudeep Johnson and the Dancers for Democracy!  [APPLAUSE]  They’ll be back for one more number a little later on.
            And finally, I want to thank all of you for joining us tonight, and for doing so much to make me feel truly welcome as we embark on this journey together.  Over the last month I have had the opportunity to talk with quite a few of you, and I’m looking forward to many more conversations, but one thing has already struck me, and that is the unusual diversity of political viewpoints that Commonweal attracts.  I’ve talked with some of you who are left of the Left; others of you have strong libertarian leanings; still others approach the issues from multiple perspectives – but a couple of things unite us all -- #1, a strong dissatisfaction with the direction the country has taken under its current leadership, and #2, a commitment to progress, to making things better.  Everyone here is committed to progress.  You give your time, your talents, and your gifts to a vast array of causes you care about – poverty, the environment, reproductive rights, civil liberties, education.  You give to political candidates because they run on progressive ideas and policies.  And you support political parties – it’s their job to get this or that candidate elected, so you give to the Democrats, or maybe the Greens, the Libertarians, whoever.  You give nationally, you give locally, to your county party, for example—or if you don’t, you should, right Andrew Byrnes?  The point is that it takes a lot of effort and investment to be a responsible citizen committed to progress in a free society, and y’all do that—many of you have been doing it for years.
            And yet, we face such problems.  An occupation in Iraq with no end in sight.  Millions suffering without basic healthcare.  Evaporating freedoms.  Government-sanctioned torture.  Oh, and lest we forget, the world is melting!  Our conservative government failed to solve these problems, so we joined together and gave of ourselves to candidates and parties, only to find now that the current Congress is struggling to make progress happen too.  President Bush refuses to solve these problems and continues to claim unprecedented powers for the Executive Branch, so in 2006 Americans from across the political spectrum worked harder than ever to check him, but now we see that those victories have not yet resulted in a new direction for our government or for the country.  Frankly, this has a lot of committed, progressive people looking around in despair and asking themselves, what’s the point?
            The point is that it takes a movement, not just a party, to make social change happen.  The job of a political party is to get its candidates elected, and keep them in office – and that’s an important job.  But the job of a social movement, like conservatism or like the new progressive movement that is emerging today, our job is to advocate for a vision for society, a philosophy of governance, and the public policy solutions to get us there.  As an organized movement, we have to exert our social will in order to make political change happen.  We have to gather supporters and adherents, unite our voices and speak up for the things we care about.  That’s what creates the political will that enables our elected officials to act.  That’s the problem with how Congress has responded to the Iraq war—we the people have failed to create sufficient social will to force the politicians to do our political will.  That’s why what MoveOn.org is doing—thank you to our advisor, Joan Blades—is so important, bringing all the anti-war groups together and leading a strategic grassroots publicity campaign to bring mounting political pressure to bear on Congress and the President to end this occupation.  MoveOn is a model of what can be achieved when progressives cooperate with each other.  Now, I may be naïve to say this, but I do believe that someday the occupation of Iraq will end.  But the need for a progressive movement will never end.
            The Commonweal Institute is uniquely positioned to play a major role in this emerging movement. When Leonard Salle and Kate Forrest founded Commonweal in 2001, they were among the first to recognize the structural problems facing progressives. They understood that without a movement and the necessary infrastructure to support it, progressives would never see their values and ideas realized as policy—and this failure has become even clearer in recent years.  From the start, Commonweal has worked aggressively to build progressive infrastructure, and that’s a term we coined in our earliest business plan (just Google it, you’ll see!).
            Our most visible effort toward this goal was last year’s inaugural Progressive Roundtable, a first-of-its-kind event that brought together leading organizations and funders determined to build our capacity to communicate our values in more effective, more unified ways. The Progressive Roundtable served as a catalyst for new ideas, new working relationships, and a new understanding of each organization’s role within the larger movement.
            But today, convening can mean more than just throwing a bunch of people together in a room. As everyone here knows, the internet has revolutionized the ways we communicate with each other, creating unprecedented opportunities to harness the pent-up frustration and idealism of a whole new generation of activists. Commonweal has been supporting the progressive blogosphere since 2002, first with Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest and now with a much larger network of fellows, including Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, Bill Scher of LiberalOasis, and Mary Ratcliff of the Left Coaster. This network of widely-read and well-respected bloggers gives us a commanding platform for disseminating our values, our vision for society, and the ideas that will take us there.
            But before we can broadcast that message, we have to craft it.  To do so requires not only a clear understanding of progressive values but also detailed knowledge of who we are trying to reach and what moves them.  In other words, to be effective we have to combine our heartfelt principles with careful research and a scientific approach to the marketing of ideas.  Let me repeat that:  In order to be effective, we must combine our heartfelt principles with careful research and a scientific approach to the marketing of ideas.  Here, too, Kate and Len have recruited experts in the field to lead Commonweal’s efforts.  Our board member, Brooke Warrick, brings to our efforts groundbreaking methods of assessing the values that drive people’s decision-making—the fancy term for it is “psychographics.” And Judith Schwartz, our newest board member, brings to Commonweal years of experience as a creative marketing professional, producing emotionally compelling content in both traditional and online media.
            Under Kate and Leonard’s guidance and the steady leadership of my predecessor, Laurie Spivak, Commonweal has developed the institutional capacity to be an effective marketing shop for the progressive movement. Champions of the Left, if you will. A new progressive movement is emerging, and Commonweal is ready and able to help bring its message to the public.  Together, we can bring about the social change America so desperately needs.
            Social change and effective communication are two things I know something about. I’ve participated in politics at the grassroots level since college, but my background is actually in the arts, and I just finished my PhD in the Drama Department at Stanford.  For me, the arts are about connecting people, about creating shared experiences that expose us to new ideas and collective emotions.  In other words, the arts are about effective communication, reaching an audience, grabbing them by the lapels and showing them a new way of seeing things.  In this way, the arts play a vital role in creating community in this country, and I have spent many years creating communal experiences through visual, aural, and most of all emotional modes of artistic communication.
            Throughout our nation’s history, religion has also played a tremendous role in bringing us together in fellowship.  Religious belief has been at the bedrock of some of the most important social changes in our history – the abolitionist and temperance movements, the first progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement.  Sadly, though, today religion has become as much of a divisive force as it is a unifying one, and it has been robbed of its association with a vision for progress in American society.  It was this sad truth that led me to go back to graduate school.  First I earned a Masters degree in religion at Yale, and then I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the historical roots of the American evangelical movement.  Evangelism is an important concept for progressives to master, because evangelism means awakening in other people the same emotional and spiritual experiences and the same beliefs that you have.  For evangelical Protestants in early America, that shared experience was spiritual conversion, and what I studied was how they built a movement around that emotional rite of passage and a common set of values.
            I studied the early Methodists in particular, and I’m going to get a little nerdy here, because the Methodists have many lessons to offer us about what makes a successful social movement in America – small groups are the key – use spokespeople to take your message to the people – get people feeling, then talking – get people to tell their version of the story – speak from the heart – leverage family ties – women have the power – and on and on, but tonight I’d like to talk a little about one particular lesson:  sing from the same songbook.
            With the rise of the internet, today we are in the midst of a revolution in mass media.  But in the early 19th century, evangelicals like the Methodists were at the leading edge of the first real media revolution in America—the mass production of the printed word. For the first time in human history, pamphlets, newspapers, the penny press, all kinds of literature were affordable and accessible to ordinary citizens.  As part of a broad cultural phenomenon known as the Second Great Awakening, Methodism succeeded as a social movement by taking advantage of that new technology to unite its adherents around a shared story and common values.  Itinerant preachers – they called them circuit riders – traveled on horseback around the countryside spreading the good word, and they supplemented their income by selling books, especially Bibles and songbooks.  People who lived lonely, isolated lives out on the frontier treated their hymnals as devotional material, to sing and meditate on the spiritual life.  But songbooks really achieved their power in community, when Methodists came together for their famous outdoor camp meetings – old fashioned revivals.  By coming together and singing from the same songbook, people were suddenly able to share their private spiritual experiences with a large community of like-minded believers.  The frontier man and his family weren’t alone anymore, and together, a better life seemed possible.
To illustrate this, I’d like to lead you all in a little audience participation activity.  Are you ready?  Okay, first of all, everybody unsucker your pucker, stand up a little straighter, take a deep breath, and let it go.  Let’s do it again, this time with a little sigh – take a deep breath – and let it go – ahhh.  So, we’re gonna do a little singing now, so first, everyone stop and think of a favorite patriotic song – there are lots to choose from, right?  The national anthem, You’re a Grand Ol’ Flag, This Land is Your Land, My Country Tis of Thee, God Bless America – plenty of options.  Okay, take a second – everybody got one?  Got it fixed in your mind?  Remember the first line?  Alright, now, on the count of three, everyone take a deep breath and sing that song, the song you picked out, nice and loud.  Ready?  Okay, 1-2-3—

            [SONG]

            See, we all know something about what it means to be American.  But it doesn’t have the same oomph as when we all sing from the same songbook.  So now let’s try it again, and this time, let’s all sing “America the Beautiful” – everyone remember how it goes?  What’s the first line, somebody?  “O Beautiful for spacious skies” – exactly.  [SING] “O Beautiful for spacious skies” – So let’s try it again – on the count of 3, everyone take a deep breath and sing out, nice and strong – here’s the pitch – everybody ready?  1-2-3—

            [SONG]

            That’s the difference. That right there is the potential we need to unlock. Instead of a cacophony of muddled voices, we have to shout it out in one voice, telling one story, singing one song. Right now, all over the country, millions of progressives are struggling to make their voices heard, and we have the power to change that. We have the people, we have the knowledge, we have the tools, and now I believe we have the will to create the change.  An extraordinary future is at our fingertips. A progressive majority for America, a progressive future for society. The American dream with liberty and justice for all, a progressive vision for the world.
            In closing, I want to tell you that I really believe Kate and Len started something special here six years ago, something powerful, something insightful and ambitious – and I’m here to tell you that together, we can do this.  So Commonweal is going to keep on bringing progressives together – we will be here to orchestrate the chant that rises to a shout that will carry from here all the way to Washington, from way WAY outside the Beltway, to shake the halls of power. And the more we sing this song and lead this chant, the more we talk about what we believe in, the more we will gather people to our cause, and persuade them to join us in trumpeting ever louder our values and our vision for the future of this country.  It started here six years ago, it’s starting again here tonight, I hope you will join us, because together we can do this – thank you very much for being here, and have a great night!