THE
IDEALISTS
sons over the last four years, and
the most important lesson I’ve
learned is that you can’t change
Washington from the inside,” he
said. “You can only change it from
the outside.”
Obama went on to talk about
the need to pressure Congress.
But the record clearly shows that
pressuring the president is also a
key part of the equation.
After Obama was elected, the
mass movement that had put him
in office essentially disintegrated.
“Everyone sort of put all their
hopes and dreams in that basket,”
Robinson said. People went back
home and figured Obama would
take care of everything. “There
was not a lot of early pushing of
the administration,” he said.
Later on, however, on those occasions that progressive groups were
able to mobilize their supporters
again, they often saw results.
After months of pressure and
protests from the gay community,
for instance, Obama finally started
working the phones on “don’t ask,
don’t tell” and signed the repeal
into law on December 22, 2010.
A few months later, Attorney
General Eric Holder announced
that Obama had decided that
DOMA was unconstitutional, and
HUFFINGTON
11.04.12
had instructed the Justice Department not to defend the statute in
court any more.
And in May 2012, Obama said
he supported gay marriage.
“I’m fine now,” Aravosis said. “In
the end what he did was huge. We
had to push extremely hard, and
I didn’t enjoy that, but in the end
we got more than enough for me to
“OBAMA IS NOT GOING TO
BE THE HERO. IF WORK
NEEDS TO BE DONE, WE
NEED TO DO IT. WE NEED
TO BE THE HEROES IN
OUR STORY.”
support the man for reelection.”
Obama’s waffling on the Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline
during the summer of 2011 turned
out the be the issue that finally
drove environmentalists into the
streets, including two large protests outside the White House in
August and November of that year.
“I think the community came
together really well to say: Look,
we’re drawing the line right here,
and we need to see good policy from
this point forward,” said Phil Radford, who heads Greenpeace U.S.A.