Endorsements A Go-Go

by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Just a quickie on a bunch of endorsements from over the weekend.  Xavier Becerra came out for Obama this weekend, which could combine with Ted Kennedy's endorsement to provide a lot of support in the Latino community.  Apparently, Kennedy will be campaigning in California.  This is a counterweight to the United Farm Workers' endorsement of Hillary Clinton last week.  But I was interested by Tom Hayden's endorsement, not of Obama, but actually for the movement he has inspired.  From an email:

I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama's moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through. There really is no comparison between the Obama generation and those who would come to power with Hillary Clinton, and I suspect she knows it. The people she would take into her administration may have been reformers and idealists in their youth, but they seem to seek now a return to their establishment positions of power. They are the sorts of people young Hillary Clinton herself would have scorned at Wellesley. If history is any guide, the new "best and brightest" of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

Many ordinary Americans will take a transformative step down the long road to the Rainbow Covenant if Obama wins. For at least a brief moment, people around the world -- from the shantytowns to the sweatshops, even to the restless rich of the Sixties generation -- will look up from the treadmills of their shrunken lives to the possibilities of what life still might be. Environmental justice and global economic hope would dawn as possibilities.

I've been saying for a while now that, regardless of the President, what will create this "change" that everyone's been bandying about is we the people.  The coalition that Obama represents does offer an opportunity to build such a movement, at a level that Clinton does not appear to be attempting to build.  It's certainly fragile, and may fracture once the Republicans prove resistant to a rhetoric of "post-partisanship" and working together.  But it's our best hope.