Hope. Experience. Politics is Personal. Change. New Politics. Unity. Frist!!!...errrr First.
We're hearing these words and phrases a lot lately as they are intrinsic parts of campaign messages leaking through the diaries.
Hope
I have Hope. But not because of any movement or possible leader is coming along to inspire me. Indeed, every time I look at or talk to my niece, I am inspired...and full of hope for her future and will work hard to elect a presidential candidate who will make sure that if she needs an abortion, she can get one--legally. I will fight to make sure that she doesn't have to worry about the phone companies tapping her line to make sure she is behaving like a "good little sheep."
The short fighter in UpState NY, the one who has gone through this past year's nightmare with my sister's illness and the shifts in homes and schools with a bright smile on her face, inspires me more than any single presidential candidate can.
Hope doesn't "belong" to one candidate. I have Hope. Hope was the last thing left in Pandora's Box--there is always Hope.
Experience
Experience is an intangible when it comes to activism and civic participation. Each of these candidates comes prepared with a whole host of life experiences in which they have done something...or many things to try and change the world (or their corner of it). Some have worked as activists in organized 19XD through 19FR situations that fit neatly on the resume. Others have been engaged in cases that accomplished small and great actions in favor of the "little guy." Still others have been part of the formation of organizations, engaged in conversations, argued cases...and so on.
Some here have argued that quantity trumps quality. Others have argued that quality trumps quantity. Still others have suggested that a combination of quantity and quality might be the way to go with interpretation of the experience being discussed.
Any which way, Experience is a concept...something that helps us gauge the effort that a job applicant has put in that makes him or her qualified to do X job. We can have experience. We can argue whether or not X, Y, or Z experience matters. But the concept is certainly not owned by any one candidate.
Politics is Personal
Whoever said that a particular candidate "owns" the concept of Politics as Personal is completely ignoring the fact that the concept of Personal (vis a vis Identity) Politics has been around for a very very very long time.
Tip O'Neill once commented that "all politics is local." And boy, did he ever have a point.
If you go into research databases like Sage and so on, you'll find hundreds of references to the various and sundry ways that the personal plays into politics.
From the development of Amber's Law to ENDA, Identity Politics wherein a
political action [is used] to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race or gender).
Indeed, some of what you'll find in those databases will criticize the concept of Identity Politics as being inherently separatist as each group separates into sub-groups to focus specifically on their particular branch of politics rather than on the bigger picture. And while the critiques have some minor points in that the larger Progressive movement is often fraught with fragments and fissures, I hardly think that it's the "politics of despair" that Joan Mandel asserts.
Rather, it is the identity...the personal...that gets us motivated to step out and "make some noise in this world" (h/t Robbie Robertson):
In the 1991 abstract for his article "Carl Rogers-Values, Persons, and Politics The Dialectic of Individual and Community," William Casparay notes that the communication style of Carl Rogers (BTW it's a style of communication that I've been discussing in my classes since 1998 when I first started teaching) offers up a space in which the personal and political can be merged to create a new dialogue space where
latent ideas about the individual within the community centered approach and latent notions about community within the person-centered approach [are explored]. As these implicit ideas are developed [in the article], a picture emerges of complex relations between person, community, economy, and polity that might enrich the Rogerian and the neopopulist approach.
We take who we are, we take what we want to see happen (and what we don't want to see happen), we take our joys and sorrows, we take it all and we enter into the politicalsphere and work to make the world a better place for our kids...neighbors...selves...people we don't even know. We do that, in part, because "politics is personal."
The phrase, one that appears to have been officially around since some time in the 1970s, cannot be "owned." It doesn't belong to one campaign with a ™ attached to it.
Every time we blog, march, write letters, rant for a cause from a personal point of view (e.g. rsevern, nameless soldier, Meteor Blades, and so on) we inject a part of who we are into what we are doing. We do it because we want change. We use our experiences to underscore that desire for change. We hope for the future. But none of us has cornered the market on any of these concepts...regardless of their use in political messages.
In closing, I give you Mr. Smith and the idea that "politics is personal":
Oh...and here's an interesting publication from the Democracy and Civil Society Programme called "Personal Politics: Democracy, Participation, and Collective Action."
(Note to novelists...I promise...there will be a NaNo novel diary tomorrow...)