If we stop organizing, Obama and the rest of us lose.  It's as simple as that.  In Philly we're getting the organizing started tonight with a Town Hall Meeting entitled "We Can Be The Change We Seek."  We'll hear from some young political leaders, how we can get involved in the health care issue, and then break down into neighborhood groups to deal with the nitty-gritty of staying organized the Obama way.  And those neighborhood groups will get networked across our City.  And they will have a voice in City politics and also on national issues.

So, if you think Obama can now cure the common cold and stop global warming on his first day in office, you should not come to the Town Hall.  But if you think we need to develop effective, democratic and diverse ways of building progressive infrastructure for the long haul, and if you happen to live in the Philly area, here's where to go tonight: First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut Street from 7-9 PM.  

So here we are, millions of us, having gone on an exhilarating ride and now wondering what to do. We loved working for Obama, and we found we also loved working with our neighbors, in our neighborhoods, for a common purpose.  Now we won, but both experiences are over.  So here is what my group, in Philly, is doing to keep us from crashing.

We're Neighborhood Networks, and we're holding a Town Hall meeting for all those Obama volunteers now suffering withdrawal symptoms.  We're going to meet in Center City, hear from some great local progressive leaders, and then break into small, neighborhood-based groups.  

We're going to ask those groups to talk about the change they want in their neighborhood, city, state and nation.  Then we're going to ask them to go back to their neighborhoods and bring more people together around the change they want.  And then we're going to educate people on the political system, including who all their reps are at every government level.  Networking together we'll have the capacity to put a strong, genuinely grass roots, lobbying force in the field on any issue on which we have consensus.  And that should be a lot.  For instance right now we have a City budget crisis and the Mayor has decided on mass library closings as a partial answer.  It's doubtful too many progressives like that, but we don't have a real voice.  Organized neighborhood by neighborhood, we can have it.

One day the Democrats will dare to win. That day hasn't arrived in Pennsylvania.

Yes, there are races that are being hotly contested.  But the willingness and heart to go to the center of Republican rule isn't there.  Case in point, the free ride being given to the Republican Speaker of the state House, John Perzel.

It's not that Perzel doesn't have an outstanding opponent.  He does, Tim Kearney, a Democrat who is, has been, and always will be a down the line progressive on every issue Democrats ought to be taking on but too often aren't.

I'm Stan Shapiro, one of the founders of Neighborhood Networks in Philadelphia.  At the end of this post you will find details about our September 30 Philadelphia conference at which we will not only talk about, but actually do "Politics from the Ground Up".  If you'd like to go to the registration page right now, you can click on the following link:  http://www.phillynn.org/  

But first, here's a brief guided tour through the swamps of Philadelphia Democratic Party politics, which will tell you why we started up Neighborhood Networks, and what we hope to accomplish, starting with a little detour to review the national picture.

Just about everyone at this site wants to build new Democratic majorities in '06 and get rid of the stench of one party, right wing rule in DC.  But it's hard to get very enthusiastic about replacing the Party that's in with the Party that's out when the latter shows so little real conviction about moving the country any place at all in particular.  So as we go about getting rid of as many Republicans as we can, we need to simultaneously organize intently and well to transform our own Party into one that has some idea of why it should be governing.

Doing that has to start in the local communities in which we all live.

In Philadelphia, where Democrats outnumber Republicans in registration 3 to 1, we have one of the most ingrained, incestuous and tin-eared Democratic Parties on earth.  In City Council, you often cannot tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats.  For instance, in recent years there have been repeated efforts to completely repeal the City's main business tax -- the Business Privilege Tax -- which brings in 15% of all local City revenue.  Council Republicans were basking in these efforts, openly bragging that this was Republican policy being pushed by Democrats.   Yet at one point 8 of the 14 Council Democrats voted to strip the City of these funds.  The legislation failed only because of a Mayoral veto that fell one vote short of being overridden.  Many of the Democratic candidates running for Mayor and Council next year will have sharp business tax cuts as central planks in their platform.  This in a town facing huge social problems such as out of control murder rates, and massive poverty, and precious little cash to deal with them.

Just two days ago, the local Party ward leaders gathered to nominate candidates to fill three vacancies in Council.  Since Philly is an overwhelmingly Democratic town, the party picks are virtually assured of election.  All three seats were filled by ward leaders in a closed door process which involved absolutely no public discussion of issues. One of the new Council members annointed has a number of campaign finance irregularities on her record, including a conviction for failing to disclose how her well-oiled PAC has raised and spent money.  No one in the Party machinery cared.

The Philadelphia Party is a major cog in a Pennsylvania machine whose modus operandi is much the same.  The state Party repeatedly rallies around conservative or issue-free candidates who lose.  This will never change unless some of us who have a different vision can figure out how to bring the Party out of its shell and into contact with real people.  Or else we will have to figure out how to nominate candidates that are real Democrats regardless of the Party's preference for DINOS (Dems in name only.)

Technically, there is a way to invade the Party machinery in Philly via the ballot box.  Any registered Democrat in Philadelphia has a chance every four years to run to be a committeeperson.  Committeepeople are at the lowest rung of the Party, but they elect the wardleaders who actually run the operation.  So if we could elect people to fill a sizable number of the 3300 committee posts, we could actually take the Party back.  But the next committeeperson election isn't until 2010.  And overcoming the entrenched positions of the holders of these posts is a monumentally difficult job.

But some of us think there's another way.  That's why we formed Neighborhood Networks in June of last year.  Our central idea is for progressives in neighborhoods all around the city to organize themselves to do the work of committeepeople without formally holding that position. To be "shadow" committeepeople, if you will.  In turn these progressive listening posts for their neighbors would elect unofficial ward coordinators, and they, in turn, would sit on a "shadow" City Committee to endorse candidates and organize around issues.

Now if such a shadow organization came into existence, it could largely bypass the power of the Party to designate whichever warhorses of the moment it wished to promote.  Neighborhood Networks, so organized, could develop a people oriented platform, organize to bring that platform into the public domain, and demand that candidates it supports pledge to implement it.  With a ready made progressive infrastructure ready to go for progressive candidates, many activists who would never ordinarily dream of running for office could have a real shot to win.  And sooner, rather than later, the Party machinery itself, would have to find a way to let us in.

Can we do this?  Well, at our founding Convention in June of 2005 we attracted some 200 activists from all around the City, living in 33 of the City's 66 wards.  We now have ward organizations in most of those areas, and they all expect to be energized and active in next year's election.  A draft platform is in the works.  On Saturday, September 30, Neighborhood Networks will have its second Convention at Temple University Law School, where we will have a raft of speakers and workshops on how to further invigorate this movement.  The first plenary on grassroots organizing will feature Chris Bowers webmaster of this site, Chuck Pennacchio who ran an excellent grass roots campaign for the Democratic Senatorial nomination, and Anne Dicker from Philly for Change, another new grass-roots Philly organization fighting to rebuild the Party.  Throughout the day there will be a raft of issue and skills building workshops with many of Philly's top activists and organizers, and then we will break down into our neighborhood groups to deal with the nitty gritty of challenging the Party structure.

Again, anyone interested in joining this effort can register for the conference at our website, http://www.phillynn.org/  I promise to keep you posted on our progress.  If there are other efforts like ours happening in other places, please let us all know.