Repeat after me, boys and girls, this mantra: PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION.

I don't give a damn whether you're so liberal you wear leaves for shoes to keep from hurting cows or so conservative you recoil at the idea of a public ANYTHING...we are SOOOOOO close, guys, to literally changing history, that we cannot, we WILL NOT...blow it at this point by bickering amongst our little Democratic selves because we're not getting every single little itty bitty solitary thing we want in a health care bill or any other bill that is before congress these days.

Furthermore, what's up with trashing our own president day and night, night and day? 

Doesn't he get anough of that crap on Faux News all the time?  Hasn't he got enough enemies?  Do you really WANT a President Palin in three years?

I mean, seriously.  I'm asking you.  Do you really, really want a President Palin, or a President Conservative Republican in a few years or even a conservative congress obstructing everything President Obama tries to do because WHHHYYYY?

Because, the Independents he so desperately needs to maintain his majority and his office have been siphoned off because whenever they turned to the Democrats or to any Democratic forum, all they saw was Obama getting ripped apart as badly as they saw him getting ripped apart by the Republicans so, therefore, they decided, he must be some kind of turd.

Time to vote Republican, eh?

Wow.  It took us less than a year to destroy everything we worked for in 2008, didn't it?

And no, before you attack, let me go into some detail on WHY I think President Obama is actually doing a helluva lot better job than many of you do, and why so much of it is under the radar of most of the media attention and most of the Talking Heads' attention on both the left and the right.

I've been stockpiling articles beside my elbow since summer on this, so I'll have Links Galore, as is my wont.  Some pretty good stuff.  I think you'll like it.  And I think that, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you are a Teabagger, you will feel better at the end of this post.

It'll be loosely divided into three parts.

First:  PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION

I've only got one source on this one, but it's so good I'm going to quote extensively from him.  That would be Paul Begala, who as we all know, was a consultant to President Clinton during the last health care battle.  His piece, in the Washington Post, came out last August but is still timely and is titled, wouldn't you know?  "Progress Over Perfection."

He writes:

Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I've never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn't generous enough; I've never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn't included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

He goes on to say that, for example, if the public option does not make it into today's version of the bill, that does not necessarily mean that it never will.  But to completely derail the entire health care reform bill, to table it flat-out, simply because one aspect of it is not included, would be a tragedy that could take decades for us to recover from, as he so painfully points out:

I carry a heavy burden of regret from my role in setting the bar too high the last time we tried fundamental health reform. I was one of the people who advised President Bill Clinton to wave his pen at Congress in 1994 and declare: "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again." I helped set the bar at 100 percent -- "guarantee every American" -- and after our failure it's taken us 15 years to start all over again.

So I am trying to find the right blend of principle and pragmatism -- ever mindful that, aside from race, health care is the most difficult domestic issue of the past century. FDR couldn't pass it. Nor could Truman, nor Nixon nor Carter nor Clinton. Lesser presidents like George W. Bush didn't even try.

The Founders gave us a standard: "a more perfect Union." It's an odd phrase; we don't generally speak of something becoming "more perfect." I believe it means that we have a duty, every generation, to make progress. For a dozen generations we have done that, in our imperfect way. Let's hope those writing the new health-reform bill can give us something that represents historic progress -- and that those of us most passionately committed to fundamental reform can celebrate progress, not lament a lack of perfection.

I don't think that anyone could question the liberal credentials of Paul Begala.  I believe he was sincere when he wrote this piece and I have also heard long-time congresspeople echo his comments that other pieces of landmark legislation, such as civil rights legislation, came in increments.

CHANGE comes in increments.

That hairy, ugly caterpiller doesn't do a pretty little whirlagig and unfurl his gorgeous wings all at once.  He builds an ugly cocoon and holes up.  If you've ever seen a cocoon busted open before its time, it's pretty ugly.

Legislation moving its way through congress is about as pretty, which brings me to the second part:

"WHY CAN'T OBAMA BE MORE LIKE LBJ?"

I hear this all the time.  Liberals criticizing Obama because, presumably, he's not twisting arms, kicking Democratic ass and taking Democratic names like Lyndon Johnson presumably did when he got the Voting Rights Act and Medicare passed in the 60's.

I always wonder, first of all...what makes you so damn sure he's NOT?

More on that, later.

First, a quick bit of history.  Keep in mind that when LBJ first came into office--and I'm not even counting that terrible day in Dallas 46 years ago; I'm just talking about after he got elected in a landslide in 1964.  Understand that he had a great deal of sympathy behind him because a lot of what he was championing had been talked about by Kennedy, but also understand that Johnson had been a congressman and then a senator (serving as minority leader and majority leader) for many years, (decades, actually), so he had many friends in both houses AND a powerful fellow Texan as the Speaker of the House in Sam Rayburn. 

All these things gave him advantages that Obama does not have.

Also, back then, there were moderate Republicans who could be cajoled and threatened and horse-traded for votes.  It was a different era, a different time.  Even a different media--remember, back then, most of the press knew about JFK's lady friends and affairs but did not write about them.  It was an old boys' club in many ways, both for the media and the government.

That said.

Let's examine what President Obama HAS been doing, and it's waaaay more than you may think.

First of all, I hear liberals, especially in places like Huffington Post, or on shows like Ed Schultz, howl that Obama has "sold out" to Big Pharma or the AMA or some other lobbyist to get health care concessions, as if making those agreements is going to leave children shivering naked in corporate doorways somewhere.

But those criticisms are completely missing the point, as was BINGOED by no less a liberal source than Mother Jones, and no less a liberal writer than Kevin Drum, in his piece, "The Long, Hard Slog Revisited"

In it, he points out that, again, in order to win over Independents, you have to go about it in an entirely different way than you would if you were reaching out to your own partisans during, say, a political campaign:

(quoting Jonathan Bernstein)

Loose partisans and true independents aren't ideologues and are unlikely to become ideologues. What you probably can do -- what Reagan probably did -- is to teach them....But you don't do that by reasoning with them, or with inspiring them with great speeches. You mostly do that, as crude as it sounds, by winning. You do it by creating winning coalitions that put Establishment People on your side.

....The convincing doesn't happen, either in the short term or the long term, from presidential eloquence. The convincing comes when, for example, you've been a Republican main street AMA member all your professional life, and you suddenly find that the AMA is supporting health care reform while the Republicans are attacking the AMA. Even then, you may still be resistant to Obama...until you start hearing him saying the things that you're reading in the AMA newsletter (or however the AMA communicates with doctors. I don't know).

Now, there's no question that Obama and the Democrats in Congress are doing this.  They've basically coopted the insurance companies, the AMA, big pharma, AARP, and corporate interests by giving away goodies to all of them.  This isn't exactly the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes law, but it's certainly the real-world way.  And it works pretty well as long as you can get the coalitions to stick together and keep the bribery from stinking up the joint too badly.

But does this actually move public opinion at the same time?  Maybe! 

...There's no question, though, that winning is indeed a powerful aphrodisiac.  Healthcare reform might be controversial right now, but if Obama gets a bill onto his desk and signs it, it will become a huge triumph almost overnight.  Support for both the bill and for Obama will rise steadily, and Democrats of all kinds will reap the benefit of being seen as tough enough and savvy enough to get it passed.  This is the fundamental reason that I'm optimistic about healthcare reform.  Every Democrat in Congress knows that if reform fails, they'll be viewed as losers and they'll pay the price at the polls in November.  They have to pass something if they want to remain in power.  That's a prospect that concentrates the mind powerfully.

I hate to put it in simplistic terms like "winning" and "losing" but America seems to be on this reality TV streak these days, and they see a lot of things as winners and losers.  And they know more about what's going on in Washington than the wingnuts would have you believe.  If health care dies, the majority of Americans will know that the Republicans killed it, but they will also know that the Democrats let it die.

That the Democrats lost.

And they won't trust us with anything again.

We've got to keep the momentum going, and get health care passed.  We can work out some of our more passionate details later, as we had to do with Medicare, Social Security, civil rights, and other landmark legislation.  Would have been a damn pity not to have passed those at all just because they weren't perfect in their original form.

Win.  Lose.  It's a CHOICE.

And it's more up to us than you might think, but more on that later.

Another criticism I've seen is that Obama has not been specific enough on the bill, that he's left entirely too much up to congress, that he has not "owned" it, that he's stayed too much in the background.

But a longtime denizen of Capitol Hill sees it in far more realistic terms.  Writing for the Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute posited back in September that he was seeing from the administration "signs of savvy, not weakness."

Ornstein put his finger on the the fickle mood of the public when he pointed out that:

Without some guarantee that reform thus defined will be enacted for the vast majority of Americans, the likelihood has always been that the closer government gets to enacting change, the more nervous voters would get about embracing the devil they don't know. And the closer one gets to broad change affecting 16 percent of the economy and a hefty slice of the workforce, the more those whose incomes depend on the current system will fight to keep their share.

He then went into the obvious--that there IS no broad bi-partisan leadership support OR broad bi-partisan majority in either house, in any political universe, and reminded readers that this is similar to what faced Clinton in 1994; only today, the filibuster lines drawn in the sand make every issue a 60-vote battle.

How to prevail under these difficult circumstances? The only realistic way was to avoid a bill of particulars, to stay flexible, and to rely on congressional party and committee leaders in both houses to find the sweet spots to get bills through individual House and Senate obstacle courses. Under these circumstances, the best intervention from the White House is to help break impasses when they arise and, toward the end, the presidential bully pulpit and the president's political capital can help to seal the deal.

He goes on to make his final case--as did Paul Begala--that

The odds remain reasonable that a solid, if not dramatic, health reform bill can make it through this process and become law. Any bill, under these conditions, will be a major accomplishment. The odds have been improved, not damaged, by the president's approach.

Again, though, there are those who want to know why President Obama is not more the arm-twister like LBJ, and AGAIN, I ask...How do you know he is NOT?

Several articles I've come across indicate that the president is doing far, far more behind the scenes than most of us realize.

An in-depth profile of Obama's team, called "Taking the Hill," by Matt Bai, published in the New York Times magazine back in June of 2009, set up how Obama structured his White House to organize for various legislative battles.  I'll go into that first, and then, a short piece in the Times from back in September, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Taking Health Care Courtship Up Another Notch," more or less demonstrated that team in motion as it worked the phones, the restaurants, the meetings, even the gyms, during the committee process to garner votes to get the bill out of the Baucus Finance committee. 

Both are highly instructive as to how the Obama White House is far more active, alive, and energetic in the legislative process--quietly and behind the scenes--than most people realize. 

It is, in fact, a brilliant strategy, because it enables the towering egos of the House and Senate to get their moments before the cameras, their home-town papers, and their constituents, while quietly building one of the biggest legislative achievements of the past century for their president.

If, as he hopes, they are able to get this health care reform legislation passed, in its entirety, in time for his State of the Union speech in January of 2010, it will be a triumph not just for him, but for the American people.

In Matt Bai's Times Magazine piece, he points out that Obama's White House "methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history."

Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn't only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it's also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And it's not just his choice of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff, who everybody by now knows was a congressman who was largely credited with helping to build the current congressional Democratic majority and who was on the fast-track to make Speaker of the House--that was key to this strategy, but also his choice of Joe Biden for vice-president.

"I'm a Senate guy," Biden told me bluntly when I visited him a few weeks ago in his West Wing office. "It's been my whole life, and I'm incredibly proud of it. Other presidents I've worked with, they view Congress almost as a constitutional impediment, you know?"

Not only have former congressional aides been hired at the White House and used extensively for their access, but from the beginning, Obama and his team have searched for creative ways to include congressmen and women, and their families, at White House events, both formal and informal, (as of mid-May, when the article was being prepared, more than 300 congresspersons and 80 senators had visited the White House), and it has paid off.

When Matt Bai asked Sen. Baucus his impression of President Obama, he gave this thoughtful response:

"How do I say this delicately?" he asked. "President Bush, he liked being president. You know, there are be-ers, and there are doers. And I think he liked being president, as opposed to doing." Obama, on the other hand, strikes Baucus as a doer. "You've really got to work at it, rather than just enjoying the job," he said.

Rahm Emmanuel has been known to give out his cellphone number to every Democratic senator (and some Republicans too), and, like Biden, often works out at the congressional gym.

And it's not just that senators meet with the president that is important.  It's HOW they meet with him:

Obama is not the schmoozer that Clinton was, nor does he bestow nicknames like Bush. Rather, he has impressed lawmakers with a direct, businesslike manner and an outward deference to the legislative branch. As Obama mulled whether to nominate Sonia Sotomayor or some other jurist to the Supreme Court last month, he called every member of the Judiciary Committee personally, taking the "advise" part of "advise and consent" to a level that impressed some longtime senators. "This is the first time I've ever been called by a president on a Supreme Court nomination, be it a Republican or a Democrat," Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney of The Times after Sotomayor's nomination was announced. A hallmark of Obama's style, in these early months, has been to meet with key senators alone, without the phalanx of aides who almost always attend Oval Office meetings. Three senators with whom I spoke, including Baucus, had been impressed by this tactic; it implies equality between the branches of government and enables Obama to establish personal relationships more quickly than he otherwise might. ("You been hunting lately?" Obama asked Ben Nelson when the Nebraska senator walked into the Oval Office and found himself, much to his surprise, alone with the president.)[emphasis mine] 

All these meetings have actually angered some on the left, who claim that it does no good to try and compromise on things like the public option or the Stupak amendment, because it will only water down the bill to basically nothing; that we should simply ram it through on reconciliation with 51 votes exactly as we please. 

Simply do as Bush did with his tax cuts and get on with it.

But Sen. Baucus cautions, and President Obama has also mentioned on the stump, that the dangers of reconciliation are that a future Republican administration could far more easily dismantle the program. What the president and the Democratic congress want to do is put into place a reform package that will stay in place for the ages, even if it has to be done in increments.

(There are other, procedural problems with reconciliation that I'm not going to go into here because I've already taken up too much space for most of you to keep reading, as it is.)

In Stolberg's piece in the Times, which was published on September 27 (link up above), during the committe process when Susan Collins' vote was being heavily wooed by the White House, there are a number of people besides JUST Rahm Emmanuel who the White House sent to talk to Sen. Collins, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, White House budget director Peter Orszag, and on and on.

It was courtship by committee.

Call it what you will, it worked.

So...what were you saying about LBJ?

And last part, HOW CAN WE BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE?

In Anna Quindland's powerful cover story for Newsweek, "Hope Springs Eternal" (which appeared on the cover as "Yes He Can: A Liberal's Survival Guide"), she goes straight for the jugular when she makes the visceral point that there is, indeed, a big difference between campaigning and GOVERNING.

From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.

History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

She goes on to detail promises that President Obama made during the campaign that impatient progressives fault him for not having fulfilled yet in his mere nine months in office, as if all he had to do were to wave his magic wand and POOF! it would take place.  (And although, yes, there are some things that he can cause to happen in just that way through executive order, he must also weigh the relative wisdom of such a course of action versus going about it in another, albeit slower method--again, that would be less likely to be dismantled later.  It doesn't mean it will never happen.  It just might take a bit longer.)

The president is a person of nuance. But on both ends of the political number line, nuance is seen as wishy-washy. There's no nuance in partisan attacks, soundbites, slogans, which is why Barack Obama didn't run with the lines "Some change you might like if you're willing to settle" or "Yes, we can, but it will take a while."

That's really how our government works, by inches...

Americans point to events ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Voting Rights Act to show that America knows how to think--and act--big. But a stroll through actual history, as opposed to the cherry-tree-chopping sort, provides a different narrative. Many abolitionists decried Lincoln's executive order, which freed few slaves and failed to make the buying and selling of humans illegal, while conservatives thought it was radical and unwise. In other words, it was a smallish, moderate, middle-ground measure. And while it has become gospel that Franklin Roosevelt utterly transformed the public weal through the New Deal, he was so frustrated by the opposition of conservative members of his own party that he proposed to Wendell Willkie that the liberal Democrats and the liberal Republicans join together to create a liberal party.

She then goes on to quote Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who actually worked for LBJ, who stated that LBJ was able to accomplish what he did, in part, by promising Congress that they would be making history, and that, "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment.  They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people."

Which brings me to my final point:

 She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt--Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls."

Now, this is the thing, my friends.

We've been making a fine noise on this health care reform business, but mostly, we've been making it amongst ourselves, bickering and arguing back and forth with each other, blasting our own president for not doing this or doing too much of that, threatening to boycott this or not vote for that--and that goes for our own members in the House and Senate!

What the hell is WRONG with us?

WE CAN'T DO THIS NOW!

Not NOW.

We are too close.

WE ARE IN THE MAJORITY AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM EVEN IF IT DOESN'T CONTAIN EVERY SINGLE LITTLE THING WE WANT.

My daughter is 29 years old.  She works so hard she can barely walk sometimes but she does not have health care right now.  I want her to be able to have health care.  I would love for her to be able to choose from a public option, but that may not be possible.  I would hope that, at least, with millions more consumers, with checks and balances and regulations provided, that she would be able to find an affordable plan through health care reform.

She won't even have THAT option if we don't stop fighting amongst ourselves, Democrats.

Some of us don't even care, as Charles M. Blow points out in his op-ed, "Health Care Hullabaloo."  He wrote it last August, but he said that even though 8 in 10 Democrats favored health care reform, it was the right-wingnutters who were dominating the airwaves because THEY were the ones who were jumping up and getting active about it.

Now, I know many many Democrats who called congresspeople, some who went door to door or called neighbors or donated to Organizing for America or blogged or did whatever they could, but I knew about ten times as many who barely paid any attention at all, and in the time being?

The nutcases started winning over the Independents.  May not seem like that big a deal right now, but it will in a few years, trust me.

But I'll give the final word to Bob Herbert of the New York Times, "Changing the World."

It's so easy to criticize Obama because, hey, he promised CHANGE and he hasn't done it yet, eh?

But he can't do it without us.  WE are the change.  He needs us to have his back, not for us to stand around throwing rotten tomatoes at him because he's not working fast enought to suit us, or because what he's doing is not perfect enough or because he won't show us what is going on inside the cocoon, right?

Herbert writes:

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

"Dear Mom and Dad," it says, "I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi -- June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew's brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis.

He goes on to point out some of the more obvious problems facing our nation: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unemployment and foreclosures and homelessness, the H1N1 flu virus, suicide bombings, and so on, and then

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you'd watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach's strategy or a script for "Law & Order."

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written "The Feminine Mystique."

The nation's political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. 

See, that's what I'm thinkin', guys.  I'm thinkin' that much of the past eight years, especially amongst the Democratic side, left us with this residual feeling of trapped helplessness that we only halfway got out of with the campaign.  I say, "halfway," because so many of us imbued President Obama with some kind of Superman powers, where we sort of expected him to leap tall buildings with a single bound, so to speak.  

We relaxed.  We thought, Go for it, man. Go fix the world.

But it doesn't work like that.  He needs our help.  He can't do this alone, gang, and he for SURE can't do it with us griping and whining and arguing and bickering and finding fault with every little thing the man does, criticizing him so much on our side that people in the middle, who can't decide what to think, look to us, then look over to the right, and then think, I guess this Barack Obama guy doesn't know WHAT he's doing.

What the hell.  Sarah Palin's kinda cute...

Right now, we're soooo damn close.  Let's close ranks, get behind our president, fight for what's right, get this thing passed.

Bob Herbert writes:

We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It's a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that's how you change the world.

It doesn't take a whole lot.

You can donate a few bucks to Organize for America, for TV commercials.  If you can't do that, you can call your senators, let them know how important health care reform is to you.  You can talk about it to your neighbors, you can fact-check viral e-mails that cross your desk and let family and friends know the truth about health care reform.

You can stand up for the president you elected and show the world you're still proud of that vote.

You can do what you can.

You can still change the world.  It's just gonna take some time, is all.