The change that Obama espoused wasn’t just the hue of leadership in the white house.  Obama was leading us to believe that we could be the change that we wanted to see in our society.  All through his candidacy he evoked the thoughts and opinions of American citizens.  He wanted to give an opportunity for people in large and small communities to be reacquainted with and exercise their civic responsibility to deliberate about some of our most pressing, challenging issues. 

However, he cannot continue this momentum alone.  Since his historical win the United States and the world has gone further tipsy turvey.  Obama is ushering in a transformative and transparent operating system.  What will be your role in it?

Link Up With the Obama White House
If the sweeping vote for change on Election Day is really to bear fruit, We the People must be the ones who nurture it. We can’t just crank back in our La-Z-Boys. That’s because the business-as-usual crowd is waiting for Obama in Washington: Wall Street bankers, the war machine, 13,000 corporate lobbyists, recalcitrant Republicans, weak-kneed Democrats, the conformist media, and others. These insiders intend to shape his presidency in their image, stifling the people’s demand for real change.

We have to be the counterforce pushing insistently, vociferously from the outside. Who’s “we”? You and me – determined citizens, working through our personal networks, public-interest organizations, progressive media outlets, the Netroots Nation, unions, community groups, and other connections to grassroots activism.

The good news is that President-elect Barack Obama intends to open a democratic channel that will run from the countryside right into the government, using the two-way electronic pipeline of the Web to link you, me, and a mass constituency directly to Washington decision-making. He used this online relationship effectively in his campaign, turning what’s known as Netroots Nation into a prodigious political force that organized locally in every state, raised a massive amount of money, bypassed the conventional media, and coordinated its own actions.

This remarkable tool is now going inside. It’ll allow Obama and a core list of e-activists, who already number more than 10 million people, to communicate back and forth instantly, without having to go through the filters of the media and lobbying groups. One of the top Internet staffers for the president-to-be has already notified the activists that “the community we’ve built together is just the beginning.”

If you want to plug in to this grassroots self-government network, the digital link-up for the transition period is www.change.gov.

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For more information on Jim Hightower’s work – and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown – visit www.jimhightower.com. You can hear his radio commentaries on KOOP Radio, 91.7FM, weekdays at 10:58am and 12:58pm.