#53 / Hope Is...

The February 21, 2011 edition of The Nation Magazine has an article called "A Conversation With Marshall Ganz." Ganz is a legendary community organizer, who helped make the 2008 Obama For President Campaign quite different from other political campaigns. The inspiration, perhaps, didn't all come from Obama.

Not printed in the online version of the article is this part of the interview with Ganz:

"He's not a bad man," Ganz says of the president. "His policy intent is not bad. But you don't have the opportunity to change history every day. The Obama campaign excited the whole world. It created an opportunity to build capacity and to do real movement-building."

In losing sight of that historic opening, and in tamping down the activist energies the campaign had unleashed, President Obama's inner circle lost a chance to change the country he leads. And then, intellectual polymath that he is, Ganz quotes the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides. "Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable."

Let's hear it for Maimonides (pictured).