It's an exciting time for America and the world.

With Barack Hussein Obama preparing to enter the White House, we can all take a huge sigh of relief. An Obama presidency will open up incredibly important possibilities for saving the earth from destruction, moving from a militarist to a generosity-based approach to foreign policy, and addressing social justice and poverty issues. We may finally address the crises plaguing our education and health-care systems. Time to celebrate! And to bless:

Bless the millions of African Americans and whites dismissed as “utopian,” “unrealistic,” or “ahead of their time,” who struggled not only against overt segregation but also against the subtle, pernicious forms of racism that have continued to distort our economic, cultural, and political lives.

Bless those of us who were killed, went to prison, dropped out of school to become organizers, lost jobs or career opportunities, and lost relationships and friendships because we were “too driven by our desire to fight injustice.” Bless those who were ridiculed and put down, but who continued to struggle—that struggle eventually reshaped the dominant values in this society sufficiently to allow for this remarkable moment.

Bless those who will continue to struggle until people of color and poor whites, women, homosexuals, and immigrants no longer face economic discrimination, racist caricatures, police harassment, poverty, or underfunded educational and health care options.

Bless the American majority who transcended racism, refuting the left-wing cynicism that saw Americans as fundamentally racist, or stupid, or too brainwashed by the media, or forever tainted by “white-skin privilege” and unable to care for the well-being of others.

Bless the United States for preserving a democratic process that prevented the worst fantasies from coming true: that these elections would be called off or stolen, that Obama would be murdered, or that a last-minute war would be started solely to galvanize right-wing patriotism in the months before the election. Bless the leaders of the U.S. military who refused to cooperate with the Bush/Cheney crowd in ordering a war against Iran as a way to influence the election. Bless the American electorate for coming out in record numbers to utilize democratic rights that had been won in hard struggle by previous generations of patriots.

Bless Barack Obama, our first spiritual progressive president, whose psychological and spiritual sophistication—combined with his passionate commitment to social justice and peace, his powerful intellectual capacities, and his emotional stability—allowed him to liberate “the left hand of God,” the voice within every person on this planet who wants to overcome the voice of fear and give precedence to the voice of love and generosity. This second voice of kindness and hope is trapped within a set of psychological and social constraints that make us sometimes appear as though we have lost our ethical and spiritual foundations and are too afraid to hope or love once again.

Bless God for making all this possible, for making us in the Divine image, for constantly calling us back to our highest selves and to our highest capacities, and for giving us the freedom to transcend the legacy of pain and cruelty embedded in families and economic and political institutions—a legacy that has been psychologically passed from generation to generation—so that we might reach this wonderful moment of joyous reaffirmation of the possibility of real tikkun olam, real healing and transformation of our world. No, this is not the messianic age, and we are very aware of all the problems, not only with the country but with the likely form the Obama administration itself might take, but still ... this is a moment to celebrate the positive!

Most Americans will be relieved first and foremost at the ending of the George W. Bush Administration. For sheer criminality and venality, the Bush years compete with the worst excesses of the Nixon years. Nixon was an inveterate liar and, along with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was also a certain war criminal. His unrealized impeachment trial would have been light punishment considering that he prolonged the Vietnam War for political advantage, with millions killed or maimed along the way.

And Nixon was far worse than Bush in his systematic repression of domestic dissent, working hand-in-glove with J. Edgar Hoover. Not only did Nixon use trumped-up federal charges to jail those of us who were leaders in anti-war demonstrations, he also encouraged local lawlessness by police and the FBI.

Yet Nixon was constrained by a powerful anti-war movement that rallied tens of millions of people. The government could not contain the anti-war movement, which created a culture of dissent and open rebellion against existing social norms. The movement eventually manifested in a liberal Congress ready to challenge the sins of the administration.

No such constraints were brought to bear on the Bush administration. Most extraordinary of all was that the Bush administration asserted its right to “interpret” legislation in ways that were clearly either not implementing or overtly distorting the intention of the Congress, while the Congress simply slunk away in disgrace, rather than confronting and impeaching both the vice president and the president (as a handful of courageous congressional reps called for, though in opposition to the chicken-hearted Democratic leadership).

Faced with a capitulating Congress, Bush continued to pursue his agenda without regard to its popularity in the rest of the society. No matter how destructive that agenda has been, there is something noble in fighting for your ideas even when they are not popular. Bush’s tenacity stands in stark contrast to the Democrats’ failure to fight for their ideas, even though those ideas have been popular.

Even when Democrats achieved a majority in Congress, they lacked the backbone to challenge the destructive policies of the Bush White House. Elected in 2006 to stop the war, the Democrats—under the misleadership of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate—instead supported budgets that actually increased the funding for the war and increased the powers of the president to wiretap American citizens. They failed to pass both the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007, which would reaffirm that presidents cannot order Americans to torture suspects, and the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act. They have continued to fund torture and the training of torturers at the School of the Americas.

Moreover the Democratic-controlled Congress voted for a Wall Street “bailout” for the very corporate bandits who have been soaking the wealth of the country, instead of providing direct relief to the people who are suffering. Instead of bailing out corporations, they should have required banks and lending companies to forgive loans or reduce the interest enough so people might conceivably pay the loans off. They should have frozen all foreclosures on owner-occupied homes.

Given this situation, Barack Obama’s campaign was faced with a difficult choice: either continue to articulate an anti-war, human rights, ecologically sane, and populist agenda, which could easily be portrayed as radical by the Republicans since it would be out of step with the weak-kneed Congress, or, as he eventually chose, to narrow his focus and campaign on a few issues that didn't really challenge the dominant thinking.

We regret that Obama chose the latter path. We remain convinced that Obama would have won an even larger landslide had he put forward an imaginative vision of what America could become under an Obama presidency.  Instead of challenging the presumptions on which an endless “war against terror” would be fought, Obama simply insisted that the war should be shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan. Instead of putting forward a different vision of how to run our economy, Obama joined with McCain in supporting the corporate giveaways that predominated in the “bailout.” Instead of standing up to the phone companies that had illegally tapped our homes, Obama voted to give them protections from legal responsibility for their acts. While both candidates tried to portray themselves as champions of the “middle class,” both avoided articulating the world views fom which their actual policy difference flowed.

Given this narrowing of differences between the candidates, it was not a surprise to see personal character issues getting greater focus. As it turned out, that focus played to Obama’s advantage. While McCain and Palin lamely tried to revive the issue of Obama's alleged associations with Chicago criminals and Bill Ayers of Weatherman infamy, Obama’s cool and centered responses to criticism, and his unwillingness to descend into personal attacks against McCain and Palin, made him appear to be positively “presidential.” The rumors—spread by, among others, some Jewish Republicans—that Obama was secretly a Muslim, or a supporter of terrorism, or an enemy of the State of Israel, never got much traction outside of the retirement homes set in southern Florida, southern California, and a few other states. The contrast with McCain’s frequent shifts in direction and tone could not have been starker.

Most erratic was McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. The choice of Palin did what it was predicted to, energizing the McCain Christian Right base. The hockey-mom-turned-right-wing politician brought her audiences to fever pitch, with some of her election rallies eliciting cries of “kill Obama” from the audience. Yet her obvious incompetence, her behavior in using her position as governor and candidate to serve her own personal agenda, and her know-nothing extremism pushed many Republicans who might have been attracted to the earlier “McCain as reformer” into extreme disillusionment. This trend was symbolized most powerfully when Bush’s own former secretary of state, Colin Powell, publicly endorsed Obama.

For a Democrat to find himself in the midst of the largest economic meltdown in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression—six weeks from the election—should have produced an election that wasn’t even close. If the old “it’s the economy, stupid” conventional wisdom were really true, then there would be no other way to account for the failure of Obama to win by tens of millions of votes than to look toward American racism. We cannot dismiss this explanation like Frank Rich did in his New York Times column ten days before the election because we personally have heard of too many instances in which undecided voters have acknowledged that they are having difficulty voting for a Black man. While economic concerns trumped racism for some, others could not let themselves imagine that a Black man would really be able to solve their problems.

We believe that Americans would have transcended narrow self-interested thinking and racism to a much higher level had they been called to do so by the Obama campaign. A relentless assault on the selfishness and materialism of this society had to be tempered if it could not be accompanied by a detailed alternative, and it was Obama’s reluctance to articulate that alternative that made him seem almost impassive as he neared the final goalposts of Election Day. Fearful that Americans would not respond to any larger vision, the Obama campaign consistently avoided taking on the larger issues that need to be resolved for America to be healed and transformed.

This was, in our view, a tragic mistake, because without such a vision Obama is less able to claim a mandate for precisely the kind of sweeping changes that are needed for the United States and for the world. Instead, Obama will have to continue to put forward policies that do not shake up the fundamental misallocation of wealth and power in the United States. As a result he may spend tens of billions more on militarism. He may make too many compromises on health care, creating a national health care system that is overpriced because it takes into account the needs of the profiteers, just as the economic bailout catered to the interests of the powerful. He may settle for a cap-and-trade approach to the environmental crisis that gives the appearance of addressing the emergency nature of our global situation without actually doing so.

Unless … unless a powerful movement emerges of liberals and progressives who challenge Obama to be his most visionary self, and who simultaneously back up that challenge with a focused campaign to replace right-wing and militarist Democrats in Congress (the lawmakers recruited by Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Rahm Emanuel in 2006 and 2008 to ensure electoral victory, at the price of compromising liberal principles) with a new wave of Democrats more similar to Lynne Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and Robert Wexler.

Ask people inside the Obama campaign, and they will tell you that this is precisely the plan they have in mind. They've mobilized millions of people to work for the campaign, they say, and those people will form the core of an ongoing movement.

There are some tough questions that need to be asked about such a movement emerging from the campaign: Is it to be primarily a movement aimed at providing local support for the proposals of the Obama administration, or is it to be a movement that can also challenge Obama to move in a more progressive direction than the various “political realists” who surround him say is possible?

Right now, and for understandable reasons given the nature of a political campaign, the volunteers and local organizers for Obama have been organized from the top to do the tasks that the national leadership has decided need to be done, and to support policies that the leadership has adopted. That makes perfect sense if you are pursuing a predetermined goal like electing a president, or if you are popularizing a particular idea or piece of legislation. If you don't like the idea or piece of legislation or candidate, you don’t have to join that organization! But when you are governing a country, the decisions that are made affect everyone whether or not they want to “join”—if they live there, the decisions made by the leaders of the country cannot be escaped (and arguably when it comes to the American empire, that may be true not only for people who live here but for everyone on the planet whose lives are dramatically effected by decisions made here). In that case, one can’t opt out. So there need to be mechanisms for discussion and debate for us little guys to talk about what we like and what we don’t like about the Obama administration and its policies. And there need to be ways to push for our own ideas about what is needed.

It would take an amazingly democratic and non-defensive Obama leadership to create the space for that kind of discussion, and for that kind of pushing of their own president and his administration. More likely, we will see the creation of some kind of organization that claims it will do that, but de facto will be tightly controlled from the top and will never allow substantial challenge to Obama’s policies. For example, the leaders are unlikely to allow a challenge to the whole idea of a “war on terror” or to the tactic in that war of escalating the struggle in Afghanistan. They are unlikely to allow a push for single-payer health care instead of the plan that Obama has, or a challenge to cap-and-trade in favor instead of a carbon tax on all emissions.

But a more democratic process could emerge with Obama’s support. Here are some of the possibilities he should consider:

• Utilizing his net roots to create a cyberspace location where his supporters (say, anyone who donated to his campaign or is willing to pay $25 to join an ongoing Obama organization) could present their concerns and their reactions to his policies.
• Requiring his cabinet members to each spend at least one hour a week giving a live, web-based broadcast during which grassroots Obama supporters could call in to express their concerns. The cabinet members would spend an additional hour responding to the criticisms and suggestions posted on the website. Obama would commit to do the same at least once a month.
• Asking Obama supporters to set up monthly meetings for the sake of discussing the new president’s policies. This is important to keep from biasing the process in favor of those who feel comfortable in cyberspace. It would enable Obama supporters to communicate to an Obama assistant the results of any votes taken to endorse a particular policy suggestion or to critique an Obama policy.
• Creating a national coordinating committee that would be invited to meet with Obama once a month. Both the netroots and the local meetings would elect representatives to the committee, which would also be empowered to organize lobbying of the administration on behalf of Obama supporters who want to see a different set of policies than those that Obama is implementing.

Nothing like this has ever been tried on a national level, and there would certainly be many kinks along the way, but the openness and democratic commitment that it represented would be a powerful break from the tradition of liberal politicians running on the slogan of “it’s not about me, but about you, and I just want to represent you, and we'll build a movement together that will last beyond the campaign” who then, after being elected, only remember their supporters when it comes time to raise money or to mobilize them once again for the next set of elections. Yet without this, millions of Obama supporters will either be channeled into a much less democratic organization or will pin their hopes on a revival of independent progressive organizations.

Whether or not Obama supporters succeed in creating a new democratic forum, the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) hopes to play an active role in shaping the Obama administration's agenda. We hope to have a Tikkun/NSP presence at Camp Obama, a grassroots effort to sit near Obama's home in Hyde Park from January 1 until Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 19), at which progressive groups will have a chance to present some of their ideas. Similarly, we will be involved in a religious gathering in D.C. the night before the inauguration, again intending to stress progressive spiritual ideas.

At both of these events we will be calling for Obama to take these immediate steps to raise hope:

• Support a ban on torture and close Guantánamo and the School of the Americas.
• Immediately reduce the number of troops in Iraq.
• Cease and desist in the execution of all immigration raids and immediately suspend
• deportations until comprehensive immigration reform is completed.
• Suspend all of the Bush administration’s policies regarding border patrol until comprehensive immigration reform is completed.
• Take all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and begin negotiations with other leaders of nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.
• Eliminate military tribunals and grant access to the U.S. court system to the detainees being held at Guantánamo and other U.S. detention facilities.
• Establish a commission to explore policy proposals that would provide universal health coverage. The proposed system should cover all pre-existing conditions, provide no less coverage than what the congressional health care plan provides, and provide health care to the greatest number of people.
• Establish a second commission to explore ways to develop and implement the Global Marshall Plan developed by the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
• Establish a ninety-day moratorium on all housing foreclosures.
• Submit the Kyoto Protocol to Congress for ratification, making a commitment to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
• Issue an executive order to promote transparency of the presidential archives or to open the presidential archives to the public.

And we can do this kind of work in a positive spirit—it’s certainly a relief to not have to be in opposition, but rather to be in joy and hopefulness.

What is most exciting is to realize that the Obama victory opens up space for these kinds of discussions to have real impact. In their different ways, the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations generated a huge amount of cynicism and despair about politics, and a withdrawal from it of the most creative, ethical, and spiritually sensitive people. The Obama administration is very likely to have the opposite impact. Obama is himself someone who shares our own highest goals, however doubtful he is about whether he can actually fight for them in the ins and outs of American politics. He is almost certain to use his bully pulpit, starting with his Inaugural Address, to point toward a vision of America that will regenerate hope and move social energy toward the Left Hand of God, toward the part in each of us that really wants a world of love, kindness, generosity, peace, ecological sanity, and social justice. That opening of hope is the most we can expect from a politician working within the confines of the current reality. The rest is up to us—to push the discourse further, to identify (as NSP already has) ways to actually build the kind of world that Obama describes. We need to organize people to turn that vision into reality.

No wonder, then, that we feel that this is a time for great rejoicing, and also a time for serious reflection and planning. We hope you’ll join us at our national conference, which we hope to hold in the spring of 2009. And we hope you’ll join the NSP online so that you can learn about our other projects.