In a final excerpt from his new book, Fighting for Our Health, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch argues that the story of health care reform is not about any individual, but what ordinary people can achieve together with the right strategy.
The final selection from Fighting for Our Health doesn't need an introduction. The key lesson from our campaign is that change -- at least change that benefits the 99% -- won't come from elites or from Washington. When ordinary people get organized they can still do extraordinary things. But the key here is getting organized. The media likes to lift up singular "heroes" who are "making a difference." But political change is not made by individuals on their own. Change, whether through organized campaigns like Health Care for America Now or movements with broader energy like the Occupations that broke out across America this fall, happen when masses of people come together to take action in a focused, strategic fashion.
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If there is one lesson that I'm hoping will be learned from the campaign that HCAN ran, it is that grassroots organizing is essential to overcome the power that big corporations and wealthy elites wield. As people rose up to overthrow dictatorships in the Middle East, we witnessed that power. At home, when tens of thousands of people rallied in Wisconsin in the winter of 2011, and then translated that energy at the ballot box, we witnessed that power. But we don't have to wait until a breaking point is reached for strategically organized campaigns that harness the aspirations of ordinary Americans to make significant change. That's the most important decision we made at Health Care for America Now. We focused our strategy outside the Beltway by organizing a grassroots campaign built on the existing infrastructure of organizations that have a mission of winning economic justice.
At Health Care for America Now we flipped the script. We assumed that the best we could do inside the Beltway -- against the army of corporate lobbyists and the bottomless war chest of corporate campaign contributors, the entrenched corporate connections of not only Republicans but of a great many Democrats, and a cynical press obsessed with the powerful and disdainful of the downtrodden -- was to maintain a credible voice that could not be ignored. By using our relatively limited resources smartly, HCAN was widely quoted in the press, our television ads were seen in Washington, and we were recognized on the Hill. But if that were all we had done -- along with the usual shallow investment in the field -- the Affordable Care Act would not now be the law of the land.
Where we had a potential advantage over our opponents was outside the Beltway, where members of Congress and their staff still meet face-to-face with constituents, and local press corps still report on civic action. If we organized people to raise their voices together, to tell their stories, to build relationships with Congress. and if we kept doing this over and over again and did it all over the country as part of a concerted strategic effort, we could accomplish what had been impossible for the past century. And we understood that doing so required investing money in organizers to do the day-to-day work of identifying, building relationships with, and empowering people.
Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a Senior Adviser to USAction. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform. Fighting For Our Health is available in bookstores February 1. You can also purchase a copy here. Follow the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.