The White House Project

Soon, members of The White House Project will have early access to online Go Lead trainings—just one of the perks of being a member of The White House Project. Let us know what sort of trainings you would like to see! Do you want to know how to raise money? How to communicate your message? How to set up a campaign team? And, if you’d like to join the movement become a member today, click here.

In defense jargon, an asymmetric advantage is where two belligerents of unequal power interact and attempt to take advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses. This interaction often involves strategies and tactics outside the bounds of conventional warfare. Part of the White House Project’s Real Security platform points out how we are literally stuck in convention– need to get urgently exit our Cold War thinking. For example, that we can prevent mass violence in the same old ways i.e. through massive force and huge weapons platforms. Suicide bombing is the ultimate asymmetric tactic.

Last Sunday, the Washington Post included a piece about women suicide bombers…a phenomenon on the increase. The part that really stuck with me is how western Jihad minded women see participation in suicide missions as part of the egalitarian attitude endowed by growing up in the West….

And here’s a related and very worthwhile read
from a recent article by Robert Kaplan (ah, my love-hate relationship
with Kaplan) His prose is beautiful here, and the implications of his thesis are as urgent as they are alarming:

“Jihad as practiced, not as theorized, places more emphasis on the
“mystical dimension” of sacrifice than on any tactical or strategic
objective. Jihad is most often an act of individual exultation rather
than of collective action, observes Olivier Roy in The Failure of
Political Islam (1994). It is “an affair between the believer and God
and not between the believer and his enemy. There is no obligation to
obtain a result. Hence the demonstrative, even exhibitionist, aspects
of the attacks……

…The suicide bomber is the distilled essence of jihad, the result of
an age when the electronic media provides an unprecedented platform
for exhibitionism.”

AND so much for airpower and missile defense:

“But our near obsession with finding ways to kill others at no risk to
our own troops is a sign of strength in our eyes alone. To faithful or
merely nationalist enemies, it is a sign of weakness, even cowardice.”

The New York Times offers its take on work/life balance this week, explaining that many women who have moved up the ladder in the work force “find themselves still yearning for something men often have: wives.” Do you relate to this article? It mentions that Ms. Magazine wrote a similar piece in 1972. Is this old news to you?

What books have you read recently that portray strong women leaders?

Thoughts from one of The White House Project’s summer communications interns, Jessica Riegel, about attending her first Go Run political training. Find out what it’s really like to spend 48 hours in a room full of women with political aspirations!

Do I want to Run?

The fact that I couldn’t picture myself running for office started to bother me in January, as I waited to hear a decision about a summer internship at The White House Project.

The interview had gone pretty well, except that I hadn’t switched my cell phone off—the entire time I worried that a Spice Girls song would come blaring from my bag. I talked to Lindsay, who was in charge of the internship program, about the articles I tackled for my school newspaper and my role as the Education Commissioner for New Jersey’s mock legislature program, scanning the mental image of my resume while trying to look collected. But I wasn’t ready for her next prompt.

“So,” she asked, smiling, “do you think you want to run for political office?”

“Well, um, no,” I said, “but I definitely want to be involved somehow, whether policy work or writing about it.” An okay answer. Spinning tough questions is smart politics, right?

“It’s so interesting,” Lindsay said, “because whenever I ask young women who are so involved and interested in politics whether they would actually want to run themselves, most of them say they’d rather do behind-the-scenes stuff.

Whoops. I guess my response wasn’t that original, or effectively spun. I tried to save it, quickly sputtering “but maybe someday.

But the reality was I could not picture myself at a mahogany desk with stars and stripes behind gleaming white teeth and stiff bobbed hair. I could not picture myself knocking on strangers’ doors, or making fundraising calls, or forming a quick, coherent answer to reporters’ jabs.

As much as I loved learning about policy and wanted to make a difference in my community—and hey, I watch C-SPAN for fun—it bothered me that I couldn’t trust myself to make the pressing decisions demanded by a political career. But it bothered me even more that I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt I wasn’t capable.

Which is why August 3rd, 4th and 5th were bright spots on my summer calendar. As part of the internship I landed here, I would have the chance to taste New York Go Run—The White House Project’s training session that aims to demystify the political process and motivate women to run for office—by listening to guest speakers, participating in workshops and interacting with inspiring leaders from across the country. In addition to learning the nuts and bolts of campaigning, I hoped to gain more insight into why I couldn’t picture myself running.

If Liz can Run and Win, Anyone Can

On Friday night, I (wo?)manned the registration table with the other interns. Women filtered up to the Penthouse level of our building, some carrying suitcases, others fanning themselves from what they sighed was “southern heat.” Everyone was all smiles, very excited and sometimes a little exasperated as we piled them with gift bags—painstakingly packed over the past week with handbooks, magazines and buttons—and a program tee-shirt in their preferred style (“regular or fitted?”) and size.

Weekend participants, as well as NYC constituents attending the opening ceremony, settled into the space with dinner and drinks. There were tables with samples of our press coverage, a mini gift-shop with WHP shirts and our president Marie Wilson’s “Closing the Leadership Gap” book on sale, and representatives from organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.

After welcomes and introductions, the program kicked off with a “Debunking the Myths” panel led by three women—Manhattan Deputy Borough President Rose Pierre-Louis, State Senator Liz Krueger and current Westminster City Council candidate (and WHP national field director) Faith Winter—who discussed the election process and lives as politicians.

Their introductions spoke directly to my concerns about not feeling confident enough to run for office. “I thought politics were random,” said Rose, “but I realized I was prepared.”

Liz called herself an accidental politician. “I’m the poster child for ‘if Liz can run and win, anybody can.’”

A common theme of the weekend was that being a politician lets you change the things that don’t work. Liz had been active in nonprofit work for decades, and expressed frustration with the way her state government functioned. She never thought she would switch to the political arena, but when her local Democratic party asked her to run, she began to understand the possibilities: she could make laws rather than fill in the gaping holes left by current policy.

“You have to know why you’re doing it,” Liz said. “You have to believe you can change your government and community.”
Rose realized that as a lawyer she could help one woman or one family at a time; if she focused on policy, she could improve the lives of many more.

And Faith knew she wanted to run after working at a homeless shelter, where she taught women to live off of 20 percent of their minimum wage jobs. The laws that required the women to struggle like that didn’t make sense. “We were taught you can be anything, you can make a difference,” Faith said. “I wanted to make a difference.”
The panel then opened the floor for questions. A few hands slowly reached up. The first was about holding on to a private life while living in the public eye. The panelists said it was tough—which I knew from experience: my mom was the president of our town Board of Education. But they agreed—as my family had learned—balance is key.

Faith, who at 27 is running for her first office, said the election is a part of who she is. Her husband and friends knock on doors every night with her. And she kept her last name because it looked better on lawn signs, she joked.

Dozens of hands shot up for the next question. A young woman from Atlanta described the opposition she faced from community members who said she couldn’t get anywhere since she was not part of Atlanta’s “black elite.” She wanted to know how to break into the club. “I have decided that I’m not going to let them pass me the torch,” she said, “I’m going to take it from them.”

Faith responded first, explaining how she faced similar resistance because of her age. Because she’s forty years younger than the next-youngest candidate in her race, she is shooed away and not taken seriously. Her advice? Show them you mean business. “They don’t want to work that hard,” she said. “They’re in the club and they think that’s enough. Show them it’s not.”

Liz agreed, emphasizing that you should outwork them but not alienate them. “Earn their respect,” she said.

The final participant wanted to know about a “day in the life” of a politician. Liz fielded that one, describing a hectic day that included an early morning radio call, negotiations and a subway breastfeeding parade of sorts, to raise awareness about a bill that guarantees women’s right to breastfeed in public. “But Fridays are slow days,” she said with a smile.

As the evening wound down, Marie Wilson asked how many of the women were thinking of running for office. Nearly all hands flew up. We were off to a great start.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

I got a little lost on the way to 71 West 23rd, pacing back and forth past building numbers that jumped from 60 to 100. Then I spied three women in business suits, and deducted that since it was 8:30 on a Saturday morning, they must be going to the training. That, and the fact that they were holding the “NYC Go Run” spiral notebooks I had helped to distribute the night before.

Realizing that I was on the wrong side of the street—no wonder my parents were concerned about me navigating the subway alone—I followed the women into the lobby of the New York Seminar and Conference Center, which was filled with the comforting sight of ‘Go Girl’ black tee-shirts.

I slipped into a seat next to another intern and looked at the women sitting around me, eager to meet them. One lived in Washington D.C., where she worked on Capitol Hill (In a workshop, she expressed her intent to run for Senate herself in 2012). I turned to another, but didn’t get beyond her name; Erin, our Program Director, was at the front of the room, welcoming participants to their first day of training and introducing Peggy Flanagan.

Peggy, a leadership trainer and treasurer of the Minneapolis Board of Education, was here to talk about power. When she said the word, the participants gave what she called an expected reaction: ick.

I attribute that reaction to the bitch complex: while the assertive man is a good leader, the assertive woman is a bitch. We don’t want to be seen as aggressive, bossy or otherwise ‘unfeminine’ so we hold back. We speak our mind—but not too loudly.

When editing articles for my high school newspaper, I often found myself tip-toeing around suggestions. I coated criticism with a sugary tone and prefaced every critique with “this could be really stupid, but.” But I knew it wasn’t stupid, and it was frustrating that I didn’t trust myself. Throughout the weekend, other women shared similar stories. They too cringed when other women played down their strengths, and cringed even more when they did it themselves. Together, we worked through our fear of having authority, learning to embrace it.

Peggy had us call out words we associated with power. Answers ranged from ‘effective’ and ‘important’ to ‘disaster.’ “With great power comes great responsibility,” Peggy quoted from Spiderman, but we shouldn’t be afraid of having it.

“Look at me! I’m an elected official!” she grinned as she strode between our tables, long hair swinging over a maroon dress. Everyone laughed, followed by the shower of applause and cheers that was a soundtrack for the weekend. We needed to hear that declaration, so that everyone in that room—different clothes, hairstyles, skin colors—could see that she has the potential to win an election and be a great leader. As Marie says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

On the surface that might just seem like a cheesy catchphrase (it did to me, at first) but underneath the rhyme lays a lot of truth.

The word ‘politician’ connotes (besides corruption and such) a square-chinned, gray-headed, slick-parted white man in a suit. And that’s, more or less, who’s elected president. Girls of my generation (I’m 17) are told they can be whatever they want. But that message alone is not enough.

Why can’t politicians look and act like normal people? Well, they can. The women I’ve met this weekend are proof. But we at The White House Project knew that. It’s another thing entirely for voters to feel confident that the woman who looks like their next-door-neighbor, who jogs in the morning, who loves horror movies, spills coffee, organizes clothing drives, schleps her kids to soccer practice and orders take-out, is responsible, intelligent and driven enough to represent them.

Changing the face of political leadership is, to me, The White House Project’s most important mission; we need to shift our perception of what a leader looks like. With that will come enough trust to support candidates for their agendas, not gender.

The Transformation Business

In Saturday’s Communications training, one woman asked about whether she should change her hair, as dreadlocks are an unconventional sight in the gray-coiffed arena of American politics. The instructor, Sujata Tejwani, advised her to stay true to herself, but to know her audience. She gave similar advice for the question of makeup and attire. “It’s not fair,” Sujata said, that women politicians face more scrutiny over appearance, “but instead of going on about how it’s unfair, why give them one more thing to attack you over?”

Yes, we want to change the status quo, to revolutionize the system. But first, we have to get inside it. So while it bothers me when I stumble across yet another article about Hilary’s headbands or cleavage, I agree with Sujata that women should, without compromising their integrity, play along with certain rules of the game in order to do the work that desperately needs to be done.
Showing up for a debate in sweatpants or a bikini top won’t win you supporters (though such attire wouldn’t help a male candidate either, especially not the bikini top). Just be yourself and win respect through your ideas, experience and values.

It’s Politics 101 that you can’t please everyone. There will always be some who will criticize you, make tired remarks about your place in the kitchen and flat jokes about your outfit. (Especially if John Edwards is to your right and you happen to be wearing a pink jacket). But if we’re persistent, we can get enough women in leadership roles to undermine these stubborn stereotypes and have them crumble away altogether. That’s why we say we’re in “the transformation business”; we have a goal and we’re on our way.

If Everyone Likes you, You’re Doing Something Wrong

As Faith Winter said during Sunday’s “Young People in Office” workshop, “If everyone likes you, you’re doing something wrong.”
That’s the message that stuck with me most strongly, the affirmation that a life in politics is not unattainable, not out of reach. I look forward to following the campaigns of the Go Run participants (a handful were already in the midst of races) and keeping in touch with the many women who offered their skills in consulting, web design and media—or just their time—to their new friends. Even if we don’t pursue office ourselves, Go Run women have gained a network that can provide advice and support.
I’m still not sure if running for office is the right path for me—maybe my strengths really are best suited for “behind-the-scenes” work—but I still have time to toy with the idea. And as I do, the image of a political career snaps into clearer focus.

You’ve spent your day learning the nuts and bolts of political campaigning. What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned today? Are you ready to “lead a political life?”

I started this morning at a panel on Progressives and the
military–moderated by Wesley Clark, and again was impressed how much
national security is on the agenda at this conference. I was one of four
speakers on a panel in the afternoon entitled Progressive Foreign Policy:
Its Importance for Elections and Activism. It gave me a chance to put
forward some of the language we have been experimenting with at the White
House Project. Below I will excerpt parts of my talk:

I believe that progressives, if we act intentionally and soon, will be the
dominant influence this century for a new understanding of American foreign
policy and national security. I say foreign policy and national security
together because I believe that foreign policy is national security–for far
too long the two have been segregated. While this might have made sense
during the Cold War, it no longer does today….and it has huge
implications, from money to manpower to allowing a runaway Executive Branch
to take our country into an ill considered war.

Changing the language of national security is one of the important
contributions that we can make. This is the first step in telling a new
American story about who we are in the world and where we are going.

We are at a crossroads today. How we understand and implement our national
security policies will determine whether the US decides to seek security
primarily through coercion and force, or through legitimacy. In other words,
through leading by example.

We’re living in a world where traditional national concerns remain
important, but where the safety of individuals and peoples, often called
Human Security, is equally so. A strong Army is important, but so is
education for girls. We must insist that both state and individual needs
are complimentary and inseparable, and not pose them as tradeoffs. That’s
one thing we can each do today: resist the language of easy tradeoff–
hawks versus doves, strong versus weak, guns versus butter. There are
plenty of legitimate tradeoffs within national security, and if you
acknowledge their legitimate fears, Americans are willing to hear that
levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis deserve consideration as
critical infrastructure…part of our nation’s security.

I lived in Berlin in 1989 during the twilight of the Cold War and saw in
person the end of an era. Sixteen years later, I am shocked at how little
this momentous occasion impacted American national security.

Progressive change has come in unsuspecting places. When I moved to DC to
work on Capitol Hill (I was asked to come to work in Congress to convene a
foreign policy study group after Newt Gingrich had dismantled the Arms
Control and Foreign Policy Caucus) I was amazed that the most progressive
organization I found working on conflict resolution was the US Army. One
remark that I still hear from my friends in uniform is how the US, since the
end of the Cold War, lacks a Grand Strategy. This is another term for a
story, a big story, if you will. About the future of our nation. In the
military the Grand Strategy is like the pole star, it provides guidance for
everything else that happens. Strategy, operations and tactics. During the
Cold War the big story was containment of the Soviet Union, an era
characterized by continual military preparedness. After 1991, we experienced
many ad-hoc military engagements, all of which required our military to
undertake social and political tasks. These became like disjointed chapters
in a book that never added up to a comprehensive narrative that
underscored the need to do things differently.

To this day, we are still fighting and funding the Cold War. We apply
military tools to political problems. We justify outrageous budgets (54% of
the discretionary budget this year) to military security. And Congress
still today has not had a comprehensive discussion about the need from top
to bottom change.

I sat in hearings in the 1990s and watched Generals like Wesley Clark talk
about peace operations at the House Armed Services Committee. He spoke of
the need for skills like knowledge of culture, history, language and
politics were vital for soldiers. Today we’re hearing the second echo of
these stories. In Iraq, when every General that testifies before Congress
claims that this fight has no military solution. That the dilemma we face
is a political challenge. That the use of force has become counterproductive
at every level–from the strategy of pre-emptive war to the tactic of
kicking down doors and terrorizing families.

This takes me back to my original point, about seeking legitimacy. We’ve
heard a lot over the past few years about the hearts and minds
campaign. Well, this is a legitimacy campaign. Counter-insurgency doctrine
is built on this notion as well. Protecting civilians, preventing violence
through economic development. In fact, every military professional I know
insists on the value of preventive action. This is the realm of foreign
policy. Which is why I believe that today more than ever, foreign policy is
national security. We must not be afraid to call it that. And, to the
opposite of the Cold War, its main ingredients are not weapons and top down
communiques. Leading by example happens at every level.

I arrived in Chicago this afternoon to attend the second annual YearlyKos conference (yearlykosconvention.org)–a progressive blogging gathering inspired by the website phenom dailykos.com.  Last year it debuted in Las Vegas, and the event became a barnstorming venue for prospective Democratic candidates, and shook up the MSM (mainstream media). The very prospect of several thousand individuals not interested in covering the typical media fare—as one panelist put it today, “Americans are interested in more than celebrities and fear”—but rather, intent on revitalizing democracy and citizen participation is a revelation.  This year nearly every Democratic candidate is making an appearance…and then staying afterward for small group discussions on Saturday. Everyone had to practically draw straws for Obama tickets.. he’s the easy favorite in this crowd .For me, though,  it was pure gluttony, like being in a chocolate coma,  and the registration person had to leave me alone for a good ten minutes as I agonized and fell into dismay over which candidate to sign up for.  I chose Hillary Clinton.

I’m here at YearlyKos to present on a panel titled Progressive Foreign Policy and its importance for elections and activism.  It will be this afternoon.  I am impressed at the number of foreign policy and national security topics on the agenda this year.  Something I worry about a great deal is the tendency for many on the progressive side of politics to opt out of these topics, especially national security.

The number of choices of sessions, caucuses, working groups and other meetings is astonishing.  Today there was everything from the military family’s netroots caucus to the lurkers session (lurkers are people who are continually online, are mega-blog-geeks, but who NEVER post themselves).  Both sessions I attended were quite interactive.  Schmoozing is a premium here.

I attended the Southern Netroots Caucus, and the feminist blogs caucus.  As luck would have it, my panel tomorrow is up against a session called How Feminist Action online is changing the Movement.  But with an average 14 sessions going simultaneously, that seems inevitable.  This is one of those conferences where I wish I had clones.

All of this is taking place at the huge McCormick Convention Center, a black glass and steel behemoth on the shores of Lake Michigan. Imagine Darth Vader as a building.  It is so huge that they rent scooters out front to get around.

The event is organized by volunteers and a few donors, so the food is scarce and the amenities minimal.  But tonight, after Senator Durbin beamed in from DC and Howard Dean rallied the crowd, nobody was thinking about anything but turning this wave into a tsunami.

The most important thing said tonight, I think, was that every single thing progressives do must focus energy on youth, because if we engage them now, they will remain loyal for a lifetime. If a young person votes progressive three times in a row, you have him or her for life.  Think about it this way, he said: every election that does not include a huge effort geared toward under 30′s young people, you might be missing your chance for the next 60 years.  Now I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I sure will now. And it makes me proud of the White House Project, which attracts more and more amazing young women to its programs every day.