Last night I was privileged to participate in a conference call with Senator Kerry meant for Massachusetts bloggers who wanted to hear about his campaign for reelection to the Senate later this year. And I realized, listening to him, that the theory I’ve been nurturing lately is absolutely true: John Kerry has never stopped being the grassroots activist he was before he began his political career.

We’ve all been involved in some grassroots effort and we know how it works: it’s a matter of vision, goals, organization and sheer grit. You’re fighting some form of City Hall, usually, and the only way to fight an institution that has all the power you lack is — every which way you can think of! That means demonstrations, door to door work, phone calls, flyering, rallies, letters to the editor, blog entries, media attention if you can get it. It means getting the truth out past the machine that is trying to shut you down. It requires ingenuity and relentless determination. Lots of the time you have to lose and get right back up again and keep going ’til you finally get to victory.

I knew John Kerry had done all those things when he was a young veteran, just returned from Vietnam, first working to make a safe, healthy environment, helping to organize the very first Earth Day in 1970, and then speaking out on college campuses and on the Dick Cavett Show and in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaking out to defend his brothers in arms, those still dying overseas, and those who had returned home scarred in body, mind and spirit. He was an organizer and an activist in those movements, and a highly effective one whose success worried the Nixon White House into a personal attack campaign against him.

Since that day in November 2004 when he bravely conceded a narrow defeat in his fight for the presidency and I watched him get back up and start working again toward his goals for Massachusetts and the nation, I’ve been realizing that everything he does is still in that grassroots activist mold. He is still fighting City Hall to get the truth out to the American people and he still uses every means open to him. That means filibustering Alito and being one of the earliest and strongest voices to tell us the smart way to be successful in Iraq and Afghanistan without continuing to put our brave troops’ lives in harm’s way. That means speeches on the Senate floor, but also blogging and the print (more…)