Yes We Can! Long Island 2012Ellis Henican
March 15, 2009
Eventually, even the most thrilling campaigns come to an end.
And then what?
Four months and change after Barack Obama’s captured the White House, romping across Long Island and New York, some of his most ardent local supporters are asking themselves, “What comes next?”
Next Saturday, the answer could begin taking shape.
The activist group Yes We Can! Long Island (yeswecanli.org) is gathering at The Metropolitan in Glen Cove for what is being billed as a founding convention. If some of the faces look familiar, they were not so long ago passing Obama petitions, staffing phone banks and riding buses into battleground states.
“But we were so busy during the campaign,” said Marvin Kreutzberger, “we never had time to create the kind of organization that could carry on. We’re getting to that now.”
Kreutzberger, of Merrick, a former principal in the Herricks district, was one of four Obama volunteers circulating get-on-the-ballot petitions in Peter King’s congressional district in the ancient days of January of last year. The group grew to 1,500 by Election Day.
“Now we hope to build a sustainable organization that will be issue-driven and nonpartisan, advancing progressive causes that we all believe in,” Kreutzberger said.
Education, the environment, energy, health care – there’s no shortage of pressing issues, local and national, on next Saturday’s convention agenda. There are potential allies among Long Island’s established Democratic, labor and progressive groups. But in 2008, it was the Obama people who had all the energy.
Can they harness that for the future? “It’s harder now than in the romantic campaign days,” Kreutzberger conceded. “But we had something extraordinary there. It shouldn’t go to waste.”
Newsday incorrectly printed our membership as 15,000. They have been notified of this error.
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