One of the President's duties is to appear on the scene of a national disaster to show sympathy and to speak about what the United States will do to help during the rebuilding process. This video is clearly framed in a way that will help Obama's 2012 campaign. The video shows him eagerly shaking hands with residents, speaking with them personally, speaking to an elderly woman in a shelter, and picking up a small child in a shelter. These images are photo opps for President Obama, which show his compassion. These make him look like a hands-on leader who is not above talking to the average American.
Otpor’s strategy mirrors one promoted by a rumpled Boston academic named Gene Sharp, who is little known in America but inspires tremors among dictators abroad. Sharp’s guide to toppling despots has been translated into 34 languages so far and was widely circulated in Egypt last year in Arabic.
After Otpor toppled Milosevic, it began to hold seminars for pro-democracy activists from other parts of the world, including many from the Middle East.
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Toppling dictators is only one application of this kind of grass-roots movement. One of the most exciting trends in the struggle against poverty and social pathologies such as crime is the use of similar youth-owned movements to change cultural norms from the bottom up.
Tina Rosenberg, a longtime writer and journalist who contributes to the Opinion section of nytimes.com, offers a brilliant look at bottom-up initiatives to achieve social change in her new book, “Join the Club.” My favorite example has to do with teenage smoking.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, nothing seemed to work to dissuade teenagers from smoking. Television commercials warned that smoking kills you or turns your teeth yellow, but teenagers felt invulnerable. And with adults united in disapproval of teenage smoking, what better way for adolescents to rebel than to cough their way through a cigarette?
Then in the late-1990s, some frustrated anti-smoking campaigners showed teenagers how cigarette companies were manipulating them into addiction. Starting in Florida, the teenagers then designed a series of funny and withering commercials, many based on prank phone calls.
One depicted a couple of teenagers telephoning an ad agency that promoted cigarettes. The kids tried to give the agency a prize for killing teenagers in large numbers, flummoxing the staff.
