Actually, Obama Just Might be the Next Paul Wellstone

I was initially skeptical a few months ago when Barack Obama was heard in the heat of the Iowa campaign comparing himself to Paul Wellstone. But Obama's latest stroke of political genius, the "Obama Organizing Fellows" program, has helped me realize that Obama is actually taking Wellstone's movement-building focus to a truly presidential level.

The fellows program will train people how to become organizers; in other words, it will train people how to reach their full potential and build for themselves the kind of lasting progressive movement we'll need to both beat John McCain and achieve the kind of powerful progressive movement we need to achieve lasting change.

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But Obama is increasingly proving that he indeed might just be bringing Wellstone's movement building to a truly presidential scale - and his latest stroke of genius confirmed it. Obama today launched the "Obama Organizing Fellows" program to train people how to become organizers, or in other words, how to build the kind of enduring progressive movement we'll need to beat John McCain and achieve lasting progressive change.

This is not the kind of thing that campaigns usually do - they're so focused on short-term results, they let the opportunity to build a lasting movement pass them by. But it's the kind of thing Wellstone would have loved and is another signal that Obama shares Wellstone's core belief: that election victories -- and even good governance -- flow not primarily from the people in office, but rather from the competing strength of the great movements that put them there.

Obama just released an extraordinarily personal video in which he talks about his own past as an organizer - and the future of his campaign and our movement. Check it out.