Grass Roots

Fundamental change usually proceeds from the bottom up, which is why it often blindsides most politicians and much of the media. For example, the "tea party"-style rage that is this election cycle's defining characteristic grows out of a broad, if inchoate, sense that the American economy no longer apportions prosperity or opportunity in anything close to an equitable fashion. As David Cay Johnston reported Monday, last year the 74 highest-paid Americans each earned an average of $519 million annually ?

Re "A party no one attended," Opinion, May 17 I disagree with Doyle McManus that Americans Elect failed for lack of a charismatic leader. The"tea party"didn't have a charismatic leader; its success in 2010 was based on a powerful message to its targeted audience and a grass-root movement. Americans Elect lacks both. I have advocated a third centrist party in Congress representing moderate Americans, folks with principles but realistic enough to know that governing is possible only through compromise.

Peter Prescott, who reviewed Gunter Grass' "The Call of the Toad" (Nov. 29), is well-respected and sincere. However, he got up on the wrong side of the bed, and sleepily, to review the book. He starts by attacking German writing sharply, saying that in Hell one would be doomed to read it. Then he moves puzzlingly on to extol "the many virtues of German literature." Next he complains of the lack of wit and humor in German writers. One wonders: When were Grimmelshausen, Heine, Brecht, Wilhelm Busch and Baron Munchausen, through Raspe, posthumously declared to have lost their sense of humor?

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformational president, and as we head into the general election, he may have gotten his wish - just not the way he or his supporters might have thought. Obama seems to have transformed the cohort of 18- to 29-year-olds, a whopping 66% of whom preferred him over John McCain, from passionate voters who thought Obama really did offer change they could believe in, into people feeling, in the words of veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, "disappointment and disillusionment.

Yes, people still get high ("Just Say Maybe," by Dan Neil, 800 Words, Sept. 24). And maybe the reason boomers are finding their way back to marijuana is that they are retiring in large numbers and are no longer subject to random drug testing by their employers. Charlotte Costello Fountain Valley I agree with Dan Neil. I'm not surprised that baby boomers are returning to their "grass roots." If an otherwise responsible adult chooses to decompress after a long day or on the weekends, what's the harm?

The grass roots came to the lush and rolling green of Brentwood on Thursday night as People for the American Way--perhaps too long known as "Norman Lear's thing"--kicked off its organizing effort for a Southern California base.

For exactly six years, the Grass Roots Cultural Center has been a meeting place for folk singers and revolutionaries, Communists and (please don't say this too loudly) a handful of quiet Republicans. So what does this suggest? A lack of focus? A lack of coherence? Changing times, marked mainly by eclecticism in thought and action? Maybe all of the above. For whatever reason, Grass Roots (which opened in October, 1981) will officially close on Thursday.

Let us count the ways to concoct a potboiler. There's politics, sex, white supremacy, rape, assassinations, homophobia, nymphomania, evangelism, suicide, the CIA, the FBI and the local sheriff. NBC's untidy "Grass Roots" (at 9 tonight and Tuesday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) has them all. At least they're spread over four hours. Naturally, all this gothic horror and chaos happens in a small town in the Deep South, which writers and moviemakers consider more ill than the rest of the country.

As the going gets tougher for President Obama's plans to overhaul healthcare, the president this week is launching a renewed effort to build grass-roots support for his plan, supplementing his tour of town-hall meetings with outreach to Americans by way of opinion leaders they already know and trust. This afternoon, the president will take part in a telephone conference with clergy members of different faiths, who will talk about problems of healthcare access, and then detail his proposals for fixing those problems.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grass roots, Sarah Palin's influence is now unparalleled. She was the one who popularized the notion that Democrats advocated "death panels" as part of their healthcare plan, a charge that helped ignite conservative opposition to reform. More recently, in a special congressional election in upstate New York, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown, far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race.

The story of "The First Grader" is a classic underdog tale: an 84-year-old Kenyan man fights to be educated, even if that means attending an elementary school. Now the film's producers are launching their own against-all-odds effort, trying to bring the movie to the attention of Oscar voters with little help from its distributor. After its premiere at last year's Telluride Film Festival, the independently financed feature was acquired by National Geographic Entertainment, a relatively new player in the theatrical world.

President Obama's latest attacks on Republicans are another sign that his reelection effort will be more sharply partisan in tone than the idealistic-sounding campaign that brought him to power. What isn't changing, though, is a reliance on grass-roots organizing as the bedrock of his national strategy. While GOP rivals focus on a handful of early states, Obama is already gearing up in every battleground in the country. At recent training sessions in more than 20 states, 1,200 new field organizers were told that Obama's second term would be won in the streets.

Charles T. Manatt, who founded one of the biggest and most influential law firms in Los Angeles and then became a political power as chairman of the state and national Democratic parties, died Friday night. He was 75. Manatt died at Kindred Hospital in Richmond, Va., of complications from a stroke suffered after surgery in November, according to his daughter, Michele A. Manatt. Manatt assumed a thankless task as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, taking over just when the Reagan era was dawning.

Ramona Hahn Wife, mother of L.A.-area politicians Ramona Hahn, 86, widow of the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and mother of both former Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, died Monday, her children announced. She was a longtime resident of San Pedro, where she died. Her death came one day before the special election in the 36th Congressional District won by Janice Hahn, the Democratic nominee for the South-Bay based seat.

Nageh Ibrahim once spoke of slaying infidels and creating an Islamic state that would stretch from the Nile Delta to the vast deserts of Egypt's south. Today he lives in a high-rise with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and has the soothing voice of a man who could lead a 12-step program on rejecting radicalism. Ibrahim's group, Gamaa al Islamiya, plotted notorious attacks, including the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat and the massacre at an ancient Luxor temple that killed 62 people, mostly tourists, in 1997.

Reporting from Austin, Texas The direct mail has been sent, the commercials have zipped about the Internet, and the robocalls have clogged answering machines, all with the same message: Joe Straus is yet another incumbent who must go. Straus hopes fellow Texas lawmakers will reelect him Tuesday as speaker of the House of Representatives, one of the most powerful posts in the state. But the election of the speaker, normally inside baseball, has become an usually public, and sometimes nasty, affair.

John Glover is a reluctant villain, but he decided he could get some good out of yet another bad-to-the-bone role. Glover plays an assassin for a white supremacist organization in NBC's two-part political thriller, "Grass Roots," which airs Sunday and Monday. The four-hour miniseries also stars Corbin Bernsen and Mel Harris. (A conversation with Mel Harris, Page 7.

Folk singer Rusty McNeil was willing to take her husband-and-wife act on the road in the early 1970s, but the mother of five had one stipulation: "Family had to come first. " So the McNeils converted a retired 1949 school bus into a home on wheels that they called Amazing Grace because it was "amazing we ever got anywhere," she later said. Keith and Rusty McNeil, as they billed themselves, traveled the United States for 15 years on the bus, raising their children and a succession of dogs as they forged a career teaching American history through folk music.

Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.