How Obama Threw Away His Activist Movement

[lpetrich]

Obama’s Lost Army | The New Republic - 2017 Feb 9 - "He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for change. Then he let it die. This is the untold story of Obama’s biggest mistake—and how it paved the way for Trump."

Christopher Edley, Jr. tried to think of something big that Barack Obama might achieve.

What if Barack Obama could become not only the first black man elected president, but the first president in history to organize an enduring grassroots movement that could last beyond his years in office?

By that point in the race, there was every reason to think that Obama could build a lasting grassroots operation. His political machine had already amassed more than 800,000 registered users on My.BarackObama, its innovative social networking platform. “MyBO,” as it was known, gave supporters the ability—unthinkable in a traditional, top-down political campaign—to organize their own local groups, campaign events, and fund-raising efforts. Its potential for large-scale organizing after the election was vast—and completely without precedent in American politics. By Election Day, Obama’s campaign would have 13 million email addresses, three million donors, and two million active members of MyBO, including 70,000 people with their own fund-raising pages. This wasn’t just some passive list of campaign supporters, Edley realized—it was an army of foot soldiers, seasoned at rallying support for Obama’s vision of change.

“As the primary season wound down, it struck me that the campaign’s broad-based engagement via the internet could evolve into a powerful tool to shape progressive politics at the national, state, and local levels,” Edley recalls. “One goal would be to support an Obama presidency. But the agenda would be far broader.”

Initially, it was to be some new "home place" for Obama supporters. It would be closely associated with Obama but independent of the Democratic Party and Obama's re-election campaign. It would also support Obama's legislative agenda and help shape it.

But when one of Obama's top staffers saw it, he objected. He didn't like something outside the party.

There was plenty in Movement 2.0 to inspire heartburn in that crowd. In Silicon Valley terms, Obama 2008 had “disrupted” presidential campaigns, demonstrating how an underdog candidate could defeat a more experienced opponent by changing the terms of the game and empowering millions of people in the process. Now, it seemed, the Obamaites and their tech wizards wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party, diverting money and control from the DNC into an untried platform, while inviting “input,” and possibly even organized dissent, from Obama’s base. Earlier that summer, activists unhappy with Obama’s flip-flop on warrantless surveillance had used MyBO to build a group of more than 20,000 vocal supporters, earning national press and compelling a response from the candidate. What if Obama’s base didn’t like the health care reform he came up with, and rallied independently around a single-payer plan? Besides, grassroots movements, no matter how successful, don’t reliably yield what political consultants want most: money and victories for their candidates, with plenty of spoils for themselves. For insiders like Tewes, Movement 2.0 was a step too far.

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Looking back, Edley says now, Podesta made a tactical error by sharing the plan with party regulars like Tewes and Hildebrand before it had garnered more high-level support in the campaign.

So it was a problem of getting high-level supporters.

Then the election.

On November 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from supporters asking for guidance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, no answers were forthcoming—not even about whether the tens of thousands of volunteers who had built personal fund-raising groups on MyBO would be able to continue them. “We’re all fired up now, and twiddling our thumbs!” wrote one frustrated volunteer from Pennsylvania. “ALL the leader volunteers are getting bombarded by calls from volunteers essentially asking: Nowwhatnowwhatnowwhat?”

Obama wanted them to continue in some way over his presidency.

Obama’s army was eager to be put to work. Of the 550,000 people who responded to the survey, 86 percent said they wanted to help Obama pass legislation through grassroots support; 68 percent wanted to help elect state and local candidates who shared his vision. Most impressive of all, more than 50,000 said they personally wanted to run for elected office.

But they never got that chance.

They got renamed "Organizing for America", and they were put under the command of the Democratic National Committee.

Obama unveiled OFA a week before his inauguration. “Volunteers, grassroots leaders, and ordinary citizens will continue to drive the organization,” he promised. But that’s not what happened. Shunted into the DNC, MyBO’s tools for self-organizing were dismantled within a year. Instead of calling on supporters to launch a voter registration drive or build a network of small donors or back state and local candidates, OFA deployed the campaign’s vast email list to hawk coffee mugs and generate thank-you notes to Democratic members of Congress who backed Obama’s initiatives.

Much of Obama's army went AWOL. OFA was only able to get 300,000 calls to Congress about Obamacare, and the Obamaites had to rebuild a campaign organization for Obama's 2012 re-election run.

 

[lpetrich]

Republicans, however, wasted no time in building activist movements of their own, though movements coordinated behind the scenes by professional activists financed by right-wing moneybags like the Koch brothers. They showed up in politicians' town halls and made an issue out of "death panels".

“Killing OFA reduced the possibility of competing for the hearts, minds, and votes of the Tea Party disaffected,” says Lester Spence, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. It also “killed the one entity possible for institutionalizing the raw energy created by the Obama campaign in 2008.”

One of the would-be creators of this mass organization still cannot get over this failure.

Mostly, he believes, it was an issue of control. “Our proposal would have required that members of the political team who had just won the nomination be willing to cede control of the grassroots movement and turn it more in the direction of policy advocacy and progressive advocacy,” he says.

Even today, Edley doesn’t know if Obama was ever told of the idea, and he regrets not bypassing the campaign operatives and reaching out to him personally. “I was loath to go around them and try to reach Barack directly,” Edley says. “That is probably one of the biggest mistakes of my professional life, given the dismal disappointment that OFA became.”

It was disastrous. Though Barack Obama was re-elected, he lost the House, the Senate, and several state governments to the Republicans - somewhere around 1,000 seats total.

In December, in an exit interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Obama himself sounded haunted by it. “You know, when I came into office, we were just putting out fires,” he said. “We were in a huge crisis situation. And so a lot of the organizing work that we did during the campaign, we started to see right away wasn’t immediately transferable to congressional candidates. More work would have needed to be done to just build up that structure. And, you know, one of the big suggestions that I have for Democrats as I leave, and something that, you know, I have some ideas about is: How do we do more of that ground-up building?”

 

[lpetrich]

Bernie Sanders: I Won’t Cease Grassroots Pressure on Washington Like Obama
The Intercept Interviews Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Bernie: When I'm President I Won't Just Be Commander In Chief, I'll Also Be Organizer In Chief

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

"So long as we remain principled and focused in our activism, so long as we remain committed to Kingian principles of nonviolence then I don't think that civic engagement and activism can be too much," AOC said. "I think that it is too much for people who are protecting the interests of the very few. It can be too much to those who want to prioritize the needs of billionaires over the needs of working people. But that's because once it gets to being to the point of too much, then you overwhelm the system with positive change."

Bernie Sanders:

“I’m a great fan of Barack Obama, who’s a friend of mine. He and I have actually discussed this very issue. His view is, it’s hard to do it,” said Sanders. “I understand that. But the essence of my politics, and I think Alexandria’s as well, is that we need an ongoing grassroots movement of millions of people to pressure Congress, to pressure the corporate establishment, so that we can bring about the changes that this country desperately needs. So that’s why I have said that I will not only be commander-in-chief, I’m going to be organizer-in-chief.” (An aide to Sanders said the meeting with Obama took place in the spring of 2018.)

So BS does not want to make that mistake again.

AOC hasn't been a slouch on this issue. From AOC Has Already Changed D.C. It Hasn’t Changed Her Much.

After the election, two of her top campaign aides founded a program called Movement School designed to teach the next generation of campaign operatives what they learned from pulling off the upset of the decade. About 70 people have gone through the ten-week training camp, and they are spread out all over the country — a standing army of dedicated campaign staff that will only grow in the years ahead.

She'll soon be starting her re-election campaign, and unlike her predecessor, she won't ignore her challengers.


How Andrew Jackson Rode a Populist Wave into the White House - HISTORY

The “outsider” candidate running against “Washington insiders” has become a familiar figure on both ends of the political spectrum. But back in the 1820s, there was no such thing as an anti-establishment, populist candidate—until Andrew Jackson invented it.

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Jackson’s “man of the people” candidacy was boosted by a rapidly expanding American electorate. Six new states joined the Union between the War of 1812 and the 1824 election, and those states extended the right to vote to (white, male) non-landowners. Many existing states followed their lead, giving the vote to a less affluent and less educated citizenry.

Also, by the time of the 1824 presidential election, all but six states allocated their electoral votes through a popular vote count. In the early years of the republic, state legislatures had chosen their electors, not the people.

AJ even invited a lot of ordinary people into the White House for an inaugural party, and they reportedly made a mess.

 

[Patooka]

I disagree. I think it would be more accurate to say Obama's grass roots machine was eclipsed by the likes of the Koch Brothers, the Mercers and the Wilks Brothers astroturfing extravaganza. Citizens United for the win, baby.

 

[Mumbles]

I disagree. I think it would be more accurate to say Obama's grass roots machine was eclipsed by the likes of the Koch Brothers, the Mercers and the Wilks Brothers astroturfing extravaganza. Citizens United for the win, baby.

No, it's clearly true that Obama walked away from OFA, and the entire thing languished. My main issue here is more the idea that this would have made a massive difference in, for example, 2010. This is less because of groups like the Tea Party, and more because young people, who hadn't actually listened to what Obama had clearly stated, decided that he had "betrayed" them by not withdrawing from Afghanistan (he said he wanted to increase troops there), or delivered single-payer health care (he stated he wanted to regulate insurers heavily and offer a public option - the latter of which was blocked in the senate), and the like.