Over the summer, as conservative activists outplayed liberal activists, turning Democrats’ local health care forums into daily news clips against the Democratic reform bill, I kept wondering where the Obama army was. Where was Organizing for America, the 13 million-strong grassroots network Obama put together during the ’08 Presidential campaign? Weren’t they supposed to be in place still, ready to get Obama’s back during his change-agent presidency?
In August, The New York Times ran an article about OFA and how conservatives were dominating the health care debate. The article didn’t explain why the Obamatons were dropping the ball, but at least it confirmed I wasn’t imagining things—OFA was indeed, anemic and MIA.
As the health care debate intensifies, the president is turning to his grass-roots network — the 13 million members of Organizing for America — for support.
Mr. Obama engendered such passion last year that his allies believed they were on the verge of creating a movement that could be mobilized again. But if a week’s worth of events are any measure here in Iowa, it may not be so easy to reignite the machine that overwhelmed Republicans a year ago.
More than a dozen campaign volunteers, precinct captains and team leaders from all corners of Iowa, who dedicated a large share of their time in 2007 and 2008 to Mr. Obama, said in interviews this week that they supported the president completely but were taking a break from politics and were not active members of Organizing for America.
There was also this curious bit of news. Although, again, it went unexplained:
In recent months the group’s strategy has changed. Gone are the television commercials on health care, climate change and other issues that were broadcast in an effort to pressure moderate Democrats to support the president’s proposals. Now, after the White House received an earful from some of those Democrats, the group has started running advertisements of appreciation.
Wasn’t OFA supposed to hound Democrats to make good on Obama’s mandate for change?
My questions have now been answered. Seizing on the latest (and crippling) loss in the fight for health care reform—Scott Brown’s historic GOP win in Massachusetts—Rolling Stone published an article titled “No We Can’t” this month that explains why everything fell apart:
Blame Obama’s decision to fold OFA into the Democratic National Committee (and the resulting inability to go after moderate Democrats) and their reliance on traditional politics (abandoning popular pressure from the grassroots for inside-the-Beltway deal making).
[Obama's 2008 campaign manager David] Plouffe, in a truly bizarre call, decided to incorporate Obama for America [now known as Organizing for America] as part of the Democratic National Committee. The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party. It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil.
Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, tried to dissuade Plouffe. “The DNC is a political entity,” he says. “Senators who you are going to need to put significant pressure on to deliver change — like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who was opposed to health care reform — are voting members of the DNC. It limited how aggressive you could be.” Hildebrand pushed Plouffe to make “Obama 2.0″ an independent nonprofit, similar to FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing instigators of the Tea Party uprising. Free from the party apparatus, Hildebrand argued, the group could raise unlimited funds and “put enough pressure on conservative Democrats to keep them in line.”
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The decision to shunt Organizing for America into the DNC had far-reaching consequences for the president’s first year in office. For starters, it destroyed his hard-earned image as a new kind of politician, undercutting the post-partisan aura that Obama enjoyed after the election. “There were a lot of independents, and maybe even some Republicans, on his list of 13 million people,” says Joe Trippi, who launched the digital age of politics as the campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004. “They suddenly had to ask themselves, ‘Do I really want to help build the Democratic Party?’”
In addition, with Plouffe providing less input in his inner circle, Obama began to pursue a more traditional, backroom approach to enacting his agenda. Rather than using OFA to engage millions of voters to turn up the heat on Congress, the president yoked his political fortunes to the unabashedly transactional style of politics advocated by his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Health care reform — the centerpiece of his agenda — was no longer about mobilizing supporters to convince their friends, families and neighbors in all 50 states. It was about convincing 60 senators in Washington. It became about deals.
“There were two ways for Barack Obama to twist arms on Capitol Hill,” says Trippi. “You can get the best arm-bender in town to be your chief of staff — and I don’t think there’d be many people who would deny that Rahm is a pretty good pick. Or the American people can be your arm-bender. What I don’t understand is why the White House looked at it as an either/or proposition. You could have had both.”
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In the wake of Coakley’s loss, OFA has been silent on the health care front. “There hasn’t been a single directive from OFA since Election Day in Massachusetts,” observes Evry, the former campaign coordinator. “No ‘Let’s get those e-mails out there.’ No ‘Let’s phone-bank.’ No ‘Let’s target this politician.’ Nothing.” The failure to secure a bill through Emanuel’s fuck-the-activists dealmaking has created a double whammy heading into this fall’s midterm elections: no legislative victory on health care, coupled with widespread disillusionment among the party’s base.
