[update: see first blockquote for latest. Also, related YouTube video, at the end of this post, of important and inspiring discussion, led by Al Giordano, on Obama & political organizing.
This post has, as I've added updates, turned into a broader discussion which doesn't assume the 50 State Strategy is dead. For an interesting framing of what may be the core issue inherent, see Micah Sifry;s comment in my second update. As a related subject, Micah Sifry discusses what will happen to MyBarackObama.com (and its attached social networks), which Chris Hughes states will continue.]
on an encouraging note from another source :
"I had the chance [yesterday] to ask [Dean] if he would consider staying on for another four years as DNC chair. He said no, but that he was extracting promises from all DNC chair candidates to preserve the 50 state strategy. He believed whole heartedly that the 50 state strategy would continue beyond his tenure."
As another useful point of reference, a DNC staffer states that the SPP (state partnership program that put organizers into states) began in 2005 with an agreement with the state parties that was always set to end this month, after which the states themselves would review the effectiveness of the program - how it was working for them; but the DNC remains committed to the 50 state program.
At the height of an historic victory, is the Democratic Party at risk of slouching back into a losing approach to national politics that, for years until Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy, helped ensure the Party's long term decline ?
As Firedog Lake is reporting, an anonymous report, leaked by someone unwilling at this point to go on record claims that the DNC organizers who have been at the core of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy, which has helped bring about an historic Democratic Party resurgence, have been told they will be laid off at the end of the month.
Update #2:
Al Giordano weighs in:
"Since my name (and video) are invoked in this diary, let me offer my take:
1. The lay-off of these organizers does NOT mean an end to the 50 state strategy.
2. More likely, it means they want to put their own people in there.
3. There's no way they're going to end the 50 state strategy: It worked! What about the Obama organization makes anyone think that it will discard what works?
4. There may be some people being laid off that don't like it - but did they really expect to continue past the election? What is the work they supposedly would be doing over Thanksgiving, Chanukah, xmas and New Years that would justify the expenditure?
5. As I understand it, they're all getting four weeks severance pay and health care through the end of the year."
And Micah Sifry, at TechPresident (Personal Democracy Forum) broadens out the discussion, getting to what really may be at the heart of the matter - questions about the continuity of the Obama Campaign's social networks and on how much control an Obama Administration and the DNC will try exert over those networks :
Lots of people are wondering what will happen to the Obama campaign's huge network of online supporters and on-the-ground organizers...
So far, we have a few crumbs of information on what may be happening. Earlier this week, Al Giordano reported that Obama staffers were being granted "four additional weeks of severance pay, health coverage through the end of the year, every reasonable accommodation to get ... employed on the transition team, inauguration team, and in the administration afterward." On the other hand, there are rumors afoot (links go to DailyKos and Firedoglake, respectively) that the DNC is shutting down its "fifty-state program" of field organization, which would mean losing all the institutional memory of the hundreds of paid organizers the party has had on the ground building local networks in the last few years. Since President-elect Obama is now the de-facto head of the DNC, this rumor makes little sense unless you are ready to believe his political team is going to throw away valuable organizing resources.
Personally, I expect myBO to get folded into the DNC, most likely by merging it into Partybuilder, the DNC's social network...
Whether myBO is merged with the DNC or kept as a separate entity, its real value is in all the networking that has already happened on and through the site. This is social capital as much as it is political capital, and arguably is as much the property of the people with accounts on the site as it is the property of the campaign. One hopes that going forward, the Obama political team realizes that the conversation with a network of supporters is different than the conversation with a list, and that the two-way, multilateral linking enabled by the platform is its real strength. While this does mean that the network could also be a "Frankenstein," a walking, talking monster that doesn't always obey its master's commands, if Team Obama attempts to take away the network's self-organizing potential, they will be left with a shell of the power now on tap.
Along similar lines, as Sifry's argument above, see Nicholas Van Hoffman, writing for The Nation.
Because I can't divulge the source this is currently a rumor, but one person commenting on this post ["The congressional district organizer we have here told me yesterday that he is laid off at the end of the month."] has heard the same news, about a DNC layoff of the core group of organizers which has implemented Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy.
A repudiation of Dean's 50 State Strategy would represent a major step backwards.
Here is some of what the source for this has stated:
I received a call today from our state field organizer, hired as part of the "50 state" program by the DNC, that [he/she] and 200 others were told they would be laid off at the end of the month and the 50 state program was being put on hold until after the new president decides on who the DNC chair will be... I am almost in shock that something which has manifested such remarkable results may be on the ropes.
I understand that people in political positions in the administration offer their resignations as a matter of course when an administration changes and would, therefore, expect that Howard Dean's tenure would be up for review. To decide to scrap an entire program and let go of the all the talented staff associated with it is another matter altogether...
...If we are truly to reshape the Democratic Party for the long term, we must, must maintain a 50 state strategy... We would not have won senatorial races in Virginia and North Carolina without the field operation already in place with the 50 state program which PAVED THE WAY for the massive Obama operation to succeed.
Another commenter on the discussion thread suggests we may yet see a more positive outcome:
"that the O'44 campaign is working on a strategy to retain and integrate others into a network of Democratic state by state support! This to insure that any legislation or Gov't needs will be addressed at the state level to guarantee things are inclusive from the ground up!"
Barack Obama's success presidential campaign was driven more than anything by a ferocious ground game that benefited from the talented state level political organizers, to whom we are all indebted, who have been at the heart of Howard Dean's winning 50 State Strategy.
As Ian Welsh reports,
Apparently they will be laid off at the end of the month, and the new DNC chair will decide whether he or she wants to continue the 50 state policy.
Of course, there's no better way to kill the program than to let the organizers go. With them will go all the experience, a lot of the contacts and most of the trust. And many of them won't be available to be rehired.
...the 50 state strategy's biggest opponent, for years has been Rahm Emanuel. Rahm's new job? Chief of Staff. Wonder if Obama's ok with this?
Until Howard Dean, the Democratic Party had been locked into the same tired, passive and fundamentally stupid reliance on a Washington DC centric approach to national politics heavily reliant on messaging, advertising and triangulation.
Through the 90's, the party's state level human infrastructure shriveled and was replaced by highly paid Washington consultants armed with mountains of polling data but oblivious to state and local level political reality.
The party hired paid political organizers only during campaign season and consequently state level party infrastructure shriveled.
But the Republican Party and, especially, the Christian right did not adopt the DNC's new and 'improved' approach to national politics.
Not at all.
While the DNC invested in polls, TV and radio ad buys and consultants, the American right leveraged its money, building up its state level human infrastructure and developing structures to groom and support cadres of budding political activists. The right organized continually, through electoral cycles.
Gradually, the Democratic Party lost its competitive edge in one state after another and stopped bothering to even field candidates in states deemed too heavily republican to be worth investing scarce party money and resources in.
It was an approach that is hardly worthy of being called a 'strategy' : a staged retreat based on a presumption, and self-fulfilling prophecy, that traditional party policies guaranteed defeat.
The prevailing wisdom, marked and propelled by the rise of the Democratic Leadership Committee, held that Democrats needed to be more like Republicans.
Karl Rove himself could not have contrived a more insidious approach that would enervate and discourage activists who formed the Democratic Party base.
The results were sadly predictable.
Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy repudiated the madness and sought to turn the Democratic Party back to the nuts and bolts of political organizing.
Dean's approach has worked, and it would be absurd for the DNC to lay off the committed party activists who have been at the heart of the 50 State Strategy, in what would represent a return to a failed, discredited and elitist Democratic Party approach that, pointlessly sacrificing basic party principles, turned away from basic human needs.
We can do better, and we must. Let's hope this isn't true.