Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone and Bill Berkowitz of Buzzflash add their voices to the growing chorus of frustration at what wreck-listed Badabing called "The Impenetrable Wall Around The President," a reference to the presidents' four closest advisors' efforts to insulate Obama from the input of progressives and even members of his cabinet.
Dickinson invites us to look beyond the Chicago Team to the greater ideological and tactical fortress now surrounding the president.
It should be a familiar sight: it's is the same status-quo, lobbyist-beholden Bastille that primary-candidate Obama and his grassroots army stormed, and defied all odds to capture.
Blaming any of Obama's inner circle is like blaming the four horsemen for the apocalypse. Obama's tribulation won't come because of his frontmen. It will come because of what they signal. Obama's signature movement, his message, his brand, and the policy platform on which he campaigned are being suffocated behind the very strategic and ideological bricks and mortar he'd breached so mightily when he wrested the nomination from Hillary.
The problem with Rahm is not that he's impolitic. We more or less tolerate boors and pottymouths if they champion our cause, and are effective (viva Alan!). The problem with Rahm is that he's a pitbull in defense of candidates, approaches and interests we abhor, and fought like tigers against in the primaries.
When we elected change, it wasn't just about ending torture or opportunistic wars or inter-party rancor (after the Patriot Act, wiretapping and "impeachment off the table," we'd had our fill of "bipartisan" Democrats, thanks). Change to us meant what Obama pledged it would mean--that the lobbyists would be barred from policymaking, and the influence of the corporatocracy would overwhelmed by the interests of the people. We didn't elect "compromise" or Clintonian "centrism" when we crusaded for Obama and threw out both Hillary AND the Republicans. We'd elected, we hoped, the beginning of the end of plutocracy corruption.
That was the promise around which Obama amassed a formidable grassroots army, his outsider-alliance of Deaniacs, Yellow Dogs, Greens, independents and disaffected Republicans. We did not fight for the agenda to be turned over to the old, shady wheelin'-dealin' Democratic guard that Obama's success against Hillary had just shown to be the party of yesterday.
By the time the 2008 presidential campaign was over, Obama for America had 13 million e-mail supporters, 4 million donors, and 2.5 million activists connected through the My.BarackObama social network and some $18 millions left in the bank, Rolling Stone magazine recently pointed out. Long-time Republicans were amazed by OFA’s success: “This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works,” Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson. “No one’s ever had these kinds of resources.”
That's a lot of support to piss away.
But that's largely what happened when Obama immediately surrounded himself with insider-politics, beltway establishment hacks like Rahm and dumped Organizing for America onto a DNC that had just installed a moderate Virginian Christian to replace its fiery, winning visionary.
“The move meant that the 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.”
“…. 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 …”
So the war-painted, whooping masses that had rallied and organized and fought with Obama against corrupted Republicans AND Democrats were commanded, essentially, to dispense with our grassroots populist hippie bullshit, and to leave our money behind. We were waved away like annoying children ordered off the White House lawn: "Take your tin scimitars on home. Us grownups are busy buying off Nelson and Shelby and 'giving Lieberman whatever he wants.'"
This is the move that not only lost the progressives, it lost the independents who weren't at all sure they wanted to prop up the old, status-quo Democratic order. They'd fought for change, or so they thought.
Rather than using OFA to engage millions of voters to turn up the heat on Congress, the president yoked his political fortunes ro the unabashedly transactional style of politics advocated by his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Health care reform … 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.
Horsetraders don't need ground troops, because they don't organize or fight in the field. They don't inspire allies, they purchase them. They don't whip up the phone banks or march in the streets or hold signs at town halls or force opponents to filibuster. They make deals in back rooms.
OFA was sidelined: supporters were disillusioned and demoralized. While Tea Partiers were in the streets shouting no to healthcare reform, OFAers were receiving email from the DNC requesting their signatures on a bland “statement of support.” When the Common Purpose Project -- made up of groups like Change to Win, Rock the Vote and MoveOn – was formed to run ads putting pressure on conservaDems to support healthcare reform, Rahm Emanuel “put a stop to the campaign.” Dickinson reports that at one of the meetings of the Common Purpose Coalition, Emanuel showed up and “yelled at the assembled activists, calling them ‘fucking retards’ and telling them he wasn’t going to let them derail his legislative winning streak.”
These imperious smackdowns felt like a betrayal of the movement--like, a Wallace takes the helmet off his British enemy, only to find Le Bruce type of betrayal. Maybe it shouldn't have been such a violent shock, but it was.
But given how in-love with Obama many of us were, we may have been appeased with a little bit of diplomacy and appreciation. But apparently, we didn't warrant even that much.
But folks should know it's not JUST the shutouts, the namecalling and the derision spewed our way from the likes of Emmanuel that has us so pissed off. It's that, again, we fought a primary for Obama because we DIDN'T want any more Rahmbo, Bob Shrum, third-way, fellate-Wall-Street Clintonian politics.
And we really don't like being cavalierly summoned like a cheap booty call after months of stonewalling, disparagement and dismissal.
It wasn't until 10 days before the Massachusetts election, after the (now-DNC's) OFA finally woke up to Coakley's cratering poll numbers, that the group sent out an urgent appeal to members, asking them to help turn out Massachusetts voters from phone banks across the country. But after having been sidelined by the White House for most of its first year, OFA discovered that most of its 13 million supporters had tuned out.
It adds to the painful irony how the Democrats' Establishment brain trust still imagines that independents turned out for Obama because they somehow hoped he'd govern like the Republicans they'd just kicked to the curb--that is, taking orders from the corrupt corporate entities (banks, insurance companies, Pharma) responsible for bankrupting the middle class. They're persisting with the delusion that folks somehow didn't come out for Coakley because Democrats, with their months of stalled legislation, were effecting too much change. Blue Dogs still haven't learned that voters who are taken-for-granted don't come out to support the status quo.
Reagan strategist Ed Rollins summed it up well:
“It didn’t work – with an exclamation point at the end! They didn’t keep the organization alive. They thought it was out there to use whenever they wanted to use it. But with constituents who feel like they’ve been part of a revolution – as ours did in ’80 and ’81 – you’ve got to feed them. You’ve got to make sure that they feel important. OFA e-mailed them to death, but without any real steps to make them feel a part of the process, like a valued part of the campaign.”
We've been pleading for Obama to get down from his tower, unsheathe his populist sword, and shoulder his way past his gatekeeping officers to again gather his army, to again speak and listen to his people--his base. If he doesn't, the same Establishment ramparts that Hillary stood smugly behind during the last primaries won't shield him either, the next time the forces for change come crashing at the gates.