History is always more complcated than a headline. Yet, we love headlines, tweets, memes: simple equations to answer complicated problems.
In 2010, after many tough and near-fatal compromises on passing Obamacare, and in the rising tide of Republican-engineered Tea Party “furor,” the grass-roots juggernaut that powered Barack Obama to his 2008 election victory was all but gone. Organizing for America, the DNC-powered Web portal for channeling grassroots activisim into Democratic campaigns, was mostly a limp and impotent shell of a force in politics, and Republicans trounced Democrats across the nation in the 2010 election. Democrats have done scarce little to pry their cold, dead hands from the levers of political power in the U.S. ever since.
How did this happen? In 2010, the meme that began to arise via articles in Rolling Stone and elsewhere is that Democratic political operative David Plouffe was to blame. From RS:
After the 2008 election, Plouffe had taken OFA, previously known as Obama for America, and moved its entire operation into the Democratic National Committee. There, he argued, the people-powered revolution that Obama had created could serve as a permanent field campaign for the Democratic Party, capable of mobilizing millions of Americans to support the president's ambitious agenda. Fresh off the campaign, the group boasted 13 million e-mail supporters, 4 million donors, 2.5 million activists connected through the My.BarackObama social network and a phenomenal $18 million left in the bank. Even Republican strategists were staggered. "This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works," said Ed Rollins, who was to Ronald Reagan what Plouffe is to Obama. "No one's ever had these kinds of resources."
Yet rather than heeding the lessons of Obama's historic victory, Plouffe and OFA permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy's seat — destroying the 60-vote supermajority the Democrats need to pass major legislation. In December and early January, when it should have been gearing up the patented Obama turnout machine — targeting voters on college campuses, trumpeting the chance to make history by electing Massachusetts' first female senator — OFA was asking local activists to make phone calls to other states to shore up support for health care reform. "Our Massachusetts volunteers were calling into Pennsylvania or Ohio to recruit volunteers in support of the president's agenda," admits OFA director Mitch Stewart.
Hmm, kind of like those volunteers who never made it to Michigan to get Hillary Clinton a few badly needed votes in the hinterlands. Yep, it’s easy to see the results from DNC/OFA mismanagment of Obama’s huge grassroots army, just as we can see how Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and Bernie’s army were tossed aside by “the grown-ups” of Democratic politics.
However, a recent article at The New Republic paints a much different and nuanced picture of how this fiasco came to be. Before Barack Obama was even being nominated at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and well before Plouffe was the point person for the Organizing for America debacle, a lesser-known precursor called Movement 2.0 was being pitched to the Obama and DNC campaign leaders by one of the most high-powered set of Internet-era thinkers ever assembled for political purposes:
On July 20, 2008, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley’s intellectual elite, dialed in to a conference call hosted by Christopher Edley Jr., a senior policy adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Joining them on the line were some of the world’s top experts in crowdsourcing and online engagement, including Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mitchell Baker, the chairman of Mozilla. Drawing on Kapor’s influence, Edley had invited them to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” Together, they would ponder a crucial question: how to “sustain the movement” should Obama, who was still a month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, go on to win the White House.
What a great idea. So, Movement 2.0 was sketched out, and readied for pitching to senior Obama and DNC operatives:
Critically, the Movement 2.0 team envisioned AFO as a tax-exempt organization that would operate free of the Democratic National Committee. “Mitch and I argued that to make the movement ‘authentic’ and entrepreneurial,” Edley says, “it would have to be built outside of the DNC—which has institutional commitments and incumbent allegiances that will always be a fact of party life.” The team concluded by asking for permission to raise $250,000 to set up a staff infrastructure and develop the web site. The founding board would include Edley, Kapor, Alexander, and Podesta.
“Authentic.” “Entrepreneurial.” Ah, those words that resonate with DNC folks like a symphony. Not. With time being of the essence, the M2.0 team pushed the proposal up the ladder to Paul Tewes, a poltical consultant who came on to the Obama campaign during the Iowa primary and who was the placekeeper head of the DNC. And of course, what does any Democratic political consultant do when they see money and power going away from their carefully constructed featherbed? They fearmonger it:
Tewes saw potential disaster. Four days later, he wrote to Rouse and his colleague Hildebrand:
As both of you know, I have many concerns about this..... as a lover of “Party” I really don’t like this.
I think the decision needs to be made and discussed on “this vs. party” or “this and party.” The discussion should focus on—What is best for Barack Obama, his politics, his agenda and his future.
If the first step is to move outside the party with your organization, the political ramifications and “future” ramifications need to be thought through. Further, a discussion should be had of party over this—why and why not?
Marching into this seems premature and secondly creating something before hand (before e-day) has appearance problems in my opinion.
I would ask that we postpone any of this till after the convention and do a little gathering where we can discuss. Please.
Ah, those lovers of Party. AKA, Those lovers of the people who pay elite consultants big bucks to spend big bucks with people who make big bucks.
The rest of the story is sad, but predictable. Obama’s attention as a candidate was placed elsewhere, M2.0 fizzled, the DNC dug their heels in, and grabbed for centralized power with gusto. By October 2008, the scotching of a truly effective and powerful grassroots machine was done:
Gone was the idea of a new organization, independent of the DNC. “A key working assumption,” the memo stated, “is that we should affirmatively empower Barack Obama as the head of the Party, and in the process strengthen both him and the Party. All Obama politics should be filtered through the DNC, and all Party politics”—including existing organizations that support candidates for Congress and statehouses—“should be filtered through the DNC. This all serves the agenda of one person, Barack Obama.”
The original backers of Movement 2.0 had been sidelined. “I had nothing to do” with the new memo, Edley says.
The DNC-fired post-election portals fizzled: they were rolled out late, directed people to no specific actions, and were quickly dribbling away grassroots support. Obama understood that there was a problem, now that he was focused on post-election activities. He took appropriate action, but it was already too late:
One person, however, seemed to understand that such half-measures wouldn’t be enough: the president-elect. The same day Hughes posted his message, Obama reached out to David Plouffe. Unlike other top operatives from the campaign, the campaign manager had decided not to follow Obama into the White House, but to take time off to be with his family before returning to political consulting. His daughter was born in the early hours of November 7, and Obama called him that morning.
Organizing for America was born, but the damage was already done. There was not a tight “war room” cadre of people who really knew how to make grassroots politics happen, In their place were (sometimes) well-meaning but misguided and mismotivated political operatives who tried to figure out how to make grassroots politics fit into the featherbedded world of Washington inside politics.
Fail. But you can’t lay it all at Plouffe’s doorstep. Clearly there were other personalities who were laying the groundwork for the political disaster we now live with well before he got his hands on OFA, as well as a pervasive failure amongst leading Democratic politicians to understand what the nation was willing and able to do together with Democrats to change American politics.
So let’s call to task the entire near-permanent cadre of Democratic political operatives who seem to be more interested in sucking up to the powerful in, around and beyond Washington to feather their nests, whilst average Americans eager for change and willing to work for it are treated like “the help” to clean up their brain-dead campaign messes. The difference between Democratic and Republican politics is that Democrats want power, and then take it from the people who gave it to them when they get it. Republicans already have power, either through business or from being annointed by business through politics, and so wisely they have kept the people who gave it to them as well curried supporters for decades.
From the DNC perspective, there is no such thing as a “Democratic base”: there are only names on lists to be brow-beaten into going to the polls now and again. A “base” would imply people to be listened to and cared for. That doesn’t really happen in Democratic politics on a consistent basis. The Tea Party was no accident: Republicans saw the threat from the Obama machine, knew that they’d be toast if they didn’t revitalize their donor/activist base, and they put pedal to the metal to make them feel like a part of the game. Bernie did a great job at this, Hillary did a better job than people gave her credit for, but she was saddled with many of the self-aggrandizing and self-profiting hangers-on that sunk Movement 2.0, who, not surprisingly, made many of the same mistakes that led to M2.0’s demise.
The good news in all of this is that the DNC is now so thoroughly discredited, and the surge of grassroots activity so strong and so well organized independent of a presidential campaign, that the demise of the DNC as we have known it is a much stronger possibility, at least in the long run. The milquetoast candidates for DNC leadership are not heartening in the short run, but hopefully this means that there will be a relatively ineffective opposition to a permanent grassroots machine growing virally apart from it, and apart from candidates who will throw the movement under the bus of their egos and ambitions. Rest in peace, Movement 2.0; we’re not going to forget that you tried to do the right thing, and we’ll do our best to make this all fly straight.