I'm now back in New York after having spent the past week volunteering for the Obama campaign up in New Hampshire. While it's nice that I can finally get off of my feet and relax a little (I probably knocked on anywhere from 500-600 doors over the past week in around 30 hours of canvassing, on foot), the result from last night weren't what any of us were hoping for. I didn't end up staying until the end, but the mood at the Nashua staging area, where I had been working out of, was somber from the get-go. We had kept our heads down and ignored the good polling coming out, simply focusing on executing the GOTV plan that had been in place - and we fell far short of what any outside expectations had been. Losing by 3% was certainly a far cry from the 20% margin of victory that Rep. Paul Hodes urged us to aim for when he stopped by to give a quick pep talk to the volunteers yesterday.
That being said, I'd like to compile my thoughts from my experience this past week and talk about what's at stake from hereon out, through the rest of the primary process. Had Obama won New Hampshire last night, he would have been the odds-on favorite to capture the nomination. Now it's going to be a fight, maybe to the bitter end. But what's at stake here - aside from choosing the next president - is the soul of the Democratic Party.
Simply put, the Clinton team must have had an excellent GOTV operation in place - better than ours. But that's not to say that it was the best one by any stretch, nor is it one that is representative of what we want our campaigns to be about. Clinton bussed in over 1,000 people from New York and paid for them to do campaign operations for her. It's highly unlikely that a great deal of those people would have come to New Hampshire had they been under their own obligation to pay their way to come and volunteer at no cost. The people I worked with came from around the country for no pay - from as far south as Georgia and Texas, and as far west as Washington. We had two high school freshmen from Austin, TX volunteer for the campaign, skipping classes to help canvass for Obama, along with college students from all over the country and others who were taking time off from their jobs to try and make history. That's what a true grassroots campaign is about: inspiring people enough to believe in a cause or a candidate that you can draw them to donate their time. It's not about paying others to work for you. One of our volunteers encountered a van full of Hillary canvassers who essentially tried to pay him to join the campaign. That's not the way campaigns should be run, much less a progressive grassroots movement.
Secondly, we were consistent in our message and our positive attitude in the campaign. Never did we say a bad word about any of the other candidates (including Clinton) when we were canvassing, as opposed to the misleading anti-Obama mailers about abortion being dropped by third-party groups supporting Clinton. Even when the Clintons started taking desperate measures, such as the comments about civil rights and Clinton's 'Muskie moment' (which was as transparent an emotional ploy as I have ever seen), we never felt the need to respond with below-the-belt responses. Never did we try to recalibrate or co-opt someone else's message in order to prop ourselves up. This speaks to the larger issues beyond the ground level - namely that the Clinton campaign is driven by poll-tested messaging coming from Mark Penn. And since that didn't work in Iowa, they simply co-opted Obama's message of change (as did many Republicans), leading to such absurdities as Clinton stating she had been an 'agent of change for 35 years'. Simply put, a Clinton presidential ticket will embody the worst tactical strategies of the DLC: a cautious, poll-tested message that has nothing to do with change. Instead, it will merely represent insignificant changes to the status quo and will once again make the Democratic Party a vehicle for the ambitions of the Clintons, as it was in the 1990s.
The last point I'd like to make is that 'electability' should be something of a concern. Many independents I spoke with in New Hampshire - both men and women - expressed notable distaste for Clinton, stating they would never vote for her in many cases. While it's not primarily her fault, this should be a real fear. If we have an unlikable candidate who plays it safe on the campaign trail, we are going to lose another election by a few percentage points. Obama has the capacity to move the 'center', wherever that may be, to the left. Clinton, I have no doubt, will be able to accomplish that, much less even be trusted to move in the right direction. That's not to say that New Hampshire voters are representative of the rest of the country, but I fear that instead of being able to focus on a true 50-state strategy (as I believe we can with Obama), we'll once again be cherry-picking certain states to try and simply make the math add up to 270.
Why do I mention all of this? Simply put, this is the battle that the blogosphere was meant to take upon itself. From when I first joined Daily Kos back in the summer of 2004, I've always understood the inherent existence of this website - and others like it - to be about not only electing Democrats, but making the Democratic Party better. After years of failed messaging, failed strategy, and electoral losses, we were to supposed to make change happen. In Hillary Clinton, you have a candidate who embodies everything that was wrong with the Democratic Party from the time Bill Clinton got elected until now: an establishment politician who is not going to deliver any real reforms and will always move to the right before heading left. Her support is from the Democratic establishment that ruled during Bill Clinton's administration; it is composed of people who nostalgically look to his presidency as what a Hillary Clinton administration will be like. It is clear from her stump speech that she is running on her husband's record in giving people an idea of what kind of president she will be like, and she is not looking towards the future; she is running a campaign that is steeped in the past.
Barack Obama is not the perfect candidate, particularly in the eyes of the netroots. To many here, he is not aggressive enough, does not fight back in the kind of rhetorical style that many would like to see, and he believes that we can pass progressive legislation without engaging in a street fight with the Republicans and the special interest groups. But strategically, he embodies everything that we do: hundreds of thousands of people who believe that, to paraphrase Howard Dean, we have the power. The power to right what is wrong and to make our hopes and dreams a reality. I saw this in the people I worked with in New Hampshire, and I have no doubt that the same can be said of the people who are volunteering in Nevada, South Carolina, and beyond. People from all over America believe in Obama and what he will do as president.
One loss won't change that.