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donheld Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:20 PM
Original message
No We Can't
Obama had millions of followers eager to fight for his agenda. But the president muzzled them - and he's paying the price

TIM DICKINSON


"Staff are replaceable. A mass of dedicated volunteers is not." — David Plouffe

As the polls were closing in Massachusetts on the evening of January 19th, turning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat over to the Republicans for the first time in half a century, David Plouffe was busy reminiscing about the glory days.

The president's former campaign manager was nowhere to be found at the sprawling war room of Organizing for America, the formidable grass-roots army he had forged during the 2008 campaign. Instead, Plouffe — who serves as a "supersenior adviser" to OFA and its only direct conduit to Obama — was across town at a forum hosted by the Progressive Book Club, where he pimped his memoir, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory.

It was a bitterly ironic way to mark the end of the president's first year in office. Together with David Axelrod, Plouffe was the brains of Obama's campaign, the man who transformed a shoestring organization into a high-tech juggernaut. 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."

Look back at Obama's "Machinery of Hope" in Tim Dickinson's 2008 report on the grass-roots organization that got Obama elected.

More: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31961846/no_we_cant
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Hello_Kitty Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:21 PM
Response to Original message
1. K and R. I read the article earlier today.
Everyone here should read it. He's right.
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MercutioATC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:24 PM
Response to Original message
2. Yes We Can!!
...we're just not going to.
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brand404 Donating Member (161 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:26 PM
Response to Original message
3. Never would have guessed Obama was also a Corportate Democrat :(
Maybe he will genuinely be for the people if he goes for a 2nd term?!?
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MercutioATC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:29 PM
Response to Reply #3
6. That's the spirit!
Make the same decision and wish for a different outcome!
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Dinger Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:27 PM
Response to Original message
4. K & R (nt)
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asdjrocky Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:28 PM
Response to Original message
5. Good article.
They get nothing from me. I gave money and time and my vote, for a right wing agenda?

Never. Fucking. Again.
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FrenchieCat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:34 PM
Response to Original message
7. No. Y'ALL can't....perhaps,
Edited on Sun Feb-07-10 09:43 PM by FrenchieCat
But some of us can, and some of us have, and some of us will......
Because we have much to lose if we don't.

Almost sound like some want to teach Obama a lesson,
when all that we will end up doing is hurting ourselves.

No one can know what would have happened to this "organization",
many were more about the man and getting him into the office and not much more.
and I have a feeling that the exact same thing that happened would have,
no matter.

Because you see, folks have been claiming that they were going to withhold support
from Barack Obama, starting at about day 2. By Day 3, many more were looking upon
the emails received like they were spam. By Day 4, it was "Hold his feet to the fire",
and by Day 5, it was "Never Again"....."Where's my change".

In fact, I remember the initial days of the Health Care forums,
where very few showed up...... and many that did were mad from the get-go.

Hell, his "stimulus" wasn't big enough, they said,
and that was done quite quickly......


So folks can imagine that Obama did something he shouldn't have,
and that if he had things would be different,
so this can be piled on to everything else folks are "disappointed" about,
but it's wishful thinking that folks who disengaged would have stayed engaged
anymore than they have. To believe to know exactly is really an exercise....

and still we face problems in this country, and if we don't come together on our own volition,
none of what someone wrote in the Rolling Stone will mean a thing anyways.
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donheld Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:39 PM
Response to Reply #7
8. Did you read the article?
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frazzled Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 09:43 PM
Response to Original message
9. Hey, I got contacted by OFA to call for Coakley
And I hauled my behind (and convinced Mr. Frazzled to come as well) all the way up to the far North Side of Chicago to the OFA office to do it, on a freezing Monday afternoon. They had organized lists, scripts, a good number of volunteers, and phones to use. We were working our behinds off, but we could tell it was not great when we kept getting things like, "I'm a lifelong Democrat, but she has been such a bitch!"

The problem was this was a six-week campaign (early December primaries to mid-January election, with xmas and New Year's in between), and Coakley didn't look to be tanking until the last week or two. All the OFA volunteers in the country couldn't turn that around.

The machinery was fine ... the candidate was not, nor was the lousy election schedule. The rest of the races have many many months for a candidate to recover from a stumble. Besides, OFA is not chartered to poll for candidates--let's blame the Coakley campaign, the DCCC (Senator Menendez), and the DNC. Organizing for America actually got a ton of volunteers out, both online and in person across the nation to make a valiant last-minute stand--tens of thousands of calls were made to get out the vote from '08 Obama voters in Massachusetts. It didn't work.



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ProSense Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Feb-07-10 10:46 PM
Response to Original message
10. These articles are hilarious.
They're all about some alternate reality used to justify why a bunch of people who do nothing but complain are demoralized. Here's how the article ends:

The good news is, OFA's last-minute blitz in Massachusetts underscored what it's still capable of. In just 10 days, the group generated more than twice as many calls on Coakley's behalf as they did in support of health care last year — an effort credited with helping to cut Republican Scott Brown's final margin of victory in half. Yet asked if the lesson from Massachusetts is that OFA should recommit itself to being a Democratic turnout machine this fall, Stewart is noncommittal. "We're still figuring it out," he says.

Privately, some party leaders complain that OFA isn't doing enough to campaign for vulnerable Democrats. The only true accomplishment from OFA's first year, they say, is the work it's done to build a national infrastructure for the president's 2012 re-election campaign. To reproduce the organizational structure developed by Obama for America in 2008, OFA has quietly deployed paid staff to all 50 states, building a network from state directors all the way down to a corps of supervolunteers, trained in organizing, who recruit an army of neighborhood team leaders. "There's a skeleton of a re-election campaign already set up — beyond a skeleton," says Figueroa, the campaign's former field director. "There's already meat to the bone in every state in the union. Three years away from the next election, that army is already being continually fed. If you're Barack Obama and his political operation, revving the engine, how is that not a good thing?"

The failures of the past year, however, have left a strong sense of betrayal among many who once were Obama's fiercest advocates. "After all the sweat and tears of the campaign," says the creator of a popular pro-Obama website, "we were owed the opportunity to fight for something." Adds another, "We thought we had earned an ownership stake in the future of our country through this campaign, but that ownership stake has been revoked."

Had Obama let his activists lead the charge and gone to the mat for health care reform, would the outcome have been any different? "I can't say that we would have health care reform," says Moulitsas. "But people wouldn't be so demoralized. We'd have an engaged base still willing to fight for that change. And I tell you what: We would not have lost Ted Kennedy's seat."

Never mind health care, at least people wouldn't have been demoralized? Oh brother.

Ignore the fact that OFA was out there making calls on most issues from day one. Ignore that the President spoke to thousand of these activists on several occasions. Ignore that many of the critics were lashing out at OFA and criticizing them for supporting the President.

Just make up an alternate reality to justify criticism and characterize the President's first year as a failure.

Utter BS.

What change: Grab a damn mop.





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donheld Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-08-10 12:28 AM
Response to Reply #10
11. From you that's a compliment
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