bottom up change

Progressives need to be more creative in their organizing around health care. A look back at the civil rights movement may be instructive.

I’ve been supportive of Organizing for America since its inception–even before we knew what it would be called.  But the sad fact is that on the biggest progressive organizing test of 2009–the health care reform push–OFA and its allies have thus far been out-organized by a bunch of obnoxious, loud, in some cases crazy, but very well-motivated citizens on the right.  The angry town hall meetings over the past few weeks is a sign that all the passion, or at least all the talent for making the news, lies with opponents of reform.  The fact that the media has focused so intensely on the anger among opponents of reform is a major loss for President Obama and OFA.

Some on the left may disagree with me that the scenes of anger at the town halls represent a loss for the President and OFA.  These town halls, they would counter, are “astroturf”, since they are sponsored by special interests and do not represent a large section of the public.  It’s probably true that the people screaming at their representatives and senators are a fringe group of conservatives, and it is true that some special interests are sponsoring the protests.  But it does not follow that these protests are therefore artificial or staged.  People are choosing to show up at these town halls en masse, and their anger seems genuine to me.  Indeed, in numbers and in motivation, the grassroots energy seems stronger on the right at the present time than it does on the left, regardless of who is organizing these people.

Last week I became aware of an incident that confirmed for me that progressives have a serious problem because of these town hall meetings.  I received an email describing how supporters of health care reform were overwhelmed by loud, jeering opponents at a town hall in Chelmsford, Massachusetts for Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-MA).  The OFA chapter in Massachusetts had tried to send supporters of health care reform to this meeting, but the breakdown of the pro-reform versus anti-reform groups was about 40-60, according to this email.  Apparently, the jeering of the anti-reform group was so loud that the pro-reform group didn’t stand a chance, and wouldn’t have even if the numbers were more even.  The fact that conservatives showed up in greater numbers and were drowning out the voices of OFA’s people in Massachusetts is a disturbing sign.  This piece describing Ben Cardin’s (D-MD) experience in the Democratic stronghold of Maryland is another example of how even in strongly blue states progressives are being outmaneuvered by conservatives at the grassroots level on the health care issue.  (For what it’s worth, I have lived in both Maryland and Massachusetts so I know that there are a lot of Republicans in both states.  My point is simply that in both states Republicans are vastly outnumbered by Democrats who could have shown up in larger numbers than they did.)

Last week, Paul Krugman wrote about the “town hall mob” mentality that has spread around the country.  His argument was that the kind of anger we are seeing against health care reform among some conservatives isn’t just a normal disagreement about policy.  Instead, according to Krugman, there is an element of unease that some people in this country have about a black President, and this unease is showing up in the town halls.  There may be some of this going on, and the whole “birther” movement is a sign that something deeply irrational is spreading among a segment of the Republican base.  However, President Bill Clinton was the victim of very bizarre rumors as well during his administration, and if we are honest, progressives will admit that there were wild conspiracy theories floating among their ranks during the Bush administration.  There was also a lot of hatred and anger.  The cause of the vitriol doesn’t matter so much as the result, it seems to me.  In his piece, Krugman wrote something that I believe is more important and insightful to the current debate about health care:

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

It’s not exactly a surprise that this kind of deflation in intensity among Obama’s supporters would happen.  Many people who volunteered and voted for Barack Obama are disappointed with the details they are hearing about the various health care reform proposals that have been passing through the various committees in Congress.  Some people strongly prefer a single-payer system, and believe that the legislation that Democrats are currently considering amounts to nothing but a half-measure that will not solve our health care problems.  Another group of progressives is more willing to settle for the so-called “public option”, but let’s face it, Krugman is right: there does not appear to be a lot of enthusiasm for this approach among Barack Obama’s base.

So what should progressives who care about the fate of health insurance reform do?  Two things are necessary, I believe.  One lesson learned from this summer is that while door knocking and phone banking may be good field tactics during an election, they are lousy methods for organizing around legislation.  OFA has been recruiting volunteers this summer to call supporters of President Obama in order to encourage them to call or write their representatives or senators and encourage them to support health care reform.  Why is this strategy doomed?  Well, we already know why: while volunteers have been making calls and knocking on doors, conservatives have been reaching a far larger audience through the mass media with their theatrics at town hall meetings.  In other words, the conservative strategy has been much more efficient at getting the anti-reform message out to a mass audience.  The images on CNN showing conservatives screaming at their representatives will create doubt among some independents and encourage other conservatives to take action such as calls to their representatives.  On the other side, the number of phone calls and door knocks that progressives can make is limited to the number of volunteers who show up, and the disparity of intensity means that not enough will show up.  So, the tactics of progressives need to change.  Supporters of health insurance reform need to get more creative in their tactics and aim for mass media exposure.    Perhaps a massive rally, a march, or a national sit-in is needed.  Let’s look back to the methods of the civil rights movement to borrow some of their tactics.  Whatever peacefully gains a national media audience and shows that there are a lot of people in the country who want reform to happen.  Progressives need to also think about distinguishing themselves from conservatives by looking like the rational actors in this debate.  If they can make their case for health care reform calmly and like adults, perhaps that will be an effective way to sway more Americans.

But the second lesson we’ve learned is Krugman’s point about passion.  If progressives do not care as much about passing health care reform as conservatives care about stopping it, then as Krugman says, “health care reform may well fail.”  I don’t know what anyone can do to increase the level of passion and engagement among President Obama’s supporters.  Perhaps Obama could do a better job getting people “fired up,” as we used to say.  But grassroots supporters of President Obama have a responsibility here as well.  If we cannot muster enough support for this bill among other progressives, then we do not deserve to win this fight.  In that case, maybe there isn’t enough support in the nation for health care reform after all.

The advantage that Democrats still have, of course, lies in their superior numbers in Congress compared to the Republicans.  But math isn’t enough.  A little more intensity, wider engagement among Obama’s supporters, and better tactics by those who care strongly about health care reform may be just what is needed.  A lot depends on the White House, OFA, and the grassroots supporters of reform learning the correct lessons from this summer.  I believe that if we do learn the right lessons, then the fall will be the time when we rebound from the setbacks of July and August.

This is the ad that Organizing for America (OFA) has released in the states of “Blue Dog” Democratic senators and moderate Republicans to put pressure on them to support health care reform.  The people in this ad are not actors, but rather citizens who submitted their videos to OFA describing how lack of health insurance has negatively impacted their lives.  This Boston Globe piece provides brief bios of these individuals and their situations regarding health care.

A more significant sign of just how much OFA is engaging in health care reform organizing is their effort to get volunteers to canvass their neighborhoods and make calls to their neighbors.  The first round of weekend canvassing was this past weekend, and OFA plans to continue asking volunters to canvass every weekend throughout the summer.  It’s clear to me that this is the make-or-break moment for OFA to show that they can effectively mobilize Obama’s base.  If they cannot engage Obama’s list of 13 million supporters for one of the most significant domestic policy fights of his presidency, there is little chance that the group will be viable in the future IMHO.

Early signs, however, are promising.  Here in Massachusetts, we still do not have a paid staff person from OFA, and yet the volunteer-led group OFA-MA is organizing a Health Care Reform 101 Forum that will take place this Saturday, July 18 in Boston.  As of today (Wednesday the 15th), 99 people have signed up.

It’s on.  Today marked the beginning of what promises to be an historic push for universal health care in the United States.  President Obama delivered his Saturday address today from France as citizens across America organized Health Care Organizing Kickoff events.  I attended and helped coordinate a very successful kickoff event at Quincy Market in downtown Boston.  34 people came out on a beautiful Saturday to talk about how they could start building support in their communities to help pass health care reform.  ABC’s World News tonight was there, and they plan to show some footage from our event Sunday evening at 6:30pm ET.  You may see me if you tune in.

The New York Times reports that President Obama plans to start the heavy lifting on health care over the next few weeks, and he is eager to make sure that his priorities are not lost in the negotiations over the details of the plan.  But Robert Reich reports at his blog that Big Pharma and the insurance industry is already balking at the so-called “public option” and is working behind the scenes to kill it.  Clearly, this is going to be a major battle.  Besides getting the economy out of the current recession, health care reform is probably going to be the most significant domestic policy challenge that President Obama will face during his first term.

I am optimistic that on the issue of health care, the grassroots army that Obama built during the campaign is going to become activated and intensely involved.  The turnout today at our event and the intensity of the participants leads me to believe that this is the time where Organizing for America has a real shot at making a difference.   It’s going to be an exciting time for organizers and those who want to see health care reform happen.  This isn’t going to happen without significant grassroots mobilization, so I hope readers of this blog will get involved.  Health care reform promises to be as significant a change to the way our country treats its citizens as social security was when it was passed, so we all have a chance to be a part of an historic legislative achievement.

Note: All links to photos, video, live-blogging, and live-tweeting of the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum are at the bottom of this post.

As regular readers of Bottom Up Change know, I have been very interested in the development of Organizing for America since I created this blog in early January.  In particular, I have wanted to see whether the grassroots energy of the 2008 Obama campaign could be translated to help President Obama achieve the changes that many of us spent so much time and energy working for during the campaign.  Some observers have expressed serious doubts as to whether an organization like OFA will be able to work.  Zephyr Teachout, for instance, made a case against the very existence of OFA in a provocative post at techPresident.  While I have been hopeful about OFA’s chances, it was only this past weekend that I saw real evidence that, contrary to Teachout, OFA can succeed.  In fact, as I argue below, the event I attended this weekend offered a case study in how OFA should work.

On Saturday, May 16, the Massachusetts chapter of OFA (OFA-MA) held a “Grassroots Organizing Forum”.  This forum was part of the OFA “listening tours” that are going on around the country right now, but it was much more ambitious in its scope.  There were 6 speakers and 2 panel discussions of grassroots organizing, advocacy, and policy.  There was also an hour-long break-out session involving the different regions of the state.  Right now, Massachusetts has no OFA paid staff, so the Forum was planned and organized completely by volunteers.  In the end, around 100 volunteers had participated in making the Forum a spectacular success.

The planning for the Grassroots Forum began in January, when Sarah Compton, the former Field Director of Massachusetts for the Obama campaign, began talking with staff and volunteers from the Massachusetts Obama organization to plan an OFA-MA event.  By the time I started attended meetings in early May, they had about a dozen core volunteers with specific roles and the planning was in its late stages.

The Forum was held at the SEIU 1199 office in Dorchester, which is Boston’s largest neighborhood.  The night before the event, nearly 700 people had registered on myBO, so we expected a good turnout and we held a training for volunteers to do a run-through of all the tasks that volunteers would need to perform.  Many volunteers ended up staying at the site until past midnight, and they had to be back at 7am on Saturday morning.  The logistical complexity of preparing for the event was high, and there was a lot that could go wrong.

Volunteers

Saturday was a beautiful day in Boston, and we haven’t had many of them this spring, so it was impressive to see that out of the nearly 700 people that signed up, more than 400 attended the Forum.  We had feared that there would be logistical problems getting people registered and seated before the 9am start time.  We only had an hour to register several hundred people.  But as you can see in the photograph below, registration was not crowded and it went very smoothly.  Another logistical challenge was helping people find the SEIU, which is very hard to find.  To solve this problem, volunteers (or “human arrows”) stood outside at key locations holding signs, wearing arrows (hence the name), and directing cars to the building.  Most everyone got inside, registered, ate their free coffee and donuts, and sat down with time to spare before the first speaker started.  The only problems that we encountered during the day were some minor glitches with the audio-visual systems, but those weren’t a very big deal.  From a logistics standpoint, nearly everything went perfectly.

Registration at OFA-MA Organizing Forum, 5/16/09

The event was very insightful for anyone who is interested in the future of the movement begun during the Obama campaign.  Mitch Stewart, the National Director of OFA, traveled to Boston from Washington DC and was one of the featured speakers.  This was one of the most fascinating parts of the day.  I hadn’t heard Mitch Stewart speak before and I found him to be a very grounded, reasonable, cool-headed person.  He’s from South Dakota, and he has a certain low-key, Midwestern sensibility which I believe will be effective.  In other words, he seems like just the kind of person that Obama would want to lead his grassroots organization.  The fact that he is a tested field operative who led President Obama to key victories in the Iowa caucuses and in Virginia during the general election is evidence that he has what it takes to manage OFA, which is very ambitious and unprecedented undertaking.

There were a few key pieces of information in Stewart’s speech which I thought were most interesting.  First, he emphasized the need for the grassroots to take a very active role in the health care effort that is coming this summer.  There was no doubt that health care was the top priority for the Obama administration and for OFA. Congress will apparently take action on this issue within the next few months.  Already, OFA is seeing a very positive reaction from the grassroots and an interest in helping on this issue.  Stewart noted that when he sent an email last week asking supporters to sign a statement of support of President Obama’s three health care priorities, the response was much bigger than anything OFA has seen so far.  Specifically, 170,000 people signed this declaration in 24 hours, which was three times bigger than the number of people who signed a similar statement in support of the budget earlier this year.  (By the way, if you haven’t signed this declaration yet, please do so.)   Stewart also stated that the second priority for OFA is to support the administration and Congress in passing energy legislation and in supporting the Supreme Court nominee that is expected to be announced shortly.  Interestingly, Stewart said nothing of education, which has been one of President Obama’s three main planks in his budget.  This omission most likely reflects the fact that education reform is a priority that will be addressed after health care and energy.

The most interesting part of Stewart’s talk came during the question and answer period.  Throughout his speech, Stewart repeatedly made it clear that OFA’s mission is first and foremost to “support the President’s agenda.”  While he was answering questions, a woman interrupted and shouted out “We want input in that agenda!”  A large number of people in the crowd applauded.  Stewart handled this issue deftly, stating that he encouraged people to provide input about policy by going to whitehouse.gov and also by speaking to local elected members of Congress.  OFA, he said, was not a policy organization and he was not a policy expert, so “at this time”, the best way to voice policy concerns is by using these other forums.  The issue of policy input from Obama’s base was one of the major themes throughout the day.  Closely related was the issue of top-down versus bottom-up control of OFA, which I’ll get to later.

I’m not going to provide a summary of my reactions to every speaker and every panel.  The videos are posted for you to see and the event was live-blogged in exhaustive detail.  Just a few more observations from my experience at this event, though.  There were some terrific speakers and panelists–especially interesting to me were Marshall Ganz’s speech and the first panel on “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”.  I also found the presentation by David Cutler on health care riveting.  Cutler was a senior advisor to Barack Obama during the campaign and he is Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard.  He eloquently communicated the urgent need for the grassroots to get involved in the health care fight.  But from my perspective, the most valuable part of the Organizing Forum was the hour-long breakout session in which attendees broke into their region of Massachusetts and discussed their views about OFA.

Marshall Ganz speaks during a panel discussion on "Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement"

One nice surprise in the breakout session that I helped facilitate was a woman who lived in Dorchester and just happened to walk by the OFA-MA volunteers outside directing traffic to the event.  She didn’t know about the Forum, but she decided to attend when she saw the volunteers.  To me, that was just a sign of both how incredibly organized this event was and how there is still a strong desire among ordinary citizens to get involved.  People were just walking into this event from off the street!  Clearly, a lot of people are still fired up.

The breakout session revealed some of the questions that had arisen during Mitch Stewart’s talk and which I heard repeatedly from participants throughout the day.  Many people felt that OFA needed to have some kind of connection to local politics and local issues or else people wouldn’t get involved.  There was a concern that OFA may be trying to “recreate the wheel” since there are already many local organizations working on many of the same issues that the President is working on.  Also, reflecting the concerns of the person who had interrupted Mitch Stewart during the Q&A, people expressed a desire to push for their views on policy through OFA.

What this discussion left me thinking was that the only way OFA is going to be effective is if it is truly grassroots.  There is always going to be some element of a top-down structure to OFA–or to any large organization, for that matter.  However, there needs to be a groundswell of activity and support at the local level for people to get involved.  I think that health care reform is an issue that will rally Obama’s base supporters because most of us feel passionately about it.  But unless some of the grassroots’ policy concerns are taken into account by the President, there will not be the kind of intense activism at the local level that can make a difference in terms of passing legislation.  For instance, many people in the audience Saturday wanted a single payer health care system and there was some disappointment that this was not on the table.  But if the “public option” is taken off the table as well, I am doubtful that a large segment of Obama’s base will be motivated enough to spend time volunteering or donating to OFA.

Incidentally, Massachusetts may have a role to play in helping the public option succeeds, because moderate Senators to our north in Maine will be key players in whether or not reconciliation has to be used to pass health care reform.  This report suggests that Sen. Olympia Snowe is trying to delay the creation of a public option.  This is just the kind of thing that OFA volunteers in Maine and Massachusetts should be acting on now, and I imagine there would be a lot of support for some kind of action to put pressure on Sen. Snowe not to try and delay the public option.

But going back to the need for OFA to have a very strong “bottom-up” component: I think the reason why the OFA-MA Grassroots Forum was so successful had a lot to do with the fact that it was organized entirely by volunteers.  A group of people decided on their own that they could build from the idea of a listening tour by making it an opportunity to hear from some of the most prominent organizers and policy minds in the Boston area.  The kind of energy that I saw at the Forum and the way it was organized should be a model for Mitch Stewart and his team at the OFA headquarters in Washington DC.  Grassroots success depends on grassroots commitment and passion.  That kind of involvement requires that volunteers and activists at the local level will largely drive an organizing effort around their concerns and their agenda.  The good news is that OFA will be receiving all of this feedback.  After hearing from Mitch Stewart on Saturday, I trust that he will be listening.

Below you will find links to various media from the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum:

Here are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

A much more impressive collection of photographs by one of OFA-MA’s volunteers, Harmony Wu.

Here is the video of Mitch Stewart speaking and his Q&A (you can also see me introducing a speaker in one of the videos on this page)

Here’s the live-blog from the event.

Video of Panel 1: “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”

For a lot of this material in one place and more, check out the website for OFA-MA, www.massforchange.com

Finally, here’s the Twitter page for OFA-MA and the live-tweet from the event under the hashtag #OFAMA.  By the way, this experiment with Twitter was encouraging.  I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.

Blogging lately has been slow because I’ve been sidetracked by some side projects.  One is the Grassroots Organizing Forum that I am helping plan.  I didn’t realize this before, but this event is the first statewide Organizing for America (OFA) event in the nation.  OFA-Massachusetts is a genuinely inspiring group of very hard-working volunteers (I don’t think anyone is staff here) and I’ve enjoyed working with them.  Our event is Saturday, and I think it’s going to be a big success.  So far, over 600 people have signed up.  I will write a follow-up post about it for sure.

In any case, I’ve been experimenting a bit with Twitter by creating an account for OFA-MA and then using it to promote our event and raise money for it.  My experiment has been to test the capacity of Twitter as not only a marketing and communications tool, but as an organizing tool.  I’ve tried to experiment with Twitter in this way in the past when I organized my Ice Cream Tweetup and Pledge Project Canvass.  That worked fairly well, and I was pleased that a very effective organizer in my neighborhood, Joseph Porcelli, heard about the event through Twitter, showed up, and helped get the word out on his website, Neighbors for Neighbors.

So I’m still in the early stages of my experimentation with Twitter as an organizing tool, but so far I have learned a few things.  First, it is very difficult to find people on Twitter who would be interested in a specific cause and who are living in a specific area.  As a result, it is tough to find the right people on Twitter to contact about an event or action.  The fact that Joseph learned of my event through Twitter was just good luck.  The problem is that Twitter does not have a search function that allows one to search by location and keywords in the user’s bio, so finding the right kinds of people to follow is cumbersome.  There may be apps that allow for this kind of search, but I do not know of them.  Second, because tweets get lost in one’s ever-changing stream, it is very difficult to communicate one’s message and get relevant updates out to people in an effective way.  (I’m sorry if this point is lost entirely on people who don’t use Twitter.  Solution: sign up and start using it!  It’s free, after all!)  Third, despite these setbacks (which I hope to solve soon) Twitter is an extremely effective tool for getting one’s message out to a different audience and as a supplement to more traditional forms of outreach.  I am finding new Obama supporters through Twitter that I didn’t know about before.  I followed them, they followed back, and we started a conversation that revealed their support.

At the Organizing Forum I hope to have a hashtag (#OFAMA) for any Twitterers in the audience to discuss the event for people who are not able to attend.  My hope is that this will allow me to identify more Obama supporters in Massachusetts who use Twitter.  I am also planning a more ambitious Twitter-and-organizing event in June, focusing on local politics.  Stay tuned!

Last week, I went to the planning meetings of an Organizing Forum that is being hosted by Organizing for America, Massachusetts (OFA-MA).  I’m going to volunteer throughout the week and during the event, which is Saturday, May 16, 9am-4pm.  They have many excellent speakers lined up, including the Director of OFA, Mitch Stewart, and community organizer and Harvard professor Marshall Ganz, to name just a few.  So far, over 600 people have signed up to attend this event, and it is the first of its kind in New England.

The Forum will introduce OFA-MA staff to the grassroots supporters of Obama that will be key in helping the White House win the major legislative battles that will be fought in President Obama’s first term.  In addition to panels and featured speakers, participants will break out into regions and begin a conversation about how they can organize their local communities in the months to come.

If you live in Massachusetts and support President Obama, please sign up to attend this forum.  At the very least, please donate $10.  The event is being funded entirely by the grassroots and we need your help.  I am enthusiastic about this effort, and I hope you will help us make this event successful.

Finally, I have created a Twitter account for OFA-MA and I will be tweeting all week about the event.  Please follow!

David Plouffe meeting with OFA New England Steering Committee, 4/17/09

If you have been wondering what ever happened to David Plouffe, the mastermind of Barack Obama’s fundraising and field operation during the primaries and the general election campaign, here is the answer.  Plouffe is currently writing a book, and he has an informal role as a fundraiser for Organizing for America (OFA).  He’s also going around the country raising money for OFA from wealthy donors.  Last Friday, April 17, I was lucky to see him make a fundraising pitch to the Obama for America New England Steering Committee meeting at the Foley Hoag law firm in the Seaport district of Boston.  The NE Steering Committee was a fundraising arm of the Obama campaign, raising money for Barack Obama from high-income donors.  50 members of the Steering Committee raised $250,000 or more during the campaign.  Now, the Steering Committee is transitioning to support Organizing for America and other Democratic races.

Plouffe began his talk by noting just how key a role money played in allowing Obama to win certain battleground states that had not been battlegrounds in years.  Money enabled grassroots organizing to take place on a scale never achieved before in a political campaign.  In Plouffe’s words, “We were able to talk to every voter we wanted to talk with multiple times.”  Plouffe argued that the same focus on organizing at the grassroots level will be critical in helping Obama pass legislation over the next four years, and in electing Democrats.  Here are some fascinating numbers from his talk:

• Obama spent $38 million in Florida and $31 million in North Carolina.  If OFA had spent less, Plouffe said, they wouldn’t have won these states.

• Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote, the widest margin of any presidential candidate ever.

• There were 6 million active supporters during the campaign–these are people who either donated money or volunteered 10-20 hours a week in the general election.

• Half of all of Obama’s active supporters had never been involved in a political campaign before, meaning they had never contributed and never volunteered.

• Obama’s e-mail list grew to 13 million individuals.

• OFA had 6,000 staffers in 16 battleground states

• Currently, 68 percent of independents support President Obama’s agenda, which is a historically high number

Some of the more “inside baseball” details that I thought were interesting were the following.  Plouffe thinks that North Carolina will be a major toss-up again in 2012, but incredibly, he said that Virginia will not be a toss-up state.  There has been a sea change in Virginia politics, Plouffe said, that will make it very hard for Republicans to win there in the near future.  Having lived in Virginia for nearly a decade, that is a bold statement, and it may be overly optimistic.  Another major shift has occured in the Southwest, where Hispanics and independent voters allowed Obama to win in states that weren’t even close for Kerry in 2004–Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.  He said that Obama would have won Arizona if McCain hadn’t been from that state.  Plouffe also said that we must distinguish between Republicans and “Washington Republicans.”  The latter, he said, are in complete disarray, and will only be “throwing stones” at the President over the next few years because they don’t have any new ideas.  He advised the audience not to worry about Washington Republicans, but to focus on trying to persuade the many everyday Republicans who may be increasingly receptive to the Democrats’ message over the next few years.

His message about Organizing for America was that it will take the lessons learned of the 2008 campaign and transition into a field organization with a focus on governing as well as the upcoming 2010 elections.  It’s still in its early stages, it has a very small staff right now, and it needs financial support in order to place staff in congressional districts across the country.  In his talk, it was clear that Plouffe thinks the main value of this new organizing structure is to facilitate “people talking with people.”  I was surprised to hear that he was skeptical of the value of voters calling Congress, calling it a “discredited tactic”.  Instead, Plouffe seems convinced that one of the main ingredients of Obama’s succcess during the campaign was the team leader model, or in his words, having thousands of grassroots “message ambassadors” go out and talk to their friends, family, and neighbors.  As a member of the field staff during the general election, I can testify that having so many committed volunteers who were talking with neighbors played a major role in Obama’s win.  Trusting the messenger is becoming increasingly important in the age of 24 hour opinion-based news and tit-for-tat attack ads on TV.

When Plouffe’s talk was over, a crowd of admirers surrounded him, many with their business cards in hand.  I thought I wasn’t going to get a chance to meet him until, as I was leaving, I noticed him beside me walking to the elevator with a DNC staffer.  I asked him what he thought of the recent tea party protests against Obama.  He paused and said they were silly, but that we need to cut spending.  A candid statement from a straightforward, humble, and brilliant political operative.

From now on, I’m going to feature comments from time to time on the main page of this blog.  There are some comments that I think should be displayed more prominently on this site so that more people can read them. Last weekend, Lainey Melnick helped organize an OFA canvass in Austin, and the results of her canvass were very impressive.  She commented on my post about my tweet-up and OFA Pledge Project canvass, and here is what she wrote.   -Jared

We organized a pledge canvass out here in Austin, Texas and had a very positive experience with it. I worked on the campaign here and we’ve kept a very tight organization of volunteers and everyone has been chomping on the bit for something to fight for. We’ve had some local battles here like on voter id legislation that got us going, and this national initiative helped to give us more to organize behind.

We used the website that I created during the campaign, linktoaustin.com, plus mybo, FB, twitter, state democratic party, Travis County democratic party,  and emailed all the precinct captains, democratic clubs and used word of mouth. We have a facebook group for our local organization, Organizing for Austin - Central Texas. We had about 35 definite rsvps and 25 more maybes, but ended up with about 14 volunteers who came to our rally and worked the high-traffic areas. We had a few other canvasses hosted in our area that had a few more volunteers. All in all, we were able to gather 467 pledge signatures from the Austin-Central TX area, a decent showing.

Yes, there were definite hiccups, but anyone who worked on the campaign knows that this is how they learn. They actually read the feedback and revise, learn from the mistakes. This is one of the things I really like about the organization. I am not an Obama-bot. I was actually a Hillary supporter, so I am not drinking the kool-aid, but I am very proud that I worked so hard to elect President Obama and that I am now working to support him.

It looks like OFA has made a few changes and now would like us to call supporters from home:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/contact/splash/budgetaction

I think this is a much better idea for people who can’t commit to several hours out in front of people. Canvassing is not for everyone!

Everything that we do to heal the world, is good work. Keep it up!

–Lainey Melnick
OFA Regional Lead - Austin CD 21/25