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.

One nice thing about going to conferences like the Personal Democracy Forum is that you learn about organizations doing interesting work that you may not have heard about before.  This was the case for me with the New Organizing Insitute (NOI).  NOI trains progressive activists in online organizing tactics and they just completed one of their “Campaign Bootcamp” sessions.  The progressive movement has had an edge in the use of the internet in political organizing in recent years, and groups like NOI make progressive dominance online more likely in the future.  I am not aware of a conservative counterpart to NOI, but if anyone knows of it (or them), please let me know.

Monday, June 15, Iranian supporters of Moussavi protest the election results (Photo: AFP/Getty)

You may have missed what happened this weekend.  I know I almost did.  No, I’m not talking about the dramatic protests in Iran against the declared election results claiming that President Ahmadinejad defeated Mir Hussein Moussavi by a large margin.  Instead, I’m referring to the use of social media in Iran and in the United States to have an impact on the protests and on the coverage of them in major American media outlets.   Andrew Sullivan has done an incredible job covering the protests and the use of Twitter in particular over the weekend.  For a summary of his work over the past few days, see this post.

So how did Twitter have a significant impact on the events in Iran and on US media coverage this weekend?  First, check out this post by Sullivan called “The Revolution Will be Twittered“, which by the way is a huge rip-off of my post a few months ago, “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted.”  Plus, it’s “tweeted” not “twittered”, Andrew.  But I digress.  Sullivan reports that Iranian authorities had silenced cell phone communications and taken down Moussavi’s website.  Text messaging had been used in the weeks leading up to the election by supporters of Moussavi to organize, so the government wanted to make sure that they did not use this method.  However, they did not disable Twitter, allowing Moussavi and his supporters to send a tweet calling for people to go to the rooftops and yell “ALAHO AKBAR” to protest the election results.  Thousands did so.  In fact, this was apparently the first time that people had spontaneously organized on rooftops since the Iranian revolution in 1979.  (And just as I am writing this post, this news breaks: Moussavi just sent out another tweet telling his supporters that every night in Tehran from 9pm-11pm they should go to the rooftops and shout “ALAHO AKBAR”.)

Twitter also enabled protesters to tweet updates about the violence that the government was unleashing against them so that the world would know what was happening.  They used the hashtag #IranElection to aggregate their tweets, and the stream of tweets was enormous: it has become one of the highest trending hashtags on Twitter over the past few days.  #IranElection is immensely popular internationally on Twitter, with users from around the world sending messages of encouragement and solidarity to the Iranians who are protesting.  Green avatars or avatars with the message “Stand with Free Iran” spread quickly with users who wanted to show solidarity.  In this way, the protesters are getting their message out and breaking news to an international audience, and the audience is able to talk back to the protesters and let them know they have the world’s support.  It’s a nice feedback loop, and one that might help sustain this rebellion or perhaps even help produce a new democratic revolution in Iran.  I am pretty skeptical about the latter, but that’s what many are hoping for.

Many traditional news organizations and reporters have picked up on the story of the role of social media in helping bring about and sustain the incredible events we are witnessing in Iran.  See this report by CBS for another account of Iranians’ use of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests and let the world know about the crackdown against protesters.  Thomas Friedman also wrote over the weekend about the ways that Iranians, much like the Lebanese in their recent push-back against Hezbollah in a major election, were using technology to increase democratic activism.  Even Fox News jumped on the story.

But the traditional news entities almost missed the significance of this story entirely.  The major media outlets did a miserable job over the weekend reporting on what was undeniably one of the biggest stories of the year so far–a potential coup in Iran and a rebellion against the government by a pro-democracy movement in that country.  CNN and many other news outlets were missing in action over the weekend during some of the most tense moments in Iran shortly after the election results were announced.  Users of Twitter who had been following the story closely noticed this silence in the media, and particularly on CNN, and began a campaign to protest the lack of broadcast news coverage of the rebellion.  They started a hashtag, #CNNfail, which quickly became one of the most popular tags on Twitter along with #IranElection.  CNN noticed the organized outrage on Twitter and by Sunday their coverage of the protests increased.  CNN had to defend itself publicly from the criticism on Twitter.  The Wall Street Journal did a story covering the effects of the Twitter #CNNfail movement here.  A website has even sprung up, CNNfail.com, which includes all the tweeets under the hashtag #CNNfail and #Iranelection.

A lot of people may still roll their eyes and shrug, wondering what the big deal with Twitter is.  But they are missing out on engaging in a new form of communication that is much more than mere entertainment.  Quite simply, Twitter is leading the way in transforming the Internet into a powerful tool for organizing, rebellion, and yes, revolution.

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.

I apologize to readers who have wondered where I’ve been over the past week.  Actually, the past two weeks have been very slow here at Bottom Up Change.  If it wasn’t for Nathan Pyles’ excellent contributions (for which I’m extremely grateful), there would have been little new content.  But I do have a good excuse!  First it was the OFA-MA Organizing Forum, which I posted about last week.  Since then, I have been busy starting up a new grassroots organization in Boston, which I want to write a little bit about here.

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me because I’ve begun to implement some ideas that I’ve been mulling over for several months.  Actually, these ideas date back to the beginning of this blog, when I began thinking about the possibilities of using blogs and other social media to connect with progressive organizers around the country.  But it was only over the past few weeks that my thinking about this topic began to crystallize into something more specific.  It’s been an inspiring few weeks and I’ve been able to confirm some of my suspicions about the power of social media as a tool for organizing.

In early May, I attended a meeting of the Young Democrats of Massachusetts (YDM), where I met with the chair of the Boston chapter, Kevin.  I had originally met Kevin at a “tweetup” (a meetup for users of Twitter) and we later connected on Twitter, where he told me about the YDM meetings.  I then met another YDM member, Ash, a few days later on Twitter.  It was refreshing to finally meet some active progressives in the Boston area who used Twitter as much as I did.  I had been to a half dozen tweetups this year, and while I always enjoyed meeting new people at these events, the attendees were usually in marketing and public relations.

When I met with Kevin and Ash in person at the YDM meeting, I laid out some ideas of holding a tweetup for politicos on Twitter.  They both were very interested in the idea and I began planning it.  My main reason for organizing a political tweetup was to see how much interest there would be in another idea I’d been toying with.  I wanted to organize a forum for the candidates in Boston’s mayoral race since it is the most competitive race for mayor that Boston has seen in over 10 years.  My idea was to make it a “social media” forum, where I would promote the event on Twitter and people could “tweet” their questions for the candidates to a hashtag (such as #Mayor).  I also thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a candidates forum as interactive as possible by making social media a major part of the forum.  The name for this forum would be Tweet the Candidates (of course).  I had been trying for several weeks to get in touch with the campaigns of Mayor Menino and City Councilor Sam Yoon, but not with much success.  It seemed that the campaigns weren’t too interested in attending a forum of uncertain turnout organized by an unknown person–me.  So after I talked with Kevin and Ash about the tweetup and the possibility of a social media candidates forum, I decided that I may have a better chance of persuading the candidates to attend the forum if there was an organization sponsoring it–one with a track record of achieving a solid turnout at events.  This led me to the idea of creating a social media organization in the Boston area that focused on politics and government.  When I began to promote the tweetup, I used the name “Social Media Progressives” for the group.

I wanted this organization to be identified as an association because at this stage, its primary aim is to connect people interested in progressive politics and social media.  I defined the organization as bringing together the tech community and the political community in the Boston area so people could start sharing ideas and collaborating about how social media and other technology can improve our politics.  Or, to use the more formal language I’ve written for the group, “Social Media Progressives is a new association of progressives interested in the ways that technology is changing politics, government, and journalism, particularly through the rise of social media.  One goal of this association is to increase collaboration between the online and offline worlds of politics and technology.”  As you can see, I wanted this group to serve as an umbrella organization for tech and politics broadly conceived, and I wanted the focus to be taking the online conversations offline so that progressives could meet, form relationships, and work together on real projects.  You can read more about our tweetup at the invitation page that we used.  I also created a Facebook fan page (please become a fan) and a Twitter account for our group.  

A few days before the tweetup, I met with Kevin, Ash, and another person I had met on Twitter, Yasmin, whose main interest was in the “Government 2.0″ movement.  Thankfully, they bought into the concept of Social Media Progressives and became founding members.  We didn’t have money and we didn’t have any other members, but our organization was up and running.

As you can see from the pictures on our Facebook page, the tweetup was a success.  We had over 40 people sign up, and over twenty people showed, which was a good turnout for our first event.  People from many different backgrounds attended.  We had the Chief Technology Strategist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, members of the YDM,  almost the entire staff of Generation Progress, and several prominent members of the social media community in Boston.    We held a raffle for Clay Shirky’s book on technology and social change, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”.  When the night was over, people were enthusiastic about the potential of this organization to grow over the summer.  The plan is to have one Social Media Progressives tweetup a month.  In the future, we hope to attract prominent speakers in the world of politics, technology, and social media.  We are still planning a “Tweet the Candidates” forum sometime over the next few months.

Social Media Progressives could be a model for other online organizing efforts around the country, particularly those using Twitter.  In fact, I have talked with several people who are interested in creating SMP chapters in several cities.  Of course, this effort isn’t entirely unique.  I know that others in the progressive “Twittersphere” have been trying to organize progressives.  Most visibly, Jon Pincus has been successful in providing progressives on Twitter with a common space to share information under the #p2 hashtag.  There may be other efforts to organize progressives on Twitter that I am not aware of.  But what I would like to see with SMP is a way to take the online conversations and connections offline so that we start building relationships in local areas among people who use social media and consider themselves progressive.  These offline gatherings can also serve the purpose of educating progressives on new technology and create opportunities for collaboration with the tech community.  By focusing on offline gatherings and emphasizing the importance of local activism, I think that SMP can develop strategies for taking online organizing to a new level.  But this is just the start.  There’s a lot to learn and a lot to do yet.

In a later post, I’m going to go into more detail about how Twitter can be used for online organizing, and how SMP will be employing these techniques.  There is a lot of potential in combining social media with progressive organizing.  I’m excited about where this will lead.

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.