A lot has happened in American politics since my last post in August, but I take some pride in having predicted that the public option was dead in the summer after the town halls.  Whether or not the Democrats will now be able to pass health care reform at this point is anyone’s guess.  What is more clear to me is that the premise of this blog was demonstrated in 2009 with the rise of the Tea Party movement.

Since law school is still taking up a lot of my time this semester, I may not be able to post very often, but I will try to post whenever I have a chance.  Thanks for continuing to check in.

Last week I wrote about the shortcomings in the pro-reform organizing I’ve observed in comparison to the way that right-wingers have effectively gotten attention and shifted the momentum on the debate as a result of their town hall disruptions.  But today I want to put some of the blame for the declining support for health care reform on Barack Obama and his team in the White House.  As someone who has supported Obama from the beginning of his campaign for president, it’s tough to be critical on this issue.  I delayed my educational plans for a year to work on his campaign.  I supported him in part because I thought he would be effective at building support in the nation for health care reform.  His powers of communication, intelligence, and decency convinced me that he could be an effective advocate for health care reform.  But something has gone very wrong over the past few months.

Before I go any further, I should say that I still believe that a solid health care reform bill is going to pass this year.  The Democrats simply have too great a majority in the House and the Senate for them to get nothing done.  It also seems that Obama is willing to pass a bill without bipartisan support, relying on Democrats alone if necessary.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the White House, President Obama, and OFA have not done a good enough job organizing and selling the public option to the American people.  Nor have they effectively countered the lies and confusion being spread at the town hall meetings and on Fox News.  As a result, it now seems obvious to me that the public option will not pass.  If the alternative idea of “co-ops” passes, it will not be an effective competitor with the private insurance market.  The powerful insurance lobby and their ground troops at the town halls have effectively scared enough Americans about the public option to ensure that it won’t happen.  So we will have an improvement to our health care system as a result of the legislation that does pass, but not nearly what supporters of Barack Obama were hoping for when they volunteered for him and worked for him.

Like many other progressives, my frustration with the President’s recent performance went to a new level recently, when administration officials seemed to back away from a commitment to the public option.  But this only confirmed that something was up in the White House after President Obama himself seemed to diminish the importance of the public option at a town hall meeting in Colorado last Saturday.  He said:

All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.  This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.

Obama is surely right when he says that the public option is not the entirety of health care reform.  But to say that it is just “one sliver of it” is just appeasement to the people who are trying to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo”, as Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) bluntly put it last month.  Whether or not the public option is essential to health care reform is not the main point.  By giving his opponents the sense that they are winning this fight President Obama crossed the line from pragmatism into weakness.  Those who want to kill health care reform now smell blood, and will likely become even more aggressive in the weeks to come.  Perhaps it would have been necessary to concede on the public option later, after the August recess, when Congress reconvenes.  But to walk back this commitment right now is the worst political move that I have seen this White House play since Obama took office in January.

President Obama has tried to reassure progressives who were outraged by his apparent concession of the public option this weekend.  In a forum organized by OFA yesterday, Obama argued that the controversy with the left was somewhat “manufactured” because he still believes that a public option is the best way to lower health care costs.  But during this forum he never stated that the public option is a must.  He didn’t threaten to veto a bill unless it contained the public option.  Here were his words:

Now, my point is — this is sort of like the belt-and-suspenders concept to keep up your pants. You know, the insurance reforms are the belt. The public option can be the suspenders. And what we’re trying to just suggest to people is, is that all these things are important and that if the debate ends up being focused on just one aspect of it, then we’re missing the boat. If all we’re talking about is the public option, then the 80 percent of the American people who already have health insurance in the private insurance market, they say to themselves, “Well, what’s in it for me?” Their attitude will be, “This is not relevant to me.”

As a justification for downplaying the role of the public option in the White House’s arguments for health care reform, this is a pretty clear rationale: the White House is scared of Republicans trying to make it seem like Obama is pushing for a government takeover of health care.  But this is exactly the problem.  Instead of acting from a position of strength, which the President had just a few months ago, the Obama administration is acting from a position of weakness, seeking to quiet the debate on one of the largest parts of the plan.

Barack Obama and his team have made major mistakes and lost their message before and yet figured out how to come back from them before all was lost.  They know how to recalibrate and get back on their game.  But I’m convinced that the errors and timidity shown this summer have done enough damage to the health care reform debate that the public option is a lost cause.  Obama has proven me and many others wrong before, of course, so maybe he will do so again.  But time is running out.

Best line: “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing it.”  I don’t know why it took so long for a Democrat to finally call out one of these people in this way.  Frank’s rebuttal to this woman is effective because he refuses to even argue with her “vile, contemptible, nonsense”, but he also notes that it is a “tribute to the first amendment” that she is able to speak her mind.  This is exactly how more Democrats should respond to the outrageous lies being spread by the townhall tea baggers.  President Obama cannot speak like Rep. Frank did, but it is noteworthy that just yesterday Obama took a more aggressive tone to those who are spreading the “death panels” lie in a conference call with religious leaders.  Democrats need to follow Barney Frank’s lead and push back in stronger terms against the lies that are starting to have a significant impact on the debate.   As Chris Cilizza reports, a recent NBC News poll found that nearly half of the country believe that government officials will make decisions on the health care of seniors (the death panel fabrication) while over half of the population believe the falsehood that health insurance will be made available to illegal immigrants.

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.

Barack Obama having a beer during the primaries at the Raleigh Times Bar in downtown Raleigh, NC (Photo: Doug Mills, NYT)

I wish I knew the real story behind President Obama’s choice of Bud Light as his beer during the “beer summit” last night at the White House.  Does Obama really like Bud Light?  Or was this a calculated move to appear like an “average American”?  The confrontation between Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley broke here in the Boston area (Cambridge, to be exact) so why not promote a strong American craft beer like Samuel Adams, which is headquartered in Boston?  At least Professor Gates had the sense to order a Sam Adams, even if it was Sam Adams Light (gross).

We need to get over this idea that drinking craft beers is some kind of elitist practice.  Lots of “average Americans” drink beers that are actually made with hops and other quality ingredients.  For a great site that discusses good beer, check out The Beer Advocate.

Free range chickens

Last Thursday night I went to see the documentary film Food Inc. for free, courtesy of the restaurant chain Chipotle.  Chipotle sponsored free screenings of Food Inc. in thirty-two cities around the country last week.  I don’t mind playing into Chipotle’s marketing strategy here because, despite being owned by McDonald’s at one time, this company has been supporting local foods since at least 2001 when it began its “food with integrity” campaign.  They have been ahead of the curve among chains in the local-food movement.

Agriculture is a major part of my family’s identity, but I’ve only recently developed a strong interest in the issue of local foods and organics.  Both of my parents have their Ph.D. in agricultural economics, and for most of my life agricultural issues just bored me to death.  I think this boredom stemmed from hearing my parents talk at the dinner table about the intricacies of crop subsidies, the farm bill, fluctuations in the price of sugar, trade barriers, etc.  My mom works for the Government Accountability Office on agriculture and trade issues and my dad works at the USDA as a researcher, so you can imagine what these conversations were like.  But aside from my parents’ professions, my mom grew up on a family farm in Madrid, Iowa, and I spent every summer until I was ten years old visiting my grandparents there.  My grandparents had to sell their farm in the eighties when a lot of family farms across the country were facing serious financial problems.

While agriculture has always been a very personal issue in my family, I only became interested in it recently.  My interest first began to develop while I was living in the Madison area of Wisconsin during the 2008 general election.  The farmer’s market in Madison is enormous–it must be one of the largest in the country–and I was impressed by the influence of local agriculture in the area.  The farms and farmland in southern Wisconsin are also strikingly beautiful, and I began to have a greater interest in farmers and their work.  But it was only this year while reading Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that agriculture began to become much more interesting to me.  Friends of mine had been encouraging me to read this book for months, and I’m glad that I finally took their advice.  It is a revelatory account of the industrial food system and the many ways that the sources of our food are hidden from view.  Reading this book inspired me to become a more regular consumer of organic foods and a much stronger supporter of farmers markets and locally-based agriculture.  So when I had the chance to see Food Inc. for free, it was perfect timing.  As it turned out, Pollan is interviewed extensively in the documentary.

Food Inc. has received glowing reviews.  Rotten Tomatoes lists it as receiving 97% positive reviews from critics.  I’ve decided to add to the chorus of praise here because this is a documentary that is in the best tradition of films that have the power to change society from the bottom up.  In fact, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Food Inc. may be to agriculture what An Inconvenient Truth has been to the debate about climate change.

Robert Kenner produced and directed Food Inc. with Eric Schlosser co-producing and having a major role in the film.  Schlosser is a highly regarded investigative journalist and the author of Fast Food Nation, a book that I’ve also been encouraged to read for a long time but haven’t yet.  I think I’ll be reading it very soon.

Food Inc. addresses many aspects of the industrial food system: the processing of our food, how processed foods affect human health, the deterioration in the livelihood of farmers, the mistreatment of animals, the damage that this system is doing to the environment, and alternatives to mass production of food.  The movie’s political agenda is not very subtle–it is taking aim at the mega-corporations that control how most of our food is produced and distributed.  Some may dismiss this kind of documentary as nothing more than propaganda, and yet, Food Inc. presents problems about the food industry in such a compelling way that I believe it will motivate many who view it to want to learn more about these problems and come to their own solutions.  Some documentaries with political agendas affirm one’s own view of the world, or oppose it, without motivating the viewer to take further action.  Food Inc. is not that kind of movie, and that is one reason I believe it works so well.

As in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the overproduction of corn plays a major role in Food Inc., but a greater focus is placed on the way that corn-fed cattle has resulted in the spread of disease in humans, with E. coli 0157:H7 being the main culprit.  A moving segment of the film looks at the case of Kevin Kowolcyk, a 2 year old who died 12 days after eating a hamburger contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7.  His mother began a campaign to require the USDA to enforce stricter standards for the inspection of meat and poultry in the United States.  She finally persuaded Rep. Anna Eshoo of California to introduce the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act, or “Kevin’s Law”, as it is referred to.  The film clearly explains how corn-fed cows are more likely to be infected with E. coli because of the changes that corn causes in their stomachs.  An additional danger is the mass production process which can all too easily result in meat with fecal matter on it passing through the meat packing process undetected.  This is how humans contract E. coli from beef, a fact that is enough to make me want to avoid beef from corn-fed cows from now on.  The Center for Disease Control reports that every year in the US there are 76 million cases of illness caused foodborne disease, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually.

Another disturbing aspect of the food industry that Food Inc. explores is the way that chickens, cows, and pigs are treated by the giant companies that process these animals for food.  There are only a handful of  companies that process almost all of the meat and poultry that Americans eat, and they have enormous pens where they house the animals in very close quarters.  If the farmers try to change the way that the animals are housed, such as not keeping chickens in dark barns, the companies can terminate their contracts.  One farmer portrayed in the film refuses to keep her chickens couped in dark barns with thousands of other chickens and her contract is terminated by Tyson.  The poultry companies refuse to allow the filmmakers to even go inside a darkened chicken coup and they refuse to be interviewed.  In fact, all of the major food companies refused to be interviewed for this movie, a fact that the director highlights frequently.  The reason why the companies don’t want the public to see how the chickens are housed is not hard to discern: we would probably be disgusted if we saw how the chickens are treated and the unsanitary conditions in which they live in these giant coops.

The ways that cheap fast food and soda are damaging Americans’ health, especially that of the poor, is a third major issue in the film.  One segment of the film follows a Hispanic family that frequently visits fast food chains for dinner because it’s cheap and convenient.  It turns out that the father has diabetes.  In one scene, the family is shopping at the grocery store and one of the young daughters is practically begging her parents to buy some fresh vegetables.  But when her parents look at the price of the vegetables and compare it to the price of soda and other junk food, they decide not to buy the vegetables.  Instead, they buy the junk food.   Kenner films a scene of the children from this family in a classroom with other lower-income children and the teacher asks if they know someone in their family who has diabetes.  Nearly every child raises his or her hand.  When they are asked if they know two people in their family with diabetes, we see about the same number of hands go up.  The reason why soda and junk food are such popular choices among the poor is because of the overproduction of corn.  Excess corn is cheap and is easily converted into high fructose corn syrup, which is in our soda and in most of the processed foods at the grocery store.  The ubiquity of cheap corn syrup in food and beverages has led to an epidemic of diabetes and obesity in the United States, with the poor being hit the hardest.  From here it’s not hard to see the connection of the issues in Food Inc. to the most prominent political issue of the summer–health care reform.

These are just a some of the problems with the industrial food system portrayed in Food Inc.  About half of the film is devoted to the evils of mass produced food while the other half is devoted to alternatives that may offer solutions.  Kenner delves into the world of organic foods by interviewing the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farms, Gary Hirshberg.  One might expect Kenner to make an unambiguous case for organics in this film, but his presentation of Hirshberg and the entire orgnanic industry is more nuanced.  While presenting the history of Stonyfield Farms and its impressive role in the organic movement, Kenner also shows Hirshberg making deals with Wal-Mart in its effort to tap into the organic market.  At one point Hirshberg defensively responds to his “more radical” friends who criticized him for partnering with Wal-Mart by arguing that because of its huge customer-base, Wal-Mart’s purchase of Stonyfield products is helping to save the world.  More revealing is when Hershberg is at an orgnanics convention and is asked what happens to these companies when they try to become as profitable and big as possible.  Won’t they end up selling their soul for profits just as the other large industrial food companies did?  Hirshberg’s response was essentially: we’ll have to wait and see.

Joel Salatan of the Polyface Farm

The most entertaining and inspiring part of the movie for me was the interview of a farmer from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatan.  Salatan’s “Polyface Farm” is a “family-owned, multi-generational, pasteur-based, beyond organic, local-market farm” according to the website.  First of all, this guy is a character.  He talks fast and passionately about his land, his animals, and the importance of keeping his farming practice small enough to allow people to know exactly where they are getting their food from and how it is produced.  The animals on his farm–pigs, chickens, and cows–roam around his land happily and freely.  It is the kind of pastoral image of farms that we imagine used to exist before the disappearance of the family farm.  Salatan and his farm had a prominent role in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so it was fun to see the colorful character that Michael Pollan wrote about so vividly.  What Salatan and his farm represent is a different way to structure our agricultural economy if consumers would be willing to pay a little more for their food.  Of course, the major objection to universalizing farms like Salatan’s is whether small operations like his could feed six billion people.  In the movie, Salatan dismisses this objection with derision, but it seems like a serious problem to me.

If there is a flaw in Food Inc., I would say it is that it hews too closely to the model of An Inconvenient Truth and the Michael Moore style of documentary-making in that it doesn’t give much credence whatsoever to those with a different view.  There is not even one significant interview with someone who disagrees with the director’s viewpoint.  I understand the time constraints in a film like this one, and the intention of the filmmaker to present as powerful a case as possible for his view.   Nonetheless, it still seems to me that excluding any opposing views hurts a documentary’s credibility.  The question of whether it is feasible to feed billions of people using the methods of Joel Salatan are never even considered except for Salatan’s one sentence dismissal.  Also, the fact that consumers pay lower prices thanks to the industrial food system does seem to me to be a major benefit of this system.  The problem with organic food and farmers markets is that they are still a luxury of the educated and the wealthy.  Until the cost problem is solved, I don’t see how me and my friends buying our groceries from Whole Foods and from farmers markets is going to dent the industrial food system whatsoever.  So in that sense, Food Inc. fails to offer realistic solutions because it does not even try to engage these broader issues.

Despite this failing, I believe that Food Inc. is one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen.  In my view, it has the potential to create serious changes in our economy because it will begin a serious dialogue among Americans about their food and the industrial system behind it.  More than that, it will compel Americans who watch it to seriously reconsider their habits of consuming food.  If this movie gains mass popularity, it could help grow the market for organic foods and the popularity of farmers markets.  And just a slight change in consumer preferences based on this movie would constitute a significant achievement.

I’m not the first to say this, but all Americans need to see Food Inc.

This speech reflects one prominent reason why I supported Barack Obama for president even before he announced that he was running in February of 2007. In this speech to the NAACP last week, Obama is articulating a new kind of liberalism, one that incorporates the importance of personal responsibility and individualism explicitly in addition to the notion that government can improve the lives of its citizens if it is administered effectively. If conservatives are correct that America is unique from European nations in its focus on the individual, then Barack Obama represents a melding of the communitarian aspects of liberalism with the emphasis on the individual in conservative political philosophy. I believe that this synthesis of ideals is one reason why many Republicans ended up voting for Obama in 2008. In any case, this is one of President Obama’s best speeches of the year IMHO. I recommend that you watch it.

By the way, as an aside, notice the emphasis on education in this speech. I’ve written here before that I believe that improving education is perhaps Barack Obama’s most important goal in his political life. Despite the current focus on health care reform, I suspect that education is the issue that drives Obama the most. Finally, I didn’t even mention the significance of the first African-American president giving a speech to the NAACP for the first time. I’m glad that Barack Obama was the one to give that speech.

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.