(2009-09-03) No We Can't

No We Can't. As the polls were closing in Massachusetts on the evening of January 19th, turning Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat over to the Republicans for the first time in half a century, David Plouffe was busy reminiscing about the glory days. The president’s former campaign manager was nowhere to be found at the sprawling war room of Organizing for America, the formidable grass-roots army he had forged during the 2008 campaign

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

After the 2008 election, Plouffe had taken OFA, previously known as Obama for America, and moved its entire operation into the Democratic National Committee. There, he argued, the people-powered revolution that Obama had created could serve as a permanent field campaign for the Democratic Party.

Yet rather than heeding the lessons of Obama’s historic victory, Plouffe and OFA permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy’s seat — destroying the 60-vote supermajority the Democrats need to pass major legislation. In December and early January, when it should have been gearing up the patented Obama turnout machine — targeting voters on college campuses, trumpeting the chance to make history by electing Massachusetts’ first female senator — OFA was asking local activists to make phone calls to other states to shore up support for health care reform.

It wasn’t until 10 days before the election, after OFA finally woke up to Coakley’s cratering poll numbers, that the group sent out an urgent appeal to members, asking them to help turn out Massachusetts voters from phone banks across the country. But after having been sidelined by the White House for most of its first year, OFA discovered that most of its 13 million supporters had tuned out. Only 45,000 members responded to the last-minute call to arms.

As a candidate swept into office by a grass-roots revolution of his own creation, Obama was poised to reinvent Washington politics, just as he had reinvented the modern political campaign. Obama and his team hadn’t simply collected millions of e-mail addresses, they had networked activists, online and off — often down to the street level. By the end of the campaign, Obama’s top foot soldiers were more than volunteers. They were seasoned organizers, habituated to the hard work of reaching out to neighbors and communicating Obama’s vision for change.

As president, Obama promised to use technology to open up the halls of power and keep the American people involved. “If you want to know how I’ll govern,” he said, “just look at our campaign.”

The problems started before Obama was even elected. While his top advisers worked for months to carefully plot out a transition to governing, their plan to institutionalize its campaign apparatus was as ill-considered as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. “There was absolutely no transition planning,” says Micah Sifry, the co-founder of techPresident, a watchdog group that just published a special report on OFA’s first year. In what Sifry decries as a case of “criminal political negligence,” Obama’s grass-roots network effectively went dark for two months after Election Day, failing to engage activists eager for their new marching orders. “The movement moment,” he says, “was lost.”

The blame, insiders say, rests squarely with Plouffe. “That was totally Plouffe’s thing,” a top member of the president’s inner circle recalls of the transition planning. “It really was David.” By that point, at the end of the campaign, Plouffe had his eyes on the exit.

“There was no question of my joining the administration,” he recounts in his memoir. So Plouffe, in a truly bizarre call, decided to incorporate Obama for America as part of the Democratic National Committee. The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party. It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil.

Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, tried to dissuade Plouffe.

But Plouffe was resolute. Obama was troubled by the prospect of big-dollar donors driving an independent nonprofit, and the DNC offered a ready infrastructure and fewer legal hurdles.

The decision to shunt Organizing for America into the DNC had far-reaching consequences for the president’s first year in office. For starters, it destroyed his hard-earned image as a new kind of politician, undercutting the post-partisan aura that Obama enjoyed after the election.

In addition, with Plouffe providing less input in his inner circle, Obama began to pursue a more traditional, backroom approach to enacting his agenda. Rather than using OFA to engage millions of voters to turn up the heat on Congress, the president yoked his political fortunes to the unabashedly transactional style of politics advocated by his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

A far cry from the audacious movement that rose to the challenge of electing America’s first black president, the group has performed like a flaccid, second-rate MoveOn, a weak counterweight to the mass protests and energetic street antics of the Tea Baggers.

Not only did the White House fail to crank up its own campaign machinery on behalf of health care (ObamaCare), it also worked to silence other liberal groups. In a little-publicized effort, top administration officials met each week at the Capital Hilton with members of a coalition called the Common Purpose Project, which included leading activist groups like Change to Win, Rock the Vote and MoveOn. In August, when members of the coalition planned to run ads targeting conservative Democrats who opposed health care reform, Rahm Emanuel showed up in person to put a stop to the campaign. According to several participants, Emanuel yelled at the assembled activists, calling them “fucking retards” and telling them he wasn’t going to let them derail his legislative winning streak. Emanuel also locked down OFA: When liberal activists approached the group about targeting conservative Democrats, they were told, “We won’t give you call lists. We can’t go after Democrats — we’re part of the DNC.”

Because OFA failed to mobilize the American people to confront the insurance companies, it allowed industry-funded Republicans, like former House majority leader Dick Armey, to foment a revolt by the Tea Partiers, whose anger dominated the news.

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