(2017-02-10) Why Obama Failed To Build An Enduring Movement

Why Barack Obama Failed to Build an Enduring Movement. How did this happen? In 2010, the meme that began to arise via articles in Rolling Stone and elsewhere is that Democratic political operative David Plouffe was to blame. From RS: After the 2008 election, Plouffe had taken OFA, previously known as Obama for America, and moved its entire operation into the Democratic National Committee. 2009-09-03-NoWeCant

However, a recent article at The New Republic paints a much different and nuanced picture of how this fiasco came to be. (2017-02-12) Sifry Inside The Fall Of Obamas Grassroots Army

The rest of the story is sad, but predictable. Obama’s attention as a candidate was placed elsewhere, M2.0 fizzled, the DNC dug their heels in, and grabbed for centralized power with gusto. By October 2008, the scotching of a truly effective and powerful grassroots machine was done

you can’t lay it all at Plouffe’s doorstep. Clearly there were other personalities who were laying the groundwork for the political disaster we now live with well before he got his hands on OFA, as well as a pervasive failure amongst leading Democratic politicians to understand what the nation was willing and able to do together with Democrats to change American politics.

So let’s call to task the entire near-permanent cadre of Democratic political operatives who seem to be more interested in sucking up to the powerful in, around and beyond Washington to feather their nests, whilst average Americans eager for change and willing to work for it are treated like “the help” to clean up their brain-dead campaign messes.

From the DNC perspective, there is no such thing as a “Democratic base”: there are only names on lists to be brow-beaten into going to the polls now and again. A “base” would imply people to be listened to and cared for.