(2017-02-12) Sifry Inside The Fall Of Obamas Grassroots Army

Micah Sifry: Inside the Fall of Obama’s Grassroots Army. On July 20, 2008... Christopher Edley had invited them to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” Together, they would ponder a crucial question: how to “sustain the movement” should Barack Obama, who was still a month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, go on to win the White House.

By Election Day, Obama’s campaign would have 13 million email addresses, three million donors, and two million active members of MyBO (my.barackobama.com), including 70,000 people with their own fund-raising pages. This wasn’t just some passive list of campaign supporters, Edley realized—it was an army of foot soldiers, seasoned at rallying support for Obama’s vision of change.

the campaign’s broad-based engagement via the internet could evolve into a powerful tool to shape progressive politics at the national, state, and local levels,” Edley recalls. “One goal would be to support an Obama presidency. But the agenda would be far broader.”

Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It was the seminal mistake of his presidency—one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.

Now, thanks to previously unpublished emails and memos obtained by the New Republic—some from the John Podesta archive released by WikiLeaks, and others made available by Obama insiders—it’s possible for the first time to see the full contours of why Movement 2.0 failed, and what could have been.

A few weeks later, on August 18, Edley sent a progress report to John Podesta and the other two co-chairs of Obama’s transition board, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse.

Edley attached the initial concept document for Movement 2.0. It outlined an audacious vision: to create “a new ‘home place’ for Obama supporters” that would be ready to go, the day after the election. The new entity would be closely aligned with Obama but independent of the party and his re-election campaign. “Think of it for now as AFO (Americans for Obama),” the memo declared, envisioning it as the “principal means for continuing the active participation of people in the Movement.” AFO would not simply whip up support for Obama’s legislative agenda—it would “gather the input to help shape it.” It would “be a place where Obama supporters can come together, affiliate and organize for change using cutting-edge online tools that will create and support a new and deeper form of civic engagement.”

Critically, the Movement 2.0 team envisioned AFO as a tax-exempt organization that would operate free of the Democratic National Committee

The team concluded by asking for permission to raise $250,000 to set up a staff infrastructure and develop the web site.

John Podesta decided to circulate the concept document to higher-ups in the campaign.

That was the moment when Movement 2.0 began to stall.

others had seen great possibility, Paul Tewes saw potential disaster.

Now, it seemed, the Obamaites and their tech wizards wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party, diverting money and control from the DNC into an untried platform, while inviting “input,” and possibly even organized dissent, from Obama’s base.

grassroots movements, no matter how successful, don’t reliably yield what political consultants want most: money and victories for their candidates, with plenty of spoils for themselves. For insiders like Tewes, Movement 2.0 was a step too far.

Looking back, Edley says now, Podesta made a tactical error by sharing the plan with party regulars like Tewes and Steve Hildebrand before it had garnered more high-level support in the campaign

recommend a new, integrated approach to the Movement 2.0 work, in complete coordination with the ongoing efforts of the DNC,

radical revisions had been made

Gone was the idea of a new organization, independent of the DNC.

The original backers of Movement 2.0 had been sidelined. “I had nothing to do” with the new memo, Edley says. “I guess they liked our name for it, but chose to pervert the idea to something quite conventional and, forgive me, trivial.

The revised memo was not the only postelection plan being considered. Julius Genachowski, co-chief of the transition team’s “Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform” group, wanted to launch a White House web site aimed at engaging the public in policy discussions. The TIGR group was a powerhouse of wonks, many of whom were headed into top positions in government, and its planning memo ran to 12,500 words, compared to just 1,500 for the revised Movement 2.0 proposal.

Ultimately, the transition team agreed on only one project: build a simple postelection site, to be called Change.gov.

But Mitch Kapor didn’t give up. In late October, he spoke to Jim Messina, chief of staff to campaign manager David Plouffe, and came away convinced that both Plouffe and Rouse now backed the original vision for the movement.

On November 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from supporters asking for guidance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, no answers were forthcoming

One person, however, seemed to understand that such half-measures wouldn’t be enough: the president-elect. The same day Hughes posted his message, Obama reached out to David Plouffe

In late December, Plouffe and a small group of senior staffers finally made the call, which was endorsed by Obama. The entire campaign machine, renamed Organizing for America, would be folded into the DNC... Jeremy Bird says the OFA team was never even told about the idea for Movement 2.0.

Obama unveiled OFA a week before his inauguration. “Volunteers, grassroots leaders, and ordinary citizens will continue to drive the organization,” he promised. But that’s not what happened. Shunted into the DNC, MyBO’s tools for self-organizing were dismantled within a year. Instead of calling on supporters to launch a voter registration drive or build a network of small donors or back state and local candidates, OFA deployed the campaign’s vast email list to hawk coffee mugs and generate thank-you notes to Democratic members of Congress who backed Obama’s initiatives.

When the fight over Obama’s health care plan (ObamaCare) was at its peak, OFA was able to drum up only 300,000 phone calls to Congress. After the midterm debacle in 2010, when Democrats suffered their biggest losses since the Great Depression, Obama essentially had to build a new campaign machine from scratch in time for his reelection effort in 2012.

Republicans, on the other hand, wasted no time in building a grassroots machine of their own.

Ultimately, of course, the failure to keep the grassroots movement going rests with Obama. It was his original, and most costly, political mistake—not only a sin of omission, but a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Democratic Party at the state and local level and turn over every branch of the federal government to the far right.