Obama political arm under fire

A year into Obama's presidency, Organizing for America is finding
itself on the defense. | AP Photo

By BEN SMITH & ALEX ISENSTADT | 1/13/10 7:40 AM EST

Barack Obama came to town a year ago to change the way politics worked, and Organizing for America was to be his instrument. The successor to his campaign organization, with the largest e-mail list in America, was poised – many observers thought at the time – to bring the campaign’s movement fervor and web-centric tactics to pushing Obama’s legislative agenda through Congress.

A year later, politics is working pretty much as it always did, and it’s Organizing for America that’s on defense.

With little public profile and a difficulty in pointing to concrete accomplishments, OfA, as it’s known, has faced criticism on many fronts: Progressives blast OfA as a soulless, top-down machine that’s alienating the base, even as some state party officials complain that the group is stepping on their toes. Conservative Democrats, too, grumbled over the summer when OfA ran mild, campaign-style ads in their districts backing health care reform, a violation of political etiquette the group hasn’t repeated after complaints from congressional leadership.

Perhaps most troubling for the party, former Obama aides and other Democrats say, OfA simply hasn’t been as effective as they hoped. And as 2010 shapes up to be a difficult year for Democrats, the quiet hand-wringing among party officials over the organization’s capacities has been matched by a new public hand-wringing among Democratic activists, with both struggling to diagnose the ills of the group that was meant to change the game.

“'Fixing health care' was a tough initial assignment for Organizing for America. It was both too diffuse and abstract,” said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the Democratic think tank NDN, who said that he thought OfA “could get back on track” next year by focusing on the economy and the elections.

OfA officials are waging their own P.R. battle to defend the group’s image. And amid online criticism last week, and after speaking to POLITICO, Deputy Director Jeremy Bird took preemptively to Huffington Post to say that the group had mounted “victory after victory” in 2010, and to claim credit for metrics including “our 3 millionth follower on Twitter.” (The Twitter feed is in the name of Barack Obama, which may have something to do with that number.)

Top officials would only speak to POLITICO on the condition that the press office approve quotes before they could be used on the record.

In an interview, OfA’s top officials argued that they haven’t gotten the credit they deserved in the health care fight. And they point as evidence to the moment generally viewed as OfA’s greatest debacle, being caught off guard by the a wave of conservative anger expressed at the town hall meetings of members of Congress, as OfA and its allies – ineffectively and perhaps counterproductively – attempted to cast the “tea party” conservatives as corporate shills.

But then the group and its liberal allies frantically mobilized, dispatching Democrats to – by its count – outnumber conservatives at town hall meetings through the country. In the months following, the group says it rallied citizens to take some 2.5 million steps – from phone calls to Congress to mere petition signatures – in support of health care reform.

Executive Director Mitch Stewart also said the organization’s broader effects have been understated.

Obama “talked about changing the way that Washington works. We believe that we’ve done that,” Stewart said in the interview with POLITICO. “Is it ‘snap your fingers and you’re living in utopia?’ No. But do we feel like we’ve made significant progress toward changing the way that Washington works? Yes.”

The impact of a grassroots organization like Organizing for America can be difficult to measure. The group has regularly sought to advertise its potency by announcing the number of telephone calls it’s placed and town hall meetings it has hosted. Harder to measure is whether it had any impact on the conservative Democrats who have weakened Obama’s bill but appear ready to vote for it.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31428.html#ixzz0cVQnoHKo

President Obama's troops break ranks on health care

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 12/17/09 8:42 PM EST

The foot soldiers of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, organized to go into action when key elements of his agenda are at stake, aren't universally enthusiastic about fighting for the health care compromise now before the Senate. Photo: AP

The foot soldiers of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, organized to go into action when key elements of his agenda are at stake, aren’t universally enthusiastic about fighting for the health care compromise now before the Senate.

On Wednesday morning, Organizing for America, as Obama’s reconstituted campaign organization is now known, e-mailed its list of 13 million Obama supporters asking them to “call your senators now and help us ‘ring in reform.’”

The campaign yielded 150,000 calls — less than half the number of a similar effort in October — and it prompted a backlash among online and local activists who had logged countless volunteer supporting Obama’s campaign and legislative agenda, but who felt betrayed by recent Democratic concessions in the health-care reform fight.

To be sure, the October effort targeted members of the House and Senate, while Wednesday’s calls only targeted senators. Keeping any political organization together after the enthusiasm of a campaign is difficult, and it’s hard to gauge how widespread the unhappiness is.

But there’s plenty of unhappiness. One leading OFA volunteer in Florida blasted an e-mail to a statewide listserv urging activists to “just say no” to the phone-banking effort — uncorking a torrent of frustration from Florida Democrats — while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action e-mail with angry messages and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.

Still others said they would indeed call their senators — but would urge them to oppose the bill. And the liberal blogosphere registered its dissatisfaction with the call to action, with one prominent blogger on MyDD predicting that “Organizing for America will get a rude awakening when they try to round up canvassers and phone bankers.”

After the October plea, which yielded 315,000 calls, a White House-allied outside group blasted out a Huffington Post report indicating that an overwhelming majority of calls specifically supported the so-called public option then being pushed aggressively by congressional liberals.

Since then, the public option has been all but dropped from consideration, and this week a proposed Medicare expansion that replaced it was removed to placate Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

The Democratic National Committee, which houses the OFA, pointed out there had been a total of 1 million calls since the health-care phone-call campaign launched in August and professed to be happy with the number of calls Wednesday, but also conceded that not all subscribers were on board.

“Of our hundreds of thousands of volunteers, there are certainly some who at any given time may disagree with a tactic here or a policy there,” said DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan. “However, as we've seen throughout this process, the vast majority of our supporters remain engaged because they recognize that after a century of fighting for reform, that we are closer than ever and that this is the best chance we may ever have to ensure affordable, reliable health care is available to every American.”

The plan as currently construed won’t achieve those goals, said Nancy Jacobson, an Orlando Democrat who has volunteered for OFA.

“I will call my senators, but I will be asking them to vote against the bill without the public option or Medicare buy-in,” she said.

Dave Hearn, a Fort Dodge, Iowa, optician who helped organize Obama’s campaign in Webster County and has volunteered for OFA by sending e-mails and organizing a local health care “vigil,” said Obama “is taking for granted that the volunteers who worked so hard for him were going to buy in to whatever strategy he chose to pass his major legislative initiative.”

Though he said he’s “still a great believer in Obama,” he said he didn’t participate in the OFA phone banking and won’t be volunteering for future health-care-related efforts. “What am I going to say: ‘I hate this bill, but we’re Obama people, so let’s do it?’” he said.

Amy Slattery, an OFA volunteer who organized a health-care phone bank in New York last month to lean on Lieberman, said she plans to remain engaged in the group’s reform advocacy, despite being “frustrated with aspects of the bill (and certainly with Lieberman).”

She explained, “I certainly understand the unease that a lot of people have been feeling, but I remain hopeful that the process will achieve some type of positive health care reform.”

But Tanya Keith, a small business owner from Des Moines who was a precinct captain for Obama’s Iowa campaign, replied to the OFA e-mail, writing “Why should I devote my valuable time to volunteer for a bill that has no teeth left in it? We've sold our souls to 4 Senators instead of sitting down and convincing them that a public option or at the very LEAST medicare is included in the bill.”

Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who ran former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, said OFA didn’t effectively “do the groundwork to get their on-ground supporters to buy in” to the reform plan before asking them to advocate for it.

“If you don’t do that pre-work,” said Trippi, who left Dean’s operation before it transitioned into a group called Democracy for America that is similar to OFA, “there’s a real danger in causing people to disengage and getting them to hit that ‘unsubscribe’ button and saying ‘don’t bother me any more.’”

That’s what Susan Smith, an OFA activist from Tampa, did. She also fired off an e-mail urging members of the Florida Progressives listserv to “say NO if (OFA staffers) ask you to participate” in the phone banking.

“If this bill passes, it will be because Joe Lieberman threw a hissy fit and was allowed to control what went into the bill,” she wrote. “That means that in the end, he had more power with President Obama and Senator Reid than we do. If he is rewarded, this tactic will be used over and over again to kill the progressive agenda.” She also urged members not to donate to the DNC or the Party’s congressional campaign committees.

In an interview, Smith said her listserv message prompted an outpouring of similar sentiments.

“People are frustrated because we have done our part,” she said. “We put these people in the position to make change and they’re not doing it.”

That kind of disappointment has already diminished the power of OFA, asserted Adam Green, a former official with the liberal online juggernaut MoveOn.org, who now helps run the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports the public option.

In September, the group collected signatures from more than 100,000 former Obama campaign staffers, volunteers and donors on a letter urging him to support the public option.

“We heard story after story from current Organizing for America volunteers about how they were getting disillusioned with Obama because he wasn’t fighting for the public option,” Green said. “Obama’s e-mail list may soon become a hollow shell if he does not fight Joe Lieberman and insist that there be a public option.”