TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.

The Platonic Ideal of Burying the Lede.

(Fair warning: while the original H/T is via RCP, there are a lot of links to Left-publications and sites in this post. This was essentially unavoidable)

It was the funniest thing: I was flipping through this Michael Scherer article on the resumption of the Obama 2012 campaign (short version: “Getting re-elected is hard!” Particularly when the Democrats have to run on an actual record, instead of the record that they breezily assured people was waiting just over the electoral horizon*), when I came across this passage:

Some on the left have argued that the President dropped the ball by failing to keep his network of supporters engaged and by following his transformational campaign with a transactional governing style. “Fighting to make something happen is different than sitting back and trying to mediate something,” says Marshall Ganz, a supporter turned critic of Obama, who teaches at Harvard. “People can’t organize around that.”

I don’t know why that triggered something in my head; it just seemed a bit… off, somehow. Maybe it was because whoever this Ganz guy was, it was enough to make David Axelrod bristle in the next paragraph. Which means that Scherer must have gotten that Ganz quote first. Which meant that Marshall Ganz may have been important.

So I decided to look Marshall Ganz up. Continue reading TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.