Tag: ofa

DNC *still* advertising for astroturfers.

No, really: check out the job description.

Email campaigners are responsible for planning, writing, and executing grassroots campaigns to advance the President’s agenda for change.

Back in December when Ben Smith reported on this the first time, the DNC’s response was “Your in-box isn’t going to fill itself.” Which is a very unintentionally revealing statement, given that it essentially concedes that the DNC assumes that there’s no such thing as a spontaneous popular movement. After all, if they don’t exist on the Left – and if they existed, the DNC wouldn’t be advertising for people to create them – then they don’t exist anywhere. This probably explains their more nonsensical statements about Tea Parties: the idea of a legitimate populist, grassroots-driven movement is as alien to them as a reactionless drive would be to a modern physicist. Continue reading DNC *still* advertising for astroturfers.

Revisiting Sifry and the OfA Withering.

Micah Sifry wrote a follow-up to his post on the withering of Obama Organizing for America, and it’s just as interesting as the first one was. More practically useful, in its way: anybody involved with building/maintaining a local Tea Party group, or other local conservative/libertarian/Republican grassroots organization should read it.  But – again – there’s one particular passage that I want to address:

…[A]nd heck, doesn’t the Democratic party want more local chapters[?]…

Not in the sense that Micah means, no.  They want their current local chapters filled with people who show up, swell the ranks, pay their dues, and perform whatever tasks the local chapter leadership expects of them.  Which, for most local chapters, involves maintaining the status quo.  Actually letting those wild-eyed activists do anything would give said local chapter leadership the galloping staggers.

Anyway, read the whole thing, particularly if you’re a Right-grassroots organizer.  But if you’re a progressive: read this, and tell yourself that nothing’s wrong, really.

Moe Lane

PS: What?  No, the GOP has a different problem in that regard, which I have no intention at all of discussing in even a semi-public forum.

Crossposted to RedState.

The steadily ebbing OfA tide.

I take exception to the last sentence of this passage from an excellent essay by Micah Sifry:

In the face of strong questioning from Melber about signs of declining support for Obama among young voters, and in the vastly lower counts he is getting on his Youtube video, Plouffe refuses to give out hard, checkable metrics on the health of the Obama base. Hearing Melber describe the disgusted reaction of uber-blogger Markos Moulitsas to a recent OFA fundraising email, Plouffe somewhat hotly replies, “It’s easy to take potshots, but I’m very closely in contact with the people who make up the heartbeat of the ground level of Obama for America, who are still out there.” (Telling that he says “Obama for America,” not “Organizing for America.”) He asserts:

“We’ve had a couple million people out there volunteering for health care, quietly in communities, helping maintain support. It’s different from a campaign; you’re not out there saying, ‘Register eight voters today.’…. I quite frankly am thrilled that over two million people, which is a lot, have done something on health care, meaning: they’ve gone out and knocked on doors; they visited a congressional office; they helped organize a press conference. It’s happened in all 50 states, and we think it’s a small part of why health care will get done.”

I’m sorry, but when two million people are in motion in favor of something, because they put themselves in motion, we know what that feels like. It’s called a movement. It started to happen in 2007-08, and it hasn’t happened since.

Continue reading The steadily ebbing OfA tide.