Business Lobby Develops Grassroots Operation

From the Los Angeles Times

U.S. Chamber of Commerce grows into a political force
A swelling tide of money could put the business group in a better position to sway elections.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is building a large-scale grass-roots political operation that has begun to rival those of the major political parties, funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.

The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns.

The chamber's expansion into grass-roots organizing -- coupled with a large and growing fundraising apparatus that got a lift from Supreme Court rulings -- is part of a trend in which the traditional parties are losing ground to well-financed and increasingly assertive outside groups. The chamber is certainly better positioned than ever to be a major force on the issues and elections it focuses on each year, analysts think.

The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller, is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat.

The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008.

Full article here.

I took a look at their web site's "About" section to find out what they are about:

Friends of the U.S. Chamber believes that American prosperity depends on lower taxes and less regulation, not more burdensome paperwork and bureaucracy. It believes in access to affordable health care, not a government mandated solution. It believes America's energy supply needs to be diverse and secure, not legislated by special interests. It believes in allowing employees the right to secret ballot elections, not suppressing workers' rights with a union leader power-grab to further regulate the workplace. And Friends of the U.S. Chamber believes in helping companies grow jobs, not threatening their existence with the risk of frivolous lawsuits.

Lots of cash and resources on hand, all the legal parameters to spread it widely in support of legislation and politicians that support its agenda, the most sophisticated public relations and communications operation that money can buy equals a potentially formidable force for the corporate right wing.

The Obama Disconnect: A Spirited Discussion

The past week or so, the Personal Democracy Forum web site published a series of fascinating articles that sparked a wide-ranging discussion on Organizing for America, the community-organizing wing of Obama's electoral operation that propelled him to victory in 2008.

Micah Sifry, in "The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets Reality," argues:

But the question raised by Plouffe's book is, given the grassroots base he helped develop in support of Obama and how powerful it became by the fall of 2008 (raising $150 million in the month of September alone, including more than $10 million the night of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech), why he didn't do more to keep that muscular organization going into Obama's presidency? To put it another way, why did Plouffe discount his own grassroots strategy in favor of the dusty old playbook used by White House insiders for decades? Why wasn't more done to extend that sense of ownership meaningfully into the life of the Administration? If you could trust your volunteers to carry the campaign in all sorts of important ways, why not also give them a real say in how they could shake up Washington?

The answer, ultimately, is that Plouffe and the rest of Obama's leadership team, wasn't really interested in grassroots empowerment. Instead, they think they've invented a 21st century version of list-building, and to some degree they're right. (It's for that reason that I think of the Obama campaign as the first 21st century top-down campaign, while McCain's was the last 20th century top-down version). For Plouffe, the gigantic Obama email list, its millions of donors and its vibrant online social network were essentially a new kind of top-down broadcast system, one even better than the old TV-dominated system.

His article generated quite a bit of controversy which resulted in an interesting set of follow-up articles and a flurry of comments and response blog posts:

The Obama Disconnect: What Could Have Been?

Responding to Karoli About Hope, Cynicism and the Obama Disconnect

One More Response to Karoli on the Obama Disconnect

The Right Gets the Obama Disconnect Wrong

Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama and OFA, via Ralph Benko

Respect, Empower, Include, Unfriend? The Story of One Disillusioned Obama Organizer

Serious As A Heart Attack: The Independents' Story

The following article was forwarded by Nancy Hanks of The Hankster. It was written by independent activist Jackie Salit. In it, Salit provides insight on the impact of the independent vote.

Personally, I think the story that Jackie outlines in this commentary below is a "sea-change" story that "big media" picked up on briefly in 2006 and again in 2008 (election fever) but is now somehow completely missing from today's analysis. More than 40% of the American electorate identify as independents. And that growth was produced in large part by the progressive wing of the independent movement. If you blink on this, you will miss the story.

Thanks!
Nancy

SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK: THE INDEPENDENTS’ STORY

By: Jackie Salit

When we finally get far enough down the road on health care reform, it will become clear that a driving force in the intensity of the fight was a heart attack. Not the medical kind. The political kind.

Independents swung decisively to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. And it is this shift by independents – who repositioned themselves from center-right to center-left – that gave the Republican right the political equivalent of cardiac arrest.

In 1992, 19 million independents voted for Ross Perot. In 2008, 19 million independents voted for Barack Obama. Over the span of 15 years, the largely white, center-right independent movement re-aligned itself with Black America and progressive-minded voters.

This did not happen out of the blue. It did not happen by magic. It happened because the progressive wing of the independent movement did the painstaking and often controversial work of bringing the Perot movement and the Fulani movement together at the grassroots. The Fulani movement refers to the country’s leading African American independent, Dr. Lenora Fulani, who exposed the black community to independent politics and introduced the independent movement to an alliance with Black America.

No doubt the dramatics that the right wing brought to the Town Hall meetings this summer were intended for the television cameras. But the organizers, strategists and radio personalities who orchestrated the theatrics had a particular audience in mind: Independents. If they could tarnish Obama’s image with indies, they could damage the black and independent alliance and re-establish the Republican Party as an influential force amongst independents. Some of that could be accomplished, they felt, by claiming Obama’s health plan would drive up the national debt – a concern that animated the early Perot movement. Some Republican strategists felt that if they simply branded Obama a socialist, it would scare independents away – not from the health care plan (everyone recognizes a plan of some kind will get passed) but away from the center-left coalition that elected him.

If indies are feeling somewhat disillusioned with President Obama over the health care reform fight, it has more to do with fears that he is being overly influenced by the partisans in Congress. Since independents voted for him to be a more independent president, it’s easy to see how some felt disappointed by his handling of the Republican onslaught. Obama’s independent appeal was based on his challenge to the prevailing culture of Clintonian opportunism in the Democratic Party and partisanship inside the Beltway. Put another way, the independent vote for Obama was an effort to define a new kind of progressivism, one that was not synonymous with Democratic Party control.

After years of hard work and organizing, independents have become a sought-after partner in American politics. They elected President Obama and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, arguably the country’s two most independent and pragmatically progressive elected officials. No wonder the Republican Party right wants a clawback.

Independents are vulnerable to being peeled away by the Republican right. The Pew Research Center reports that were the 2010 midterms to be held today, independents would lean towards Republicans by a 43 to 38 percent margin. But, the evolution of a 21st century independent movement is not that simple. First, the movement is very fluid and very new. Historical movements develop through twists and turns, not in a straight line. The far right has attempted to take over the independent movement before. In 1994, Newt Gingrich crafted the “Contract with America” to woo Perotistas back into the Republican tent. And in 2000, social conservative Pat Buchanan hijacked the Reform Party presidential nomination, though he was roundly repudiated by independents in the general election.

If Republicans are increasing their influence among independents, it’s also because the Democratic Party Left has not been a friend to the independent movement. Sure, Democrats were happy that indies broke for Obama. But they were disappointed that we didn’t become Democrats. They equate progressivism with being in the Democratic Party. But they’re wrong.

Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party has been enthusiastic about the development of indies as a third force. For different reasons, surely. But they share a common goal: to maintain the primacy of two-value logic (where there is only one or the other, never neither) and make sure independents are passive companions. That’s one reason that the fight for open primaries – which allow independents to cast ballots in every round of voting – and the campaign to appoint independents to the Federal Election Commission are so important. Those fights are about our right to participate and our right to represent our interests in changing the political culture.

The independent movement went left in 2008, after many years of grassroots organizing to link it to progressive leadership. Now the right wants to peel it back. Obama, presumably, wants to hold on to the partnership, but must also privilege his own party, which turns independents off and makes them more susceptible to Republican attacks. Meanwhile, independents are working hard at the grassroots to hold our own.

Jackie Salit is the president of IndependentVoting.org and the campaign coordinator for Mike Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign on the Independence Party line.

Sirota on the Washington Power Dynamic in the Healthcare Fight

Writer and political pundit David Sirota wrote an extremely important piece of political analysis over at the Open Left blog which deserves to be read far and wide by people interested in the healthcare battle and how it can potentially tilt the power dynamics in Washington. The recent outpouring of outrage and organizing on the Left in support of a public option in healthcare reform is having an effect where Progressives are finally flexing their political muscle and is on the verge of success.

Sirota writes:

Polls show local Democratic dissatisfaction with easily primary-able Democrats, putting huge pressure on those Democrats to get in line; the Paul Krugmans of the liberal punditocracy, often offering up "on the one hand, on the other hand" dithering at the end of legislative fights, have now come out pretty strong for a public option; mainstream Republican editorial boards like the Denver Post are saying the public option is necessary; the decline in Obama's poll numbers are being fueled by progressive - not conservative - dissatisfaction on health care; fundraising for the public option campaign is intensifying; and the organizing work to support the public option is in full gear.

Taken all together, the aimed at A) forcing House Democrats to pledge to vote against a public-option-free health care bill and B) getting Senate Democrats to state their support of a public option may be making the easier legislative path the one that squeezes the Blue Dog Democrats...

He adds:

We must focus laser-like efforts on constructing a group of House members who delivers on a promise to vote against a public-option-free health care bill. If we do that, we will change the power dynamic in the health care debate by forcing the administration to use its power to make the public option a reality in the final bill that is reported out of the conference committee. And even more broadly, it may change the power dynamic on every other issue by finally establishing the progressive majority in the Democratic caucus - and not the corporate whores - as the final "deciders" on other major bill... While they aren't going to get us all the way to single payer (which I've long said was a huge missed opportunity), they may deliver us a public option that represents genuine progress.

Read the original article at the Open Left blog.

'Wake the F$*^ Up!'

From NMP:

health care reform is in real danger of failing and thus the Obama presidency failing and thus us failing. We really need to wake up! Democratic weasals like Baucus and Bayh are crawling out of their holes onto the set of shows like Morning Joe because they sense the President is weakened. You're going to see more and more conservative to moderate Democrats start chanting, "we can't deficit spend our way to health care reform." That chant is soon going to grow into chorus and eventually it's going to drown out calls for health care altogether. What are you going to whine about then?! If the President goes down, everything that we campaigned for goes down. We really need to get our priorities straight and our shit together before this all comes to an end.

Reminder of who to call!

PLEASE CALL the White House and let President Obama know that you don't want him to consider the "7-year trigger" for the public option. Let him know that you're ANGRY that he's doing this. Tell him it won't be REAL health care reform without an immediately available, strong, robust Medicare-like public option.

CALL the White House at: 202-456-1111 and E-MAIL them as well!

PLEASE CALL these Senators on the Senate Finance Committee today to demand a strong, robust affordable Medicare-like public option. Here's a list of talking points below:

Tell Senator [Name] that you DO NOT want the 7-year trigger for the public option and take it off the table, and that you want him to support an affordable strong, robust Medicare-like public option. We NEED a strong, robust Medicare-like public option NOW OPEN TO ALL AMERICANS AND AFFORDABLE, not more of the SAME broken system that's given us unaffordable premiums, little private insurance coverage, and rising co-pays. Also, DON'T TAX OUR EMPLOYER HEALTH BENEFITS. Instead, follow the proposal by President Obama to tax the wealthy above $250,000, eliminate the overpayments in Medicare Advantage, and put tax capital gains to help fund health care reform.

Read more »

Folks, time to call your Congressman and Senator

From Micheline

Rikyrah,

Is it possible to do a post on the necessity for people to call their senators in support of President Obama's stimulus package. Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads are tying up the phones.

So, our favorite racist junkie radio host is telling his knuckledraggers to call Congress.

Well, YOU can call Congress too. And, you can send an email blast to everyone you know to call Congress.

The junkie gets $100 million to spew his hate, so he doesn't give a rat's ass if this country goes down the tubes. And, his audience....well, ignorance is ignorance.

So, everyone out here knows someone who is hurting. Someone who would be helped by this Stimulus package. It's part of that continued involvement that our President and First Lady discussed always on the campaign trail.

A phone call isn't that hard.

Here is the site for Congress. Just find your Representative up top to get their number.


Here is the site for the Senate. This is the link to the page where all the Senators and their phone numbers are listed.

If you can fax, do that too.

Obama's Grassroots Network

The Other Transition: Whither Obama's Movement?
By Micah L. Sifry, from Personal Democracy Forum

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan."

What exactly is going on? The Obama people are saying very little. For a team that has been refreshingly open about the transition in Washington--not only posting an extensive list of transition staffers and donors but inviting public comments on top issues like health care and the economy, letting everyone see those comments and rate their value, beginning to engage in open dialogue via YouTube and mass conference calls and community discussions, posting the names of the outside groups lobbying the transition as well as the text of their position papers, asking for comments on same--the transition to OFA2, which seems to be de facto centered in Chicago, has been a totally top-down, one-way affair.

Yes, the Obama political team has been asking for input from its supporters about the future of OFA2. BarackObama.com features a big online "supporter survey" and the campaign (I guess that's what we still have to call it) has urged supporters to schedule local "Change is Coming" house parties for the weekend of December 13-14. "These meetings offer supporters a chance to reconnect with one another and talk about the issues that are most important to them," says Obama staffer Christopher Hass, "as well as an opportunity to discuss what they can do to support Barack's agenda and how they can continue to make an impact in their own communities....Your input, through the online surveys and through these upcoming house meetings, will help guide the future of this grassroots movement."

But what kind of guidance can isolated individuals and disconnected house parties give, other than vague affirmations of the need for "change" and their desire to pitch in?

Full article at the Personal Democracy Forum

What Happens to the Obama Grassroots?

from the Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington -- It is the biggest and broadest American political force ever created -- a vast, electronically linked network of activists, neighborhood organizers and volunteers who raised record amounts of money and propelled Barack Obama to the White House.

Now, as Obama turns from campaigning to governing, his advisors are struggling to harness this potent web of supporters to help him move his agenda over the next four years.

But it is no simple task to convert an insurgency into a standing army.

That challenge has sparked rare discord among Obama advisors who ran a highly disciplined operation with no public disagreements throughout the long campaign.

Traditionally, the new president would blend his campaign operation with his party's national committee. Some of Obama's closest advisors lean toward that pragmatic view.

But others, who built the grass-roots organization, worry that linking it too closely to the party could cause the unusual network to unravel -- and squander an extraordinary resource.

The Obama machinery relied heavily on idealistic political outsiders committed to breaking free from old ways of doing politics. The worry is that these enthusiastic activists might drift away if they are turned over to the Democratic National Committee, where the party might ask them to support Democrats and target Republicans.

Full article at the Los Angeles Times

The key quote in the article was how do you transform an insurgency into a standing army? I would bet that many of the people who supported and voted for Obama are independents and non-ideological voters who do not have a particular affinity towards nor loyalty to the Democratic Party as exemplified by the DNC.

I agree that attempts to turn these followers into a partisan organization would only serve to alienate them (hell, it would alienate me! I consider myself an independent voter who voted for Obama). I would urge Obama's team to encourage models of political and civic participation that is not designed solely for the benefit of the Democratic Party but to model its efforts along pragmatic and realistic solutions to the country's problems based on a core set of Progressive principles. The focus should be on problem-solving. Not party politics.

More Inspiration From The Field

I know that sometimes it seems, I' m just one person. What can I do?

I know we're nervous about this election.

I found inspiration from this post over at The Field

Read the personal accounts from all over the country. Some in red states. Some in blue. Some in tossups. All important, IMO

It's Your Story Now
Posted by Al Giordano - November 1, 2008 at 6:27 pm

During these next 72 hours, some of us - for example, the presidential candidates and the reporters that track them - fade into a kind of irrelevance.

The candidates will be speaking, the journalists will be scribbling it, the pundits will be commenting upon it, but it begins to sound like a monotonous noise in the background of a much more compelling song being sung.

We now take a back seat to the authentic protagonists of this campaign: those of you on the ground that are knocking on doors, making phone calls, hauling voters to the polls and otherwise getting out the vote.

It's so intense on the ground, that a scribbler with a pad, or even a photographer, can tend to be underfoot: nobody in his and her right mind is paying us any mind at this hour anyway, unless we have yet to cast a ballot (your correspondent has already done that, and doesn't need a ride to the polls, thank you very much).

But the intensity of the ground game right now makes the reporting much harder to do...

Or does it?

I was just thinking to myself, hey, we have all these readers and commenters here that have been out all day doing that work. They're the eyewitnesses to history now!

Just then an email arrived from one of our regular commenters, in Illinois:

I have just returned from canvassing Indiana, after leaving Chicago at 7 am today. I would like to share with you what happened.

The campaign had previously e-mailed me and assigned me to a specific city (Indianapolis), a specific office in that city, and a specific staging area to meet in Chicago to get there. Normally in these staging areas there are more drivers than riders. This time so many volunteers showed up the cars filled up. I showed up 10 minutes late and was not able to secure a car. They had all filled up. The campaign then told me to go downtown to the Illinois HQ, which was a staging area for a different city in Indiana, Michigan City. While I'm in the HQ signing in and getting a ride, I see at least 75 people phonebanking.

We hit the road and ninety minutes later I'm in Michigan city. The field office there is packed: at least 100 volunteers are crammed into it. They have a three shift system: people canvass in the morning, and give their list to the second shift who knocks on the doors of anyone who wasn't home, and a third shift that knocks on any door that the second shift didn't make a contact with. I was assigned to the second shift, but there were so many volunteers I couldn't get a packet!

Michigan City, a fairly small city, had a satellite office. I was quickly sent there, to find a room with 4 campaign organizers and at least 50 volunteers. I managed to score the last walking packet for this office's second shift. I did my shift in a lower-income African American area and had a contact rate of 30% (mind you, using a walking sheet that had already been walked 2 hours ago; I was knocking on every door that had been marked previously as nobody home). Everyone I spoke with had either already voted or assured me they vote Tuesday for Obama.

The best part? On the way to the satellite office we passed the local RNC office. It was closed.

(I'll leave it up to the writer as to whether he wants to uncloak or not, here in the comments section.)

I'm betting more of you have stories like that.

Share them.

You must tell these stories.

Your story - of canvassing, of phone banking, of getting out and protecting the vote - is the single biggest news story of the hour.

Use the comments section here to tell those stories (or if you're shy, send me an email submission).

The microphone, the narrative, the blog - like the campaign itself - is now very much in your hands.

GO TO THIS POST AND READ THE REPLIES.

Read how individuals, just like you are working with others, to weave together something positive. To fight together for this country.

I dare you to read those replies and NOT be inspired.