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

Interesting Political Articles: Organizing for America and Gerrymandering

Disorganized: What happened to Obama's massive network of grassroots activists?

from The New Republic

Last year, after winning the presidency, Obama decided to keep intact the backbone of his stunningly efficient, innovative campaign. Previous presidents had outsourced their activism to interest groups; Obama was going to create his own. OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda (and keep them engaged for 2012). "We've never had a political leader who has continued their organizing while in office like this at this scale," Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn, told NPR in January.

As right-wing protesters dominated the news this summer, it would have seemed the perfect opportunity for Obama's much-touted organizers to drown out the conservatives with some coordinated agitation of their own. But they barely made a ripple. Where were they? And how could such a formidable grassroots operation--having just put Obama in office--fall quiet so quickly?

Full article at The New Republic

Redistricting and Gerrymandering: Can the Internet Help?

from the Personal Democracy Forum

Gerrymandering has long been one of the ugly little secrets of American politics, and absolutely one of the arenas where the role of technology has been to make politics worse, not better. Every ten years, after a new census is completed, state legislatures redraw district lines, using powerful computers that essentially enable them to pick their voters before the voters ever have a chance to pick them. Wonder why 94% to 98% of incumbent Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are have been re-elected every cycle since 1996? Or why so few House seats--generally only one-in-ten--are considered up for grabs each cycle? This has long been one of those problems mostly of interest to academics and good government groups, and while everyone wrings their hands about how the resulting lack of electoral competition is bad for democracy, fosters polarization and entrenches corruption, so far no one has figured out how to make ending gerrymandering into a more popular cause.

Enter RedistrictingtheNation.com, a new site built by Avencia, a firm that specializes in web-based geographic analysis, visualization and modeling applications. The site offers an intriguing way of breaking down the barrier to public engagement on this issue, and, if it manages to draw more support, could actually change the game by showing citizens how easy it is to draw fair political boundaries, and how corrupt the process is now.

Full article at the Personal Democracy Forum