OFA Falls Short in Advocacy -- Again

Politico reports on Organizing for Action:

OFA’s pledge to punish senators who voted against gun control was the first big test of the group’s reach — and, undoubtedly, a difficult one, given that many of the senators voting no were in deep-red states where Obama lost badly. Even measured against those odds, there are almost no successes to point to: The group didn’t sway a single vote for the background check proposal, and so far, it hasn’t been able to make any of those who voted against it feel any heat.

Even in states Obama carried handily — places like Ohio and New Hampshire — the group couldn’t hold big rallies, blanket the airwaves with TV ads or motivate enough supporters to match the volume of phone calls from pro-gun advocates. Asked for demonstrations of the strong effort they were mounting, OFA staff pointed to “tweet your senator” pushes they encouraged in the days after the vote.

Organizing for America, its predecessor group, had similar problems.

OFA 4.0

At The Atlantic, Molly Ball writes:

Insiders are calling Organizing for Action "OFA 4.0" -- the fourth iteration of the acronym. OFA 1.0 was the first presidential campaign; 2.0 was its successor, Organizing for America, which became an arm of the Democratic National Committee in 2009; 3.0 was the reelection campaign.

OFA 2.0 is the most direct precedent for the current effort -- and a cautionary tale. Organizing for America was largely blamed for having squandered the momentum of Obama's first victory, allowing the president to get mired in D.C. deal-making and leaving his rank-and-file supporters out in the cold.

Veterans of the group bristle a bit at this characterization, but most acknowledge that Organizing for America took too long to get started, lacked a focused mission, didn't play well with other actors (such as local Democratic parties) and, because of its affiliation with the DNC, suffered from conflicting imperatives. Was its job to push Obama's plans, or was it to get more Democrats elected?

"The biggest problem with being inside the DNC was that we couldn't put pressure on Democrats," one Organizing for America veteran told me. Though Democrats commanded a 54-seat House majority and 60-vote Senate supermajority, it became clear early in Obama's first term that they would need some cajoling to go along with plans like the stimulus bill and especially the health-care legislation.

Obama 501(c)(4)

Organizing for America did not work out too well as a non-election entity. The Los Angeles Times reports of OFA 2.0:

As he launches his second term, President Obama may get help from an ambitious new political organization being built out of his reelection campaign, a group that could reshape how future presidents harness supporters to press their White House agendas.

Run by former Obama campaign officials, the advocacy group will seek to leverage the campaign's sophisticated organizing tools and rich voter database to support the president's policy objectives, including raising the debt ceiling, gun control and immigration reform.

...

Leadership for the new group has not been announced, but former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and several other former campaign operatives are expected to play key roles. On Thursday, Messina sent out an email blast to Obama campaign supporters urging them to back the White House gun policy proposals.

Making the leap from a campaign built around the singular goal to one with a broader — and ongoing — mission is no easy task.

"Every presidential campaign struggles with the question of, 'How do we handle our legacy?'" noted Republican election law attorney Michael Toner, who served as general counsel for George W. Bush's 2000 campaign. "This is fairly novel, and it's rare to talk about trying to house this apart from the party. I think it's very challenging, because the DNC will say, 'What about us?' Other candidates will say, 'What about us?' It's very hard to finesse that."

The organization will be set up as a 501(c)4 social welfare group, according to top Democrats privy to the discussions. That structure allows it to accept unlimited contributions.

Here is the Messina email:

As the "fiscal cliff" debate raged on, supporters like you were right there with President Obama, making sure your voices were heard from all over the country. When we work together like that, we're a powerful force.

Issues like immigration, climate change, and gun violence will be debated over these next four years, and President Obama is ready to take them on -- but he needs us by his side. Our goal is to help him get things done, but also to help change how things get done in Washington in the first place.

Over inauguration weekend, you'll have a chance to participate in a discussion about how we'll work together to support our president and address the issues we all care about. Some volunteers and staff will be gathering in Washington, D.C., and will be joined online by thousands more supporters nationwide for the Obama Campaign Legacy Conference, where we'll firm up the structure and leadership of the new organization.

Want to be part of the conversation as our next chapter begins?

Say you're in and we'll follow up with ways to participate.

The impetus for this conference comes from you. In November, we sent a survey asking you about your campaign experience and where you'd like our movement to go from here.
More than a million people responded. In fact, four out of five survey respondents said they'd like to continue to be involved and volunteer over the next four years.

That's an advantage that no previous president has enjoyed, and one that has the potential to reshape our politics for years to come.

This is an important opportunity to shape the future of this movement, and I hope you'll take part:

http://my.barackobama.com/Obama-Campaign-Legacy-Conference

Thanks. Can't wait to see what we do next.

Messina
Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
P.S. -- Watch this short video to see how your work backing the President during the "fiscal cliff" talks allowed us to restore fairness to our tax code by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more. It's just one example of what we can accomplish when we're in it together. 

OFA, RIP?

Time reports:

What happened to Barack Obama's once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. "There's no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms," says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.

Neglect is to blame. After Obama was elected, his political aides ignored the army he had created until it eventually disappeared. No one was in charge; decisions were often deferred but rarely made. By the time they realized they needed more troops, says longtime consultant Joe Trippi, "their supporters had taken a vacation from politics."

DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse pushes back:

This is a ridiculous bit of reporting that didn't deserve the five graphs it was given. Who in the world would think it is appropriate to compare the scale of effort that takes place in a presidential election year with that of a midterm — it'd be like comparing an ant to elephant and criticizing the ant for not measuring up in size and stature. The fact is, the $50 million vote 2010 plan, which includes thousands of volunteers and hundreds of paid staff in all 50 states, concentrated in key states and districts, is the largest and most robust investment of resources in terms of money, personnel and volunteers for a midterm election in the history of the DNC. If anything, the effort we have undertaken here should be compared to previous midterm efforts of the party and not to a presidential election in which the two candidates raised and spent more than $1 billion.

In addition, the writer offers nothing to back up the assertion that we allowed OFA to languish after the election, which is a flat out misstatement of the facts. Within a matter of days after President Obama was sworn in, OFA was organizing thousands of events in support of the Recovery Act — hardly something that would have occurred if we had not been paying close attention to our supporters. Incidentally, since OFA launched in its present form, we have added 2.6 million people to the e-mail list and 5.1 million people have taken action through OFA — all of this before the midterm elections even have gotten into fool swing (sic). These are figures provided to the writer but which were not used because they did not fit the premise of the story she was writing.

Grassroots and Netroots 2010

House Republicans are using social networking to develop a policy agenda. America Speaking Out is the vehicle. See Reid Wilson's story at Hotline. and Charles Babington's AP story.

Meanwhile, Organizing for America continues its identity crisis. A Washington Monthly article from a few months ago put it this way:

But so far, Obama has failed to do what Reagan and Eisenhower did: he has asked his supporters to rally around Democratic causes, but he has balked at asking them to become Democrats. He has asked his loyal enthusiasts to take ownership of a presidency, but not of a party. The distinction matters—you can support a presidency, but you can’t really participate in it. OFA has called on its members to contribute money, make phone calls on a handful of issues, even knock on doors for Democratic candidates running in off-year elections in November (desultory get-out-the-vote efforts which, unsurprisingly, turned out only dribs and drabs of Obama’s electorate for John Corzine and Creigh Deeds in their failed gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia). But it hasn’t asked them to, for instance, work on behalf of primary candidates who reflect their values, shape local party platforms, or run for office themselves. It’s why, for all of its fervent activity, OFA looks less like a movement than a cheering section.

More recently, the Democrats have tried to rev up OFA. CNN reported last week:

The Democratic National Committee announced details Thursday of a new addition to their get-out-the-vote efforts, which includes a website and a focus on recruiting new voters for the midterm election.

Democratic leaders vowed to spend $50 million, which they describe as an unprecedented sum, for their "Vote 2010" efforts, which include the unveiling of a new "Raise Your Vote" campaign.

Party officials say the new campaign is specifically geared toward making voting registration and getting information about voting as easy as possible for people in any state across the country to access. DNC staffers say this is the first-ever comprehensive voting information and registration hub ever housed at the party headquarters.

"Also unprecedented is the idea that when our organizers hit the doors to register voters and turn them out they will have already built a relationship with them over the last year and a half," said Mitch Stewart, director of Organizing for America, the political arm for President Obama. "This won't be the first time our organizers will have met with the pastor at the local church or the commander at the local VFW post. We're hitting the ground running."

OFA, Campaigning, and Governing

A Washington Post article quotes a perceptive comment by my student Abe Shimm about the difference betweeen campaigning and governing.

[E-mail] now comes from Organizing for America, the campaign's online network, renamed, that helped deliver Obama to victory and was supposed to smoothly pivot toward pushing his agenda through Congress. It hasn't worked out that way. Election Day was black-and-white; it declared a winner. Inauguration Day was the beginning of gray; it brought the grind of governance, with its weird parliamentary maneuvers and bizarre negotiations.

The members of "the movement," in their loose confederation online, are still paying attention, says Abe Shimm, 22, a Claremont-McKenna College senior who took two summers and a semester off to organize for Obama in Iowa and Indiana. "When there is an actual campaign presence, to be told by an organizer, 'If you knock on these doors, you'll get these votes' offers you a tangible result. . . . It's far more difficult to express what a phone call is going to accomplish" if made to a member of Congress wobbly on the health-care overhaul plan.

TNR on OFA in MA

The New Republic reports on Organizing for America's role in the Massachusetts Senate race:

The Coakley operation failed to tap into the deep well of Obama-inspired volunteerism in Massachusetts. But OFA hasn’t done a much better job of cultivating and channeling the kind of movement from which it was born—there’s a disconnect. “I think it’s not about the campaign,” says Massachusetts grassroots organizing consultant Tony Mack, who’s involved with a similar group called Cambridge-Somerville for Change. “If they were doing real organizing, which is encouraging leaders to think for themselves and developing their own priorities, then people would be ready to mobilize more when the time came.”

“The way you build up a strong leadership capacity is to give people independence and power,” Mack goes on. “They didn’t have that, and to some degree, the OFA model right now ends up being that people wait for instructions.”

GOP Gains in Tech Battle

A few months ago, the GOP seemed to be losing the tech battle. Now the Republicans have seized the initiative. At the Washington Examiner, Chris Stirewalt reports:

GOP members of Congress have more than twice as many Twitter followers than their Democratic counterparts and tweet five times more often. Minority Leader John Boehner may look like a character from Mad Men, but the Don Draper of the House has a “director of new media” and more than 30,000 Facebook fans – almost four times as many as Nancy Pelosi.

Look at the Massachusetts Senate race, where Republican insurgent Scott Brown is using the same technologies Obama once did to mount a campaign that might derail the president’s domestic agenda.

Using tweets, text messages and e-mails, Brown raised $1.3 million online in one day and brought together an overflow rally to compete with the president’s stump speech for Democrat Martha Coakley.

At the Huffington Post, David Meerman Scott writes of the Massachusetts race:

Politics and platforms and personal connections are important. But didn't Obama for America teach us that the Web has the power to push a candidate over the top? Obama also showed the importance of young people (whose communications of choice is digital).

Let's look at a few numbers. As I compare the morning before election day, @MarthaCoakley has 3,520 Twitter followers compared to @ScottBrownMA with 10,214 followers. Coakley counts 14,487 Facebook fans to Brown's 76,700 fans. Advantage Brown by more than three to one.

Scott attended the Obama rally for Coakley at Northeastern University. He noticed something missing:

How do college students communicate? Facebook and SMS of course! Yet these two forms of communications played absolutely no formal part in the rally. The brochure that was handed out had no web addresses or social media sites. At the rally, Coakley fans were asked to vote. They were asked to volunteer at phone banks. They were asked to talk to neighbors and friends.

But were the many college students in the crowd told to talk up the Coakley campaign on Facebook, the college student communications tool of choice? No. Were people at the rally asked to tweet? No. Were they asked to join Coakley's fan page? No.

Report on Organizing for America

TechPresident has a comprehensive report on the first year of Organizing for America. Some of its conclusions:

• OFA successfully mobilized and sustained a new corps of super-activists between election cycles in 2009, according to cumulative participation estimates and OFA members interviewed for the report. This kind of governance activism is unusual for the national political parties – and has never been achieved at this frequency, or with such a massive, direct communications network.
• OFA focused on two priorities in its first year: Lobbying for health care reform, which constituted 44% of the group’s member communications; and community maintenance, aimed at sustaining the social capital and community networks developed during the presidential campaign, which constituted about 10% of communications.
• Congressional staff in both parties say OFA has mobilized constituent lobbying, but do not say OFA was a major or powerful force on Capitol Hill in its first year. Congressional aides do not think OFA is changing Members’ votes. [emphasis added]
• Some former staff for Obama’s presidential campaign contend that the White House did not prioritize grassroots organizing in 2009.
• While noting that OFA faces a large challenge in converting a campaign network into lobbying activities, some former Obama campaign staffers say OFA’s programs are not targeting Congress effectively, or providing sufficiently diverse engagement opportunities for OFA members

Sifry on Obama and Grassroots Politics

A noteworthy article at TechPresident:

The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting

These observations square with our analysis in Epic Journey.  For more on campaign finance, see Michael Malbin's working paper.  And a CQ article has more on the enthusiasm gap.

Palin Online

In an earlier post, we cited an article on Sarah Palin's Facebook tactic. Nevertheless, The Hill quotes GOP consultant Jordan Raynor criticizing her Internet presence:

"What I don't like about as far as an online strategy is that she puts most of her eggs in the Facebook basket. She should be extending her online cachet into other strategy,” he said. Raynor and other consultants claim that her e-mail list of supporters could be larger considering her political celebrity. Online political strategists have come to see an e-mail list as the essential tool of a web campaign. Raynor, who works for a firm that works with a statewide candidate and a congressional candidate, noted that the Obama campaign raised two-thirds of its funds through its enormous e-mail list of around 10 million backers. Obama’s list of grass-roots supporters was such a powerful tool that, after the election, the Democratic National Committee adopted it and renamed it Organizing for America.

“Even with this web 2.0 and social networking, we still see that one of the most powerful tools is a really good e-mail list,” said a former campaign co-manager for former Sen. Fred Thompson’s (R-Tenn.) 2008 presidential bid who declined to be named.

Ongoing Lessons from 2008

Pawlenty ought to learn from Romney, as Dan Balz writes in The Washington Post:

Four years ago, Romney lurched to the right in preparation for his presidential candidacy. He did it on social issues, where his prior support for abortion and gay rights left him vulnerable on his right flank. Pawlenty has a consistent record of opposition to abortion and gay marriage. In his case, he appears to be catering to the conservative, populist anger on the right, which is challenging the party establishment and attacking Obama in sometimes extreme language. The real risk for Pawlenty, as Romney learned in his unsuccessful 2008 campaign, is losing his true voice and his authenticity. Romney spent so much time trying to reposition himself and picking narrow tactical fights with his rivals that the qualities that might have made him a more attractive candidate were lost in the smoke. But once a candidate starts down that road, it can be hard to pull back.

(Why do reporters always refer to rightward moves as "lurches"?) Anyway, First Read reports:

A Pawlenty adviser responds in an e-mail to First Read: "Some people may assume that Governor Pawlenty's a moderate since he hails from such a liberal-leaning state, but in fact his record is consistently conservative. Since he ran as a conservative and governered as a conservative, it should be no surprise that he continues to lead as a conservative now. He feels strongly that President Obama and Congressional Democrats are leading the country in the wrong direction on health care and deficit spending, and he's going to say so."

The GOP learns from Obama, as The Des Moines Register reports in a story on David Plouffe:

Through Organizing for America, the Obama campaign’s successor, he’s working to foster citizen-level advocacy. “You watched us – we put a huge premium on the campaign of people talking to people. We didn’t think there was any more important kind of political communication than that,” he said. “And we still believe that.”

Whatever you think of Obama’s policies, anyone interested in presidential politics would be wise to study his 2008 campaign tactics. We’ll be seeing them again in 2012 – in some of the Republican campaigns.

The son learns from the father, as AP reports:

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul's son is borrowing a page from his father's playbook for his U.S. Senate bid, leaning heavily on Internet fundraising and tapping the enthusiasm of young Republicans on college campuses.

The difference this time is that it could actually work. Eye surgeon Rand Paul, once ignored as a longshot, raised more than his main 2010 GOP primary opponent in the most recent fundraising period, and experts say he has a legitimate shot at winning the Senate seat being vacated by colorful Republican Jim Bunning.

"On some levels, it's more than a grass roots campaign," said Western Kentucky University political scientist Scott Lasley. "It's a guerrilla campaign. It's not the easiest to compete against."

Organizing for America

In California's Inland Empire, Organizing for America -- a DNC grassroots group that is the successor to the Obama campaign --is working for the president's health proposals:

Cal State San Bernardino student Torrey Reed was only too happy to oblige when an Obama organizer stopped him on a campus walkway last week and asked him to immediately open his cell phone and tell his senator he supported health care reform.The organizer gave him the number and told him what to expect from the staffer who answered. "It's the first time I've felt like I really had an impact on something," said Reed, 21, of Moreno Valley.

Similar, brief interactions occurred a few hundred thousand times last week as an army of volunteers fanned out across the country to drum up support for President Barack Obama's top political priority.

"I know organizers everywhere are going through the same type of stuff," said Tommy Purvis, 30, San Bernardino County's main organizer for Organizing For America, a national volunteer group advocating for health care reform and other parts of Obama's agenda.

Last week, the OFA orchestrated a national "day of action," visiting college, public parks and even ferry boats to get Obama supporters to call Congress and say they support health care reform. It's that kind of push that the OFA hopes will keep Obama's agenda on track.

A big problem, however, is that there is no single bill to rally around. Moreover, reports The New Republic:

Obama's people had created something both entirely new and entirely old: an Internet version of the top-down political machines built by Richard Daley in Chicago or Boss Tweed in New York. The difference (other than technology) was that this new machine would rely on ideological loyalty, not patronage. And that was a big difference. The old machines survived as top-down organizations because they gave people on the bottom something tangible in return for their participation. By contrast, successful organizations built mainly on shared philosophy tend to be driven by their memberships. Marshall Ganz, the legendary United Farm Workers organizer-turned-Harvard-professor and godfather of the Obama field strategy--he helped orchestrate Camp Obama, a grassroots training program for staff and volunteers--sees the command-and-control nature of OFA as a crucial flaw. "It's much more an instrument of mobilizing the bottom to serve the top than organizing the bottom to participate in shaping the direction of the top," he told me.

Fuzzy

ABC and CNN use similar language in reporting on the recent drive by Organizing for America (Obama 2.0) to get pledges of support for the president's agenda.

ABC: "Fuzzy Math and the Obama Army?"

CNN: "Fuzzy math in Organizing for America's pledge drive"

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explains:

CNN and the Huffington Post dutifully reported the DNC's claim of 642,000 pledges. Network cameras and the BBC showed up to film the operation. "We had one of the big printers downstairs smoking last night," party spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.

In fact, the canvassing of Obama's vaunted e-mail list of 13 million people resulted in just 114,000 pledges -- a response rate of less than 1 percent. Workers gathered 100,000 more from street canvassing. The DNC got to 642,000 by making three photocopies of each pledge so that each signer's senators and representative could get one.

Pledges and Promises

Organizing for America (aka Obama 2.0) is urging volunteers to canvass today for the Pledge Project: "Build your community's support for President Obama’s approach to renewing and rebuilding America by knocking on doors and asking your neighbors to get involved."

The website asks people to "Take the Pledge" by clicking a button agreeing to the following:

• I support President Obama's bold approach for renewing America's economy.
• I will ask friends, family, and neighbors to pledge their support for this plan.

A few weeks ago, a group of celebrities took related pledges. At about 3:54 in the video below, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher say: "I pledge to be a servant to our president, and all mankind."