President Obama held a reception for the leaders of large progressive organizations, plus the Chamber of Commerce, last night. This is both exciting, and a relief, given all the face time that Republicans and Blue Dogs were getting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
One of the main messages from the meeting appears to be using progressive organizations as a "echo chamber" or megaphone to help drive the Democratic message around the country:
At a private White House cocktail reception last night for leaders of major progressive groups, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle appealed to these leaders and signaled that their groups would play a key role in driving the big progressive changes at the heart of the White House's legislative agenda, an attendee tells me.
The message was that these groups would be valuable as a kind of progressive outside "echo chamber," as the attendee puts it.
There is nothing wrong with this message, in and of itself. Working to counteract conservative and Republican media messaging is undeniably one of the main reasons many new progressive organizations have come into existence over the past decade. Given netroots support for Democrats in electoral and legislative fights, helping out the team has clearly been one of the main tasks the "netroots" has always adopted for itself. It is also a message I have heard from Democratic leaders before, in conference calls and meetings with Democratic leaders like Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even with (then Senator) Barack Obama.
However, it is also incredibly frustrating when it feels like echoing and broadcasting someone else's messaging is all they want from you. If small donors sometimes feel as though they are treated like ATMs, I'm sure I am not the only blogger who sometimes feels treated like a podium with a microphone attached to it. Both complaints are connected to an existential rationale for grassroots activism on behalf of large political institutions, whether campaigns, parties, organizations or administrations: many of us don't want to just help the institutions in question, but to change them, too.
So what I am getting at here is more an issue of best practices with new grassroots institutions than with specific complaints about any single campaign, party, organization or administration. To get better results from progressive grassroots activists, please treat them like more than just an echo chamber. It is much more useful to find some way to invest them in the campaign, whether that means providing a community representative in strategy meetings or providing them with a contact person who takes their concerns as more than just extremist, ignorant--but also exploitable--hotheads. On this front, the Obama transition and Obama administration have been much better than the Obama campaign, but this is a lesson that goes beyond Presidential politics, and applies to all other areas where grassroots activists are involved.
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