Plouffe: We encouraged people to work within the campaign

by: Chris Bowers

Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 15:28


This afternoon, I had a chance to participate in a conference call with David Plouffe, concerning his new book and the Obama campaign.

My question for Plouffe focused on the moments where the campaign appeared to engage in top-down behavior, despite its reputation as a vast grassroots organization.  As part ofthe question, I cited incidents such as:

  • The Joe Anthony MySpace controversy;

  • The de-funding of the 527s;

  • The replacement of the 50-state organizers at the DNC with Obama campaign staff and organizing fellows (which also put that staff under the direction of the DNC, rather than the state parties);

  • How this call was just about the only campaign-related conference call bloggers were invited to participate in (although the White House is inviting us on calls now)

Plouffe response was straightforward and blunt.  He stated that, having ran the IE (independent, non-campaign directed expenditures) for the Kerry campaign, he didn't feel as though that sort of campaign "outsourcing" worked.  Because they were on the outside, these groups did not know the strategy or the metrics.

While they appreciated outside organizing on their behalf, the Obama campaign wanted to control the message, so they encouraged people to work within the campaign structure.  Whatever problems this might have caused for outside progressive infrastructure, the belief was that the stakes were too high, and they needed to do everything within their power to win.

My take is that whether or not you approve of how the Obama campaign acted in this regard, it does reveal a tension between its reputation as a vast, bottom-up, grassroots structure, and a tightly controlled, top-down, more authoritarian operation.  Such tensions are, I believe, unavoidable.  Rather than organizations being either top-down or bottom-up, all political organizations fall somewhere within a continuum without ever reaching one absolute or the other.

Primarily, in the end I just wish they had kept the 50-state organizers, and paid Joe Anthony for his work.  Even though they certainly have some benefits, I can live without the 527s, too.  Also, if I don't have access to something, I consider that my own fault.  However, undervaluing, or just flat out dumping, the grunts who carry out so much of the actual organizing, simply isn't right for a campaign that ran on being a community organizer, and which called upon campaign supporters to play a role in governing.

If you are going to ask people to be selfless foot soldiers, don't cut off funding for your troops.

Chris Bowers :: Plouffe: We encouraged people to work within the campaign

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Plouffe: We encouraged people to work within the campaign | 20 comments
Inevitability is overrated (4.00 / 10)
I sympathize with them, but we can now see the results, and they aren't pretty. They won. Perhaps they wouldn't have won had they not done what they felt was necessary. Score one for them.

On the other hand, we didn't win. The proof of that is in what's happened since. Same old parasites, same old government in business for itself. If it's hard to imagine how it could have been any different, I submit that it's precisely that lack of imagination which will inevitably doom what we're pleased to think of the progressive enterprise.

Slice it any way you want to, Plouffe has his victory, and at best we've moved up a seat or two in the waiting room. Call him Pyrrhus -- not that he'll have a clue what you mean by it. Call us mistaken about who to work for. That's a far more serious matter, as we shall presently see.

I'm not as cynical. (4.00 / 2)
We won half victories.  It's far better than Bush and we need to fight the right wing.  Unfortunately, the centrsits seeem to have had the upper hand on many issues so far.  It is a center and left coalition that elected Obama.  I just wish they recognized the left half (or majority).    
[ Parent ]
Far better than Bush? (4.00 / 1)
By what standard?

Single-Payer is the ONLY viable public option.
[ Parent ]
It's not cynicism, (4.00 / 1)
it's a genuine disagreement about how the world works, and the best way to alter it, if altering it is what you're after. I acknowledge that sometimes two steps forward, and one back has much to recommend it. I don't agree that this is one of those times.

You can always appear to be winning the argument if you aren't actually arguing. Such apparent victories will always be illusory, though, unless and until you stop temporizing and come out from behind the curtain. Plouffe can't afford to lose, but then he's not playing the same game as we are.

In other words,

Love is not love,
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

Plouffe wouldn't get that either, I imagine.

[ Parent ]
I completely agree here, but you've gone and ruined Sonnet 116 (4.00 / 3)
for me, at least until I forget its newfound association with corporatist Dems.
[ Parent ]
No one can ruin Shakespeare, (4.00 / 1)
least of all your humble servant.
[ Parent ]
Plouffe (4.00 / 1)
I expect he'd get the Pyrrhus but not the poem.  Not much poetry but a nuts and bolts guy.  He was not out for any pyrrhic victories.

I liked it in the days when candidates and staff quoted poetry.  Those were the good old days.

[ Parent ]
in some ways it's more dangerous than Bush, (4.00 / 6)
because Obama is smoother.

Bush aroused opposition wherever he tread. He had to strongarm his way to legislative victories. He was obviously mean-spirited and petty, and that made it hard for him to

Obama lacks any trace of malice and is brimming with good intentions. Even some of his enemies are charmed by him. It's difficult to oppose him, because he's so obviously sincere in his desire to help.

Because he goes down so much more easily than Bush, and he's so charming and eloquent, he can persuade people into going along with things they never would have gone along with under Bush.

For example, Bush failed to gut Social Security. But Obama could succeed.

And McCain proposed a spending freeze (with the exceptions of defense and veterans affairs), which fell pretty flat:

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

LEHRER: Would you go for that?

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn't make sense.

And now Obama is proposing the exact same thing:

The Obama administration, mindful of public anxiety over the government's mushrooming debt, is shifting emphasis from big-spending policies to deficit reduction. Domestic agencies have been told to brace for a spending freeze or cuts of up to 5 percent as part of a midterm election-year push to rein in record budget shortfalls.

Yet with the economy still in distress and unemployment pushing past 10 percent, prospects for making a dent in a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit seem slight. And since the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs would likely be shielded from such cuts, overtures toward trimming the deficit may hold more symbolic value than substance.

But where is the outcry?

And because he has a "D" after his name, whatever he does is "liberal" in the eyes of the media and the public. Even if it really is no such thing. He is the representative of the Democratic party.

Saying that "Obama is a centrist Democrat who is pursuing a Tory agenda under the guise of reform" is too complicated an idea for the public to quickly digest, because we haven't yet felt the effects of those policies.

And once we do feel those effects, the public will very quickly conclude "Because Obama's policies were bad, liberalism is bad" without slowing down to consider that his policies really weren't that liberal.

The liberal brand will be tainted, and it will be very hard to make the argument that Obama failed because he wasn't liberal enough.

[ Parent ]
For better or worse, (4.00 / 5)
any much is in the eye of the beholder, they way the campaign was managed was a preview of how they would govern.

There always will be too much at stake to let grassroots truly influence.  Right or wrong, that seems their belief.

Input exists and the appearance of grassroots (OFA) is encouraged, but it's still rather top/down.  

re: 527s (4.00 / 2)
Even though they certainly have some benefits, I can live without the 527s, too.

I didn't like the de-527-fication. They can be useful and you don't gain anything useful by saying 'I stopped them.' I don't think any voters care?

This follows the pattern set in Pennsylvania. (4.00 / 1)
Wasn't there some hullabaloo during last year's primary in that state over how ground-level volunteers weren't being paid in Philly or Pittsburg or something?  Whatever one's views on that, I think it illustrates a pattern of taking foot soldiers for granted and treating them like employees instead of dedicated volunteers.

Single-Payer is the ONLY viable public option.
It was about the ward leaders (0.00 / 0)
They're used to getting paid for election day poll workers.  (This wasn't about his own campaign staff of volunteers.)  Obama decided he didn't need to pay out the street money. Link.
[ Parent ]
It was a decision made by the campaign (0.00 / 0)
early on to use actual volunteers to do the work, as opposed to "paid volunteers," which is the tradition in some cities like Philadelphia. As one of those non-paid volunteers, I didn't feel like I was being taken for granted.

And wouldn't one feel like an employee if the campaign had paid them? I'm not sure what that last point you make is getting at.

[ Parent ]
fake populism (4.00 / 2)
Does anyone believe the purpose of Orangizing For America revolved around bringing people out into the streets to protest those out in the streets protesting Obama? No, it was after those 13,000,000 email addresses of course. A wonderful motherlode for fundraising.

In my view, the campaign Plouffe ran was largely a fraud. Obama is not a man "of the people, by the people, for the people." Not unless those people hang around with the Tim Geithners and the Larry Summers of the world. Bilderberg down to the bone.

All throughout the campaign I kept looking for the evidence that Obama had maintained close alliances with those he organized with "out in the hoods" of Chicago. I didn't find it. He faked his way through the campaign and into the White House. And by that I mean he portrayed himself as someone truly dedicated to "changing the way Washington works" when he really had no intention whatsoever of doing any such thing.

I had friends who worked in this cyberspace generated operation and down on the ground [in and around Baltimore] they would point out over and again how far removed this effort was from the stuff that was going on in the 60s and 70s. I was a part of all that back then. Unfortunately I am not physically able to venture out of the house much [living as I am on disability] so I was not able to experience the gap myself. But everything I learned about it confirmed my friends anecdotal rendition.

Grassroots? Right.

So, naturally: "A few days before the inauguration, Obama announced, in effect, that Plouffe's view had prevailed: Organizing for America would be securely housed within the DNC."

Which means Rahm Emanuel and the DLC.

Of course! Bring it in inside the Democratic Party!! The party of the Blue Dogs; the party of Max Baucus, Chris Dodd, Chuck Schumer and all the rest of the revolving door types that run Congress. That run Wshington.

Marshall Ganz:

"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,"

george:

Try to imagine Ceasar Chavez and Barack Obama sitting down and discussing EFCA. About sums it all up, right?

But none of this really makes any sense unless you are finally willing to accept what is obvious: that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party really are tweedldee and tweedledum when it comes down to fundamental economic and foregn policy. If you are willing to accept the proposition that the "battles" between them here are largely tactical scrapes revolving around a shared strategic investment in Wall Street so much becomes ever more clearer. From the Wall Steet bailout and healthcare "reform" to Afghanistan and China, the Democrats and the Republicans are the same people. They just haggle over the means to achieve [basically] the same end: sustaining the Bilderberg world.

In the end, OFA is more or less controlled....top/down...by the fake populists behind the curtain in both the Obama administration and large chunks of the Democratic Party.

Love for Obama, by itself, (4.00 / 6)
won't win elections.

The majority of people voted for Obama because they wanted something from him, not because of his charm or eloquence. If they don't get it they're gonna be pretty mad.

Even with Bush, it wasn't just the personality cult that got him (sort of) elected in 2004; it was the shock of 9/11 and the cachet of being a wartime president in what was, at the time, perceived as a righteous war. And of course, he was a pampered prince of the oligarchy, a GOP blue-blood, and therefore protected by the media and Wall Street to an unprecedented degree.

Obama will have none of that, plus his base is a lot less prone to blindly following an authoritarian leader. If he tries to pump up the charm after a major policy failure, it'll fall flat, for the most part.

The only way he can get reelected is if he produces real results. And that is the very thing he's leery of doing, because he thinks it would be too controversial and unruly to try.

527s (3.33 / 6)
Not all 527s even work on Presidential Elections, and this is where the Obama campaign's "ban" was so stupid.

For example, Progressive Majority, a non-federal 527 that works to elect candidates at the state and local levels (thus, forming the farm team for future elections), was dramatically impacted by Obama's "ban" ... and not the only organization that felt these effects. The campaign aggressively told donors to NOT give to 527s, no matter what their purpose.

The campaign, as usual, was self-centered and self-indulgent.

Contact Plouffe Here (0.00 / 0)
http://akpdmedia.com/contact-u...

Tell him what you think.

the deafest of ears (4.00 / 2)
He spun the shit out of David Sirota this morning on the radio, I doubt he'd listen to what I have to say.
[ Parent ]
I believe I recognize this.. (4.00 / 1)
I believe I recognize this..I think it goes "I'll call you"
Funny but they never do call - guess that is what happens when you give it away for free and think you are in a realtionship - too bad - it was always just one way.  You were "bambozalde".  Too bad.
By whatever name . . . (0.00 / 0)
Most commenters to this article have an intimidatingly profuse political lingo and lucidity of politico-historical facts, and sound almost like insiders to a lesser known political circle than at least I had been aware of.

But, whatever you might call it inside the circle, or the square, Obama is nothing more than a kinder and gentler extension of Bush, which does in fact make him more dangerous, because we won't see it coming when he naively or intentionally turns over whatever powers or rights we have left to the financial communities and super-corporations.  

A National Progressive Alliance, is the only viable solution.

http://www.openleft.com/diary/...

Plouffe: We encouraged people to work within the campaign | 20 comments
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