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Passing the stimulus: Obama’s movement, MIA

by James Crabtree / February 18, 2009 / Leave a comment
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not quite so moving

not quite so moving

“Today, I signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law” writes President Obama, twice, in my inbox this morning. (Somehow, I’ve ended up on two different e-mail lists from the campaign.) The message, heralding the $787bn stimulus bill signed yesterday, comes appended with the note: “Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee.” There was never  much doubt that the stimulus would pass. Republican critics had a point—the bill is really only half stimulus, with the rest made up of longer-term spending, often on pet democratic projects which won’t make much difference to long term growth. But the right never had anything close to the muscle to stop it going through. That said, the bill was something of a test for Organizing for America—the new, and slightly mysterious, body spawned by the Obama people to take the “movement” part of their campaign to Washington. Its early days, for sure, but the signs aren’t too good.

In the last edition, i wrote a piece—Moving Pains—in which I argued that the administration would find it tricky to engage the 13m who had been, to some degree, involved in the campaign, either the 3m who gave money, or the other 10 who volunteered, or at least read their e-mails.

Obama’s 13m supporters and 3m donors can neither relocate en masse to Washington nor be consulted on every law, while door-knocking alone doesn’t solve most political problems. In short, “movement” into “government” doesn’t go… As commentator Micah Sifry noted at the time, the covert gathering [where Obama’s team planned to set up OFA] cemented a view that the move to what some call OFA II—or Obama for America II—has been a “top-down, one-way affair.”

This piece got picked up a bit, for instance in this post from Andrew Keen, while other blogs—especially the aforementioned Micah Siffrey, on the marvelous TechPresident—have been watching the same issue. So what happened?

In short, very little. As i noted in the article, one of the tricky things for online-driven organising is what can you get people to do? The campaign itself allowed volunteers to undertake lots of small tasks. You walk into an office, you are immediately given something small to do. (My colleague Tom Chatfield has a neat point that those who set…

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Comments

  1. Tom Steinberg
    February 18, 2009 at 13:11
    It seems to me the key questionable line in the above is: "Nonetheless, in Government, there simply isn’t very much that 13m people can do to help a President figure out the correct policies." That's true right now, at a point in history when nobody in power has even vaguely tried. My question is "Will they seriously try to test this assertion, or will they just move smoothly to government as usual, like Sarkozy did?"
  2. PooterGeek
    February 18, 2009 at 13:50
    There's a false dichotomy between "13m people ... help[ing] a President figure out the correct policies" and "government as usual". The countries of the western world have a good (or least worst) system for running their governments: representative democracy. Technology can and often has increased the efficiency, openness, and responsiveness of this system (and I hope it will be allowed to continue to do so). It shouldn't change its fundamentals.
  3. James Crabtree
    February 18, 2009 at 17:24
    Agreed. I'm not saying they shouldn't try, don't get me wrong. The things they are doing are all in the right direction—be it the sunlight before signing move, or things like making the right noises about peer-2-patent and other things. But thats stll quite a long way from trying to find a model which works on a mass scale. At the moment the limited steps to openness which are happening are suitable for a few thousand people perhaps—a few thousand experts who can comment on legislation, or who know something about patents. There is a big gap between there and say, 100,000 people, or people who don't know much about the details. How to find things for that group to be engaged seems like the next step.
  4. Paul C
    February 18, 2009 at 18:03
    I'm convinced that technology will reshape democracy (and generally for the better) but it's unlikely to be a good fit with the systems that we currently have. Representative democracy has been extremely successful at delivering, but technology drives us towards direct democracy - and nobody seems to be discussing how those different systems can be reconciled. The danger is that the technology will undermine representative democracy without providing the new forms of direct democracy that are needed to replace it. Tom, you're at the front edge of this kind of debate - have I missed something? Pooter, your comment suggests that you would disagree with my point - true?
  5. PooterGeek
    February 18, 2009 at 19:45
    Plenty of people have discussed now representative and direct democracy might be reconciled. Their discussions have, rightly, not (for the most part) been technological ones---but I don't think useful answers will come from political "theory"; they seldom do. We could use existing technology, right now, to make it possible for all the people watching Mr Edmonds turn into Alan Partridge on Noel's HQ to vote from their armchairs for the immediate sacking of the local government official against whom Edmonds' quivering rage is directed (and his audience's collective foam finger is wagged at). This would be direct democracy. It would also be madder than cheese. Even constructing a robust shared computer security system is less a computer engineering problem than it is a social engineering problem. Constructing a robust shared political system is more so. To reshape democracy for the better, you first have to find a model for citizens to interact with one other that improves on the way they do now. Then you can go looking for the technological tools to implement that change. Don't get me wrong. There are systems of collective organisation that have grown up within scientific and programming and blogging communities that can teach outsiders a great deal about how to do difficult things well and keep "stakeholders" [how I hate that word] happy, but they have to be shown to work beyond their respective domains for people not familiar with those cultures before they are pressed upon those who think "open source" is an uncapped ketchup bottle. The question of improving voting technology itself embodies these challenges. I love gadgets, but I've yet to find a PDA/mobile/netbook more convenient and reliable for taking notes on the go than a pencil-and-pad. Similarly, no one has come up with a voting system that (in every country) is more trusted and robust than voters making a cross on a piece of paper. (My main objection to proportional representation is similar. Many PR algorithms are theoretically fairer than first-past-the-post, but it's more important that everybody voting knows exactly what his/her vote means than that an electoral system should solve an abstract optimization problem.)
  6. Paul C
    February 18, 2009 at 23:16
    PG - that's exactly where I was aiming at. In my line of work, it's all social rather than technical problems - and literally none of the solutions have worked. That's not to say that solutions aren't there, but they seem damned elusive considering how much time everybody spends talking about them. Technology isn't neutral - it pushes and pulls us in directions without us realising. If we accept that point, suddenly the intahwebb's influence on democracy starts to look more worrying to me - more like Noel than Obama. Celebrity elections at 6!
  7. James Crabtree
    February 19, 2009 at 03:02
    We're getting a little off point here, but i had to say that, while i may be behind the times, but i've never seen this before—the noel clip, i mean. Its utterly marvelous, right down to the use of the big foam hands, which the audience use to give their considered view of local government planning policy. I suppose one could look at such a spectacle and see both sides of the debate i mentioned in the post: what happens when you find things for people to do in a democracy, or when you don't. But, sadly, i suspect something like this—perhaps better done, less obviously silly—is what Organizing for America needs to try to communicate with a couple of hundred thousand supporters. It is, after all, basically what Rush Limbaugh does too.

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James Crabtree
James Crabtree is comment editor of the FT
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