"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 such tasks can learn a lot from video games, where the first tasks are always very easy, but get progressively harder. Volunteering for Obama was a bit like that—the first steps were easy, there was a shallow end.) But now there really isn't anything for supporters to do. The campaign reverted to organising more house parties, in which supporters were meant to gather together on an evening——wait for it—talk about how important it was to pass a stimulus bill. Rumour has it they weren't a great success. Indeed, Obama's campaign to pass the bill really only took off when he got back on the road, and did some old fashioned campaigning, a pattern which he continued all the way through to the decision to sign yesterday's bill not behind his desk in Washington, but at a big campaign event in Denver.
Don't get me wrong. The Obama people are tremendously good at this stuff—much better than most, and certainly better than similar, fairly hopeless attempts to do similar things in this country. Equally, there have been some worthwhile innovations already, not least the "sunshine before signing" idea, which lead Obama to delay putting the stimulus into law, to give people a chance to look it over. (Generously, one could call this form of what enthusiasts sometimes call intelligence at the edge, although it is rather late to do something about the contents of the bill by the time the sunshine is applied.) Nonetheless, in Government, there simply isn't very much that 13m people can do to help a President figure out the correct policies. This reflection, in turn, this makes giving money seem the almost perfect form of political engagement—its what the campaigns really want, it takes no effort to give it, little time, and you can give as much as you feel is right. But, if not that, it seems the Organizing for America is going to have to invent something meaningful for its supporters to do—running sponsored marathons, bake sales for the stimulus, whatever—to stop them becoming disillusioned.
Obama is (surprise, surprise) yo-yoing between embracing open-source democracy and relying on adults like Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton to authoritatively run his show
