Mythbusting the Obama Magic

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Brock N. Meeks" <bnmeeks () verizon net>
> Date: January 3, 2010 10:52:16 AM EST
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Mythbusting the Obama Magic

> The following excerpts from a TechPresident blog post by Micah L.  
> Sifry I found very interesting reading.  The title alone is enough  
> of a hook: The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets  
> Reality <http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/the-obama-disconnect>
>
> I found it provided a reasoned roadmap for the fog of my own mental  
> wandering when pondering the fact that, almost out of the starting  
> gate, the Obama Administration has failed to cultivate any  
> significant percentage of that digital alchemy the campaign managed  
> to conjure.  That failure alone deserves a book; this blog post  
> provides a jumpstart on such a book, in my opinion.
>
> =-=-=-=-=
>
> The problem for Obama and the Democrats today, as they head into  
> 2010, is that much of their activist base appears to have swallowed  
> too much of the wrong half of the myth: they thought that Obama  
> would be more of a change-agent, and never really embraced their own  
> role.
>
> [snip]
>
> But the question raised by Plouffe's book is, given the grassroots  
> base he helped develop in support of Obama and how powerful it  
> became by the fall of 2008 (raising $150 million in the month of  
> September alone, including more than $10 million the night of Sarah  
> Palin's acceptance speech), why he didn't do more to keep that  
> muscular organization going into Obama's presidency? To put it  
> another way, why did Plouffe discount his own grassroots strategy in  
> favor of the dusty old playbook used by White House insiders for  
> decades? Why wasn't more done to extend that sense of ownership  
> meaningfully into the life of the Administration? If you could trust  
> your volunteers to carry the campaign in all sorts of important  
> ways, why not also give them a real say in how they could shake up  
> Washington?
>
> The answer, ultimately, is that Plouffe and the rest of Obama's  
> leadership team, wasn't really interested in grassroots empowerment.  
> Instead, they think they've invented a 21st century version of list- 
> building, and to some degree they're right. (It's for that reason  
> that I think of the Obama campaign as the first 21st century top- 
> down campaign, while McCain's was the last 20th century top-down  
> version). For Plouffe, the gigantic Obama email list, its millions  
> of donors and its vibrant online social network were essentially a  
> new kind of top-down broadcast system, one even better than the old  
> TV-dominated system.
>
> [snip]
>
> When it came to planning for being in government, it turns out that  
> Plouffe, along with David Axelrod, was a chief advocate for bringing  
> in then Rep. Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff. He writes,  
> using a baseball analogy: "Rahm was a five-tool political player: a  
> strategist with deep policy expertise, considerable experience in  
> both the legislative and executive branches, and a demeanor best  
> described as relentless." (p. 372) Note that nowhere in that vital  
> skill-set is any sense of how to work with the largest volunteer  
> base any presidential campaign has developed in history. Rahm  
> Emanuel came up in politics the old-fashioned way; organizing and  
> empowering ordinary people are the least of his skills.



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