Kathleen Geier has been pulling some yeoman's (yeowoman's?) duty at the Monthly recently, but this post left me scratching my head a bit:
[I]t’s high time the American media, and liberals in particular, stop treating politics as if it solely consisted of biography. We need to obsess much less about”character” issues and who’s up and who’s down in a political race---diverting as those soap operas may be---and start focusing on the systemic barriers to change, and how we might abolish them, or at least get around them. And while we’re at it we need to think long and hard about how we might build ourselves a political mass movement.
No gripes with any of this. But didn't we, like, already have a political mass movement?
Instead of deploying his loyal army of 13 million citizen-activists to pressure Congress to enact his agenda, Obama essentially mothballed his massive campaign machine as soon as he took office. He also dispatched his top deputies---including Messina, a Beltway veteran of 17 years---to tell the "professional left" to sit down and be quiet. "The progressive community was better organized than I'd ever seen before, but they were all leaned on by the White House to not raise hell," says an insider from the '08 campaign. "That first year and a half, it was like, 'No, we'll take care of it.' You got a visit from Jim Messina or someone, saying, 'Don't rock the boat.'"This postelection shift from "Yes We Can" to "I Got This" left many supporters feeling like they'd fallen for a bait-and-switch. "When they cut us loose in 2009, people were really disillusioned," says Marta Evry, a volunteer who ran phone banks that placed more than 600,000 calls for Obama in 2008. "Especially young people. The first time you get jilted is the worst."
To me, one of the most puzzling aspects of the early days of the Obama administration was its refusal to use Organizing for America as a lever for lobbying, pressuring or supporting recalcitrant legislators in Washington who balked at its most ambitious early agenda items. Instead, the movement simply morphed into a mouthpiece for the administration, and I've never really understood why this was allowed to happen---unless the administration either (a) really didn't buy into the "fundamental transformation" rap that they were selling us in 2008, or (b) assumed, arrogantly, that we'd obediently tag along on whatever middling policy path the administration chose in the name of bipartisanship-for-its-own-sake and Doing The Big Deal. My guess leans more towards "arrogance" than "lying", but the fact is, they had a motivated uber-Occupy movement of progressive activists set up, financed, and ready to march. And like successive waves of ineffectual Union generals under Lincoln (who found his eventually remedy in Grant), the administration refused to deploy its foot soldiers in anything but a defensive position. How effective OFA could have been at the national level, it's hard to know now---but since its resources were never tapped in the first place, it can only be viewed as another squandered opportunity.
---Vitelius
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