Andrew Golis

An essay in which I ponder the opportunity presented by organizing-oriented campaigners, inspiring and energizing leaders, and the internet:

Power, Not Cash: A Promising Moment for Organizing in the Democratic Party

By Andrew Golis – April 11, 2008, 7:39PM

The Obama campaign is taking fire in Philadelphia because it’s refusing to literally hand over bags of cash to local party bosses. Ward bosses are demanding “street money,” loose cash they need to keep their loosely put together political machines moving. They aren’t getting it because the Obama campaign believes they can, once again, circumvent an entrenched political hierarchy.

Obviosly, as Jay Newton-Small points out over at Swampland, part of this is optics. Promising a new politics and then handing out “street money” would be hypocritical, to say the least. But this also has to be put in the context of a sea change in how campaigns engage voters that started in the Dean campaign and is continuing in both the Obama and Clinton campaigns this cycle.

I wrote last August about a community of organizers I worked with in the 2003/2004 cycle for the Dean campaign and at the DNC who are trying to re-create the way the party does field organizing. Their belief is that top-down marketing based direct-mail and robocall field strategies have led to a withering of local party infrastructure and contributed to a broader disengagement with politics.

They advocate instead an organizing-based field strategy that emphasizes allowing voters to get involved in leading their own local campaigning. The hope is that locals are more effective and, after the campaign is over, can keep the work going. Dean activists engaged in this model in New Hampshire ended up taking over many local Democratic Committees, got themselves elected to local office, and started grassroots organizing. In other words, this model builds power on the ground, it doesn’t just collect voters for a day. This cycle, most went to work for the Obama campaign, but some also practiced his model for Hillary. And this cycle as opposed to last they seem to be winning the argument. The Philadelphia incident hints at why.

While it might not seem like it, this old model of “street money” distributed by party bosses goes hand in hand with the market-based field operations. Both are top-down and require minimum investment in nitty gritty on the ground work. That work, that might have led to long-term benefits for the party and the communities themselves, simply required more money, energy and expertise than campaigns usually had to provide. So they focused their energies on targeted tactics that had a more guaranteed return.

But, because of the growing influence of this community of organizers, the unprecedented Democratic activism inspired by both candidates (Dean and Obama) and our president, and the fact that the internet allows for, as Clay Shirky puts it, “ridiculously easy organizing,” the organizing-based model is now more than just an idealistic quest.

What we see as a result of those three things converging, then, is also a convergence between the long-term and the short-term interests of the party. Dean’s 50-state-strategy and Obama’s investment in organizing (embodied by his “Organizing Fellows” program) are both practically good for their short-term interest in winning elections and good for the Party and the countries long-term interest in re-organizing local communities to take up progressive politics.

This is, I think, promising.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 12:07 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.