Obama's Lost Army

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 2:05 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Obama's Lost Army
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Obama’s Lost Army
He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for
change. Then he let it die. This is the untold story of Obama’s biggest
mistake—and how it paved the way for Trump.
By Micah L. Sifry
Feb 9 2017
<
https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine
>

On July 20, 2008, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and a longtime
denizen of Silicon Valley’s intellectual elite, dialed in to a conference
call hosted by Christopher Edley Jr., a senior policy adviser to Barack
Obama’s presidential campaign. Joining them on the line were some of the
world’s top experts in crowdsourcing and online engagement, including Reid
Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mitchell Baker, the
chairman of Mozilla. Drawing on Kapor’s influence, Edley had invited them
to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” Together, they would ponder a
crucial question: how to “sustain the movement” should Obama, who was still
a month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, go on to win the
White House.

Edley had been a personal friend of Obama’s since his days teaching him at
Harvard Law School. Their kinship had been underscored the previous summer,
when Obama had invited Edley to the Chicago apartment of Valerie Jarrett,
the candidate’s closest confidant, to deliver a stern lecture to the
seasoned political operatives who were running his underdog bid for the
presidency. The campaign team had Obama on a relentless pace of town halls
and donor calls, and Hillary Clinton had been besting him in the early
primary debates. Both Barack and Michelle Obama were unhappy. According to
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s account in Game Change, Edley urged
Obama’s campaign managers to schedule fewer rallies and fund-raisers, and
allow the candidate more time to think and develop innovative policy ideas.

The intervention, delivered with a full-blown harangue telling the troika
managing the campaign—David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs—to
“get over yourselves,” was deeply resented by the political professionals;
in his memoir, Believer, Axelrod would later call Edley “systematically
antagonizing.” But Jarrett and Michelle Obama, who was also in the meeting,
hung on Edley’s every word. “He’s channeling Barack,” Jarrett thought,
according to Game Change. Jarrett told Axelrod she thought Edley’s fiery
presentation had been “brilliant.”

Now, a year later, Edley had been moved over to Obama’s still-secret
transition team, helping to map out policy and personnel on education,
immigration, and health care. It was a better fit for Edley, a dapper and
soft-spoken law professor with a salt-and-pepper beard, who had served in
senior policy-making roles under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. “Although I
have worked in five presidential campaigns,” he told me recently, “I hate
them because there is never enough emphasis on policy.” But Edley found
himself newly motivated by a single big political idea, born in part from
his past experience trying to win policy fights. What if Barack Obama could
become not only the first black man elected president, but the first
president in history to organize an enduring grassroots movement that could
last beyond his years in office?

By that point in the race, there was every reason to think that Obama could
build a lasting grassroots operation. His political machine had already
amassed more than 800,000 registered users on My.BarackObama, its
innovative social networking platform. “MyBO,” as it was known, gave
supporters the ability—unthinkable in a traditional, top-down political
campaign—to organize their own local groups, campaign events, and
fund-raising efforts. Its potential for large-scale organizing after the
election was vast—and completely without precedent in American politics. By
Election Day, Obama’s campaign would have 13 million email addresses, three
million donors, and two million active members of MyBO, including 70,000
people with their own fund-raising pages. This wasn’t just some passive
list of campaign supporters, Edley realized—it was an army of foot
soldiers, seasoned at rallying support for Obama’s vision of change.

[snip]

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