http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zack-exley/the-dnc-needs-to-get-star_b_90749.htmlIn 2004, the Kerry/DNC campaign proved that, without a long period of meticulous organization building in advance, no amount of money can buy you an effective national field campaign. The Bush campaign taught us the exact opposite lesson, with its meticulous preparation and high-accountability organization that extended all the way down to volunteer county chairs as early as 2002.
If you don't take the time to build an organization large enough and true enough to gather millions of accurate voter IDs, then money won't help you to turn out base votes effectively. If you don't have well trained and already-experienced field staff and volunteers in every important county and precinct, then money won't help you persuade swing voters. If you don't have the right field directors in charge of important states, counties and cities starting now (March) at the very latest, then they won't have time to build teams that are reliable and deep.
No amount of money spent on consultants or big names from past races will fix the organizational messes that the nominee is being set up for now. In fact, those consultants and big names will only mess things up worse, despite their best intentions.
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The problem is, the DNC has (correctly) been waiting for the presumptive nominee to appoint general election state field directors. The DNC has done its job well for this cycle: it built the DNC's first ever accurate and usable voter file (despite what Harold Ickies keeps telling reporters). It miraculously brought every state party on board with that unified voter file system. Also for the first time ever, it brought all the states onto a standardized set of end-user tools for field organizing (the Voter Activation Network). All of that amounts to an historic achievement for the party.
No, they haven't built a presidential-sized field organizing operation. But it would be unfair to expect them to have done that. Field organizers want to be in the middle of the action on the campaigns, not waiting patiently at the party for a candidate. The DNC did exactly what it was supposed to do: lay down the infrastructure that only the national party could.
However, I think Zack is ignoring the obvious fact that one of our candidates is already building such an organization. One of our candidates is using the Voter Activation Network, and the other scorns it. All those Obama volunteers are not just in this for Obama--most are thinking of long-term party building and issue activism. (And if Kucinich-supporting policy wonks like myself can't win some of them over on real universal health care, it will be our own damned fault.)
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/obamamachineryofhope/page/5No group represents the campaign machine that Obama has built better than AlamObama. A year ago, the group was nothing more than eight people who attended an informal get-together at a Borders bookstore. Today, it's a 600-member grass-roots outfit — an all-volunteer field operation that hums with the energy and efficiency of a fully staffed campaign office. "In Iowa, the campaign was on the ground for six months," says Judy Hall, a college professor who co-founded the group. "They come here, and it's like they've already been on the ground for six months. Those of us in the grass roots, we simply minded the store.
"Well," she says, reconsidering her words, "I guess we actually built the store — but that's what this campaign is all about."
As Hall's well-honed operation makes clear, the Obama campaign has succeeded not by attracting starry-eyed followers who place their faith in hope but by motivating committed activists who are answering a call to national service. They're pouring their lifeblood into this campaign, not because they are in thrall to a cult of personality but because they're invested in the idea that politics matter, and that their participation can turn the current political system on its ear.
In reality, it already has. "We're seeing the last time a top-down campaign has a chance to win it," says Trippi. "There won't be another campaign that makes the same mistake the Clintons made of being dependent on big donors and insiders. It's not going to work ever again."
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