Herding Donkeys
Ari Berman--The Nation
Despite locating OFA in the DNC, changing the Democratic Party didn't rank as Obama's foremost priority. He had more pressing problems on his plate—not least, digging the country out of its worst economic crisis in decades. In those critical days following the election, OFA opted largely to circumvent the party rather than enhance it. On November 5, 2008, the DNC's nearly 200 local organizers, the core of Dean's fifty-state strategy, awoke to the news that their contracts were expiring at the end of the month. The e-mail from headquarters called it a "bitter-sweet moment." When Obama's DNC reconstituted Dean's strategy a few months later, funding OFA staffers across the country took priority. Unlike the organizers hired under Dean, who worked to strengthen the party at the state and local level, the new Obama organizers were instructed to focus strictly on helping to pass the president's legislative agenda, forming a parallel structure to the existing party. "I'm not trying to build a bigger and better Democratic Party," says Colorado OFA director Gabe Lifton-Zoline.
You couldn't really blame Obama for not wanting to take full ownership of the Democratic Party, given its status as a perennial punch line—the Buffalo Bills of politics. He was following a long line of historical precedent. Republican presidents routinely sought to strengthen their parties, while Democratic presidents tended to ignore them, Northwestern University political scientist Daniel Galvin observes. But the president, Galvin argues in his book Presidential Party Building, neglects his party at his peril. If it atrophies too much, Obama will find himself in a situation similar to that of Clinton following the disastrous '94 midterms, facing an increasingly hostile Congress and unable to push through the bold legislative agenda he campaigned on.
Democratic Party officials, as much as they want Obama to succeed and see their fates largely determined by his success, point out that they have additional responsibilities, ranging from candidates for governor to county commissioner. That's why party strategists believe it's so critical to bring independents, Republicans and first-time Obama supporters into the fold. Reagan Democrats, after all, became Republicans after the 1980 and 1984 campaigns. "There's probably not a more front-and-center issue for the Democratic Party than that," says Obama pollster Cornell Belcher. "You'd think they'd build infrastructure at the grassroots level within the party to work that very diverse and younger constituency." One former high-ranking member of Obama's campaign describes OFA as a "massive fucking power grab" that siphons much-needed resources away from the party. (There are some notable exceptions; in Texas, for example, the OFA investment in local organizing is much larger than in recent years. And this past June, the DNC launched a $50 million outreach effort to persuade first-time Obama voters—and register new ones—to go to the polls in the upcoming midterms.)
Dean's strategy decentralized power away from Washington, but under Obama, Washington once again calls the shots. "The DNC is just not as energized and connected to local activism as it was under Howard Dean," says Margaret Johnson, former Democratic chair in Polk County, North Carolina. After the election, pundits predicted that Obama's DNC would launch a "fifty-state strategy on steroids," but in some places—especially outside the typical battlegrounds—it feels more like the fifty-state strategy on Ambien.
The state chairs now receive far less money than they did under Dean and are struggling to pay the bills. One chair called the $5,000 monthly stipend the state parties eventually got "money to shut us up." "If we had what we previously had," says Idaho state chair Keith Roark, "we'd be in far better shape." The gains of the fifty-state strategy are by no means permanent, the chairs warn, and can evaporate as quickly as they accumulated. Indeed, in Obama's first year, the party lost three straight major elections, in states the president had won by six, sixteen and twenty-six points. In Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama's "coalition of the ascendant"—blacks, Hispanics, young people—failed to turn out in large numbers for the Democratic candidates. With the midterms a month away, Democrats are struggling to defend vulnerable incumbents across the map.Much More..from Ari's New Book which he excerpts at::
http://www.thenation.com/article/155108/herding-donkeys?page=0,1
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