grassroots

There's blood in the water. Republicans are licking their chops. But these very lucky partisans had better think very clearly and carefully in the coming months. Things have changed. The dynamic is tentative, fragile and fortunes can turn on a dime. The calculation for politicians has changed, too. People are empowered like never before. And they're watching.

Scott Brown is what many might call a RINO. I know, I know. He may help America dodge a legislative bullet in Obamacare. And, of course, for Massachusetts, beggars can't be choosers. Still, we must be leery of stuff like this, from Senator-elect Brown: "In Massachusetts, I support the 2006 healthcare law that was successful in expanding coverage, but I also recognize that the state must now turn its attention to controlling costs." The Massachusetts healthcare plan is the last thing Congress should emulate. (So tread softly, Scott. Or should I say "don't tread.")

Unlike 2000-2006, principles have to come first. Otherwise, the independents and RINO hunters will find you and take shots. If you come into office with an incumbent-mentality - cozying up to special interests and building bridges to nowhere - they will call you out. They will cool your ambitions in the icy waters of truth. Why? People are tired of the 'lesser of evils mentality', for what has it gotten us?

Also, the old calculation was a system that rewarded crony capitalism: i.e. if you ensured that regulations, subsidies and pork projects benefited supplicants in your district, more than likely, you'd keep power. Then, occasionally, you'd get to do something idealistic that would obscure the dirty deals that really kept you in office. Not any more. The Democrats are learning a very difficult lesson about a very different age.

Your job will be to cap spending, reduce the debt and pass regulatory review to begin stripping out the perverse incentive systems both your party and the Dems have woven for your respective benefit. These systems pick winners and losers. They are destroying competition and thus our economy. Indeed, the special interest state is destroying our very institutions.

It used to be that the logic of collective action was such that the costs of organization favored special interests. It was too costly to organize taxpayers and people of principle, being so many people with so little access to information and means to organize. But technology has lowered those costs. They're organizing now. They're RINO hunters and they're coming to your district. When they arrive, they'll hold your feet to freedom's fire. So if you have anything else in mind but something like First Principles, your time in power will be short. If you're the product of some old-boy network and ran in order to serve that network, they'll find out. Your political life may be but an asterisk in the New Book of Purgation.

There are armies - mad as hornets - carrying flashlights, too. They are bringing to light your practices. They are coming armed with ideas and principles. So again, the calculation has changed. The blood you smell in the water by 2012 could be an elephant's.

Your new motto is "Principles First." Don't like it? To succeed, you will serve principle slavishly. Not self, not career, not power, not the crony-capitalist complex your party helped the Democrats to build (and that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have perfected). You will serve principle. Your job will be to free the American people,  American free enterprise and renew that contract with America.

Otherwise, your career may be a one-term proposition. Why? Because you'll be temped to cozy up to the special interests in your state. But these unholy alliances won't keep you safe. You may try to hide behind the moralistic rhetoric of this issue or that, but it does not trump principle. Your elections and reelections will depend on navigating the waters between the Scylla of special interests and the Charybdis of the RINO hunters and tea-partiers. Either way, term limits will be imposed from without. Welcome to 2010.

This morning I awoke to a "public flogging of Patrick Ruffini" from Ralph Benko, an enthusiastic proponent of new media in the conservative movement in D.C. He was responding to my recent piece on the "Obama Disconnect" -- the lively debate surrounding Organizing for America and Obama's loss of grassroots mojo from the campaign.

Ralph attempts to connect my skeptical view of Organizing for America (and indeed the Obama campaign) to disdain for the tea party movement. It's a pretty big leap, and one superseded by my numerous posts on the actual tea party movement (here, here, and here). 

Erick Erickson has come out in my defense but highlights this quote he says is "rubbing people the wrong way:" 

Now, what happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done — even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs.

This would be damning if it were actually about the conservative movement, but it's not. It's about Obama, and the shift from the faux-bottom up ethos of the campaign to the top-down work of governance. Actively throughout the post, I was putting myself in the shoes of a David Axelrod, first (some might say cynically) embracing the "bottom-up" energy of supporters in the campaign because of their financial and organizational strength, then jettisoning them when that enthusiasm invariably ebbed when they came into power. Isn't the story of Massachusetts right now the extremely fired up Republican base versus the listless, moribund Democratic base? The quote is a commentary on the reality of Democratic politics right now, not the very opposite phenomenon that is the dominant reality in the Republican party. 

There is a legitimate question of what happens when a party comes to power, and the role of the grassroots in that shift.

There is no question that grassroots politics is harder when you are in power. That is just a fact that I think requires no further explanation. The MoveOn.org / OFA base is not in the room when Obama horsetrades on health care with Harry Reid, the unions, or the Blue Dogs. This invariably leads to compromises the left doesn't like. But, news flash: there were lots of things the right didn't like about the Bush Administration, from Medicare Part D to the bailouts. And I would remind Ralph that I advised a party-line Republican vote against the bailout.

Does the base tend to get sold down the river more when one is actually in power? Yes. Do I like that, as Ralph suggests I do? No. But I am also realistic enough to recognize that it's a distasteful reality and the price of actually being in office. And that's ultimately why you have a movement: to minimize deviation from principle as much as possible and to set standards for those pesky professional power-wielders. 

Right now, the right is in a different moment. The role of the movement is not to serve as a check on the elected officials because the elected officials are largely irrelevant. The role of the movement is to expand the opportunities for capturing ground as much as possible. Massachusetts would not have been possible without the grassroots deciding to make this the cause it did. If we win, it will be their victory. And the fact that a victory will have a profound and lasting effect on the policy of the United States is the ultimate testament to things the grassroots can do that the establishment can't. 

Flickr photo by Mike Bryant

Lost in the hubbub about the tea parties, the health care town hall protests, Joe Wilson, and the ACORN sting is the outcome of a long-simmering meta debate about the vibrancy of the grassroots right and its capacity to organize online. Along with a slew of other bad political indicators, the perception that the GOP might be stuck in a permanent Luddite rut reached its peak with the election of Obama and the role the Internet played in his victory.

Nearly a year later, not only have things turned around, but they've done so faster than anyone could have dreamed or imagined in those post-election doldrums.

First, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, flash mob-like, at Tea Parties not even three months after Obama Nation reached its apogee with the inauguration. The left was caught flat-footed and stammered that it must have been the creation of Fox News, although Fox News existed in the latter Bush years and during the McCain interlude and was unable to conjure up a similar display of enthusiasm in that period.

In August, the rightroots gained further velocity with the health care protests. This was significant in that it was the first head to head match with OFA and the unions, and it was no contest.

The third key moment came when Joe Wilson was able to raise as much (if not more) money than his Democratic opponent after the "You lie!" outburst. The left's immediate rallying around Rob Miller was a textbook netroots play, aided by ready-made infrastructure (an ActBlue page ready to accept contributions without crashing and display real-time feedback). For a Republican -- especially one deemed to be on the "wrong" side of a PR war -- to have been competitive in money raised with a netroots Democrat is something that simply would not have happened in the Bush years. This is especially striking given that Markos, Stoller, Bowers et al. made money raised for candidates the sine qua non of the netroots, an outgrowth of the left's 1970s era obsession with countering "big money" in politics.

Finally, the O'Keefe/Giles video bust of ACORN -- the right's biggest media coup since Rathergate -- showed the right to be getting its sea legs in investigative journalism, a space virtually patented by the left in recent years.

What we seem to be witnessing is the Feiler Faster Thesis in action, with a robust grassroots opposition to Obama, aided by the Internet, taking shape far more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and comparatively speaking, in a far more timely fashion than it took the left to gets its act together against Bush.

(The big asterisk in that comparison with the Bush years is 9/11 and the wars, but looking back to August and early September 2001, the Democratic opposition to Bush was weak and defined largely by spineless Washington pols like Tom Daschle rather than a sea of grassroots protest, which became apparent only later when the Internet became a viable organizing vehicle.)

So, the fear that Republicans would be disorganized for months if not years after Obama taking office has proven to be unfounded. The right's rise online (and offline too) has been a pretty automatic reaction to Democratic hegemony in Washington, disproving the notion that there is anything intrinsic to the right or the left driving the use of specific tools. And wrapping this up in a neat little bow, the political environment turns out to be the decisive factor in how emphatically people use the technology, not the other way around.

Understandably, not all of this has been online. Talk radio, and yes, cable news, still plays a role, particularly in the critical task of driving calls to member offices. As I noted on Twitter in August, 

For all the talk about lefty activism recently, it seems the right has an institutional advantage in contacting Congress... on every issue

From immigration to health care, most of the time you hear about a lopsided disparity with one side shutting down phone lines on Capitol Hill, it's conservatives doing it. While the political climate may dictate how effectively the tools get used, the right and left still have a tendency to focus on different things, with the right jumpstarting its movement in recent months with legislative advocacy and moving bodies to events, and while the left first built the netroots around raising money for candidates.

As a skeptic of the hegemony of money in campaigns and a believer in shoeleather organizing, it's not surprising to me that a newly resurgent right has made such an explosive impact on the national debate in the last two months. All the folks who wondered for five years where our response to the netroots was now have their answer.

They’re getting comfortable. As Henke alludes to here, the self-satisfaction that comes with being in control was a primary factor in the waning of GOP power after 2002. The Dems know political power is nothing if not entropic. That’s exactly why the leadership is rushing like hell to do what they can to entrench their power and fundamentally alter the economy (i.e. before things start to burn and the people turn). Having mastered both the blame game and the art of sophistry, they think they’re better and smarter—despite all the linear thinking and pseudo-intellectual fervor. But victory has a half-life.

What is the Right to do? Let the Left languish in their smugness. Let's innovate: 

1. Get better organized and unified. (Includes networking and collaboration.)
2. Convert talk radio listeners into givers and doers. (Need help from the jocks.)
3. Focus on popular messages of freedom, prosperity and suspicion of government.
4. Create new constituencies resistant to government takeovers of their sector.
5. Create media markets to further dilute the leftish MSM. Hasten the destruction of print.
6. Tap, activate and integrate existing grassroots networks while creating new ones.
7. Use mockery and satire to prick the Obama bubble. “What were we thinking?”
8. Redirect resources from policy wonks to message-makers, writers and activists.
9. Find and exploit joints and weak-points. (Attack from the side. A distracting swarm is better than a standing army.)
10. Develop an “operating system” for distributed activism. “Embrace and extend” the left’s successful methodologies.
11. Crowdsource investigation of key leaders. Dig Relentlessly.
12. Use technology as a means to 5 primary ends—registering voters, organizing activists, changing minds, increasing transparency and crowdsourcing ideas.
13. Make a continuous show out of dissatisfaction. Be creative. Create distractions.
14. Plan carefully, but execute rapidly. Make media. Explosive media campaigns should make people do a double-take.
15. Rebrand as a new breed with new ideas. (Use veterans/old guard sparingly.) Think: New Labour circa 1996.
16. Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.
17. Create alternative funding channels, including micro-donations.
18. Invite in a million ideas and create a filtration mechanism for the best ones.
19. Take risks with policy messages and critiques. Simple and powerful.
20. More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

When you’re clinging to power and pushing your agenda, it’s hard to keep tabs on the enemy. It’s hard to continue innovating now that your foot-shoulders spend most of their days doe-eyed before O-TV, or making snarky comments on rightwing blogs. In 2008, the Left took all the best aspects of the free market – distributed systems, decentralization, collaboration and voluntary association – and out-organized the Right. Disillusionment with the war and the Obama emotion-bubble helped too. But those will soon fade. It’s time to turn the tables.

To be sure, the Left’s leadership will be busy tearing down what is right and good about the U.S., building up what is wrong and adding to a network of special interests and dependents whom they honestly believe will keep them around forever. They’ll make a good go of it. But take heart: Ireland, New Zealand and Britain all rebounded from the depths of socialism and its crony-capitalist variants. Ireland is now economically freer than the U.S. So is New Zealand. Britain is currently moving right. So there is hope. Let’s start innovating.

During the election, the groups functionality on My.BarackObama.com was a remarkably efficient way to communicate to Democratic activists on the local level. Republicans wanting to volunteer for McCain-Palin signed a sheet at county victory headquarters, and might or might not get a call back. If you wanted to get plugged into the Obama campaign, all you had to do was sign up to your local group online, and a local organizer would send out regular e-mails with volunteer opportunities, which if printed out would be something like 10 pages long.

Ever since, the group listservs have served as an EKG of sorts for the movement. It's not so surprising that activity is way down from the election. In one Gmail inbox I used to track groups in swing states, MyBO group emails went from 4,200 messages in October to just under 300 in the last 30 days -- a decline of 93%. However, the content too is considerably less upbeat. Here's part of a message I got to my local group summing up recent election results and looking forward to the June Virginia primary:

Let's prove that 2008 wasn't a fluke because of the cult of Obama....the long term demographic trends are in our favor but WE CAN'T BRING CENSUS AND POLLING DATA TO THE BALLOT BOX and declare victory.

...

So far this year there have been several special elections in Virginia and the results haven't been good....WE RECENTLY LOST TWO CITY COUNCIL SEATS IN ALEXANDRIA (voted 72% for Obama) and came close to losing Brian Moran's Delegate seat and Rep. Gerry Connolly's Chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (home of 1 million people).  Because of EXTREMELY LOW TURNOUT these races came down to a handful of votes as the ELECTORATE OF THE "PAST" DECIDED THE WINNER.

On a similar note, PRESIDENT OBAMA NEEDS US to get involved in the upcoming HEALTH CARE REFORM BATTLE.  So, keep in mind that elections might require the most work for the "community organizer" in us, but WE NEED TO STAY ENGAGED IN OUR COMMUNITY TO GET THE RESULTS WE WANT after our candidates get elected.

The all-caps exhortations seem kind of.... forced, no? Like it isn't as easy anymore without Obama on the ballot. As the e-mail accurately notes, there is a partisan realignment of sorts going on in Northern Virginia local elections, with Republicans coming within one percent of capturing the chairmanship of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, a Republican picking up the supervisor seat of the newly elected chair in a quite Democratic, close-in district, a pickup of two seats on the Alexandria City Council, and the almost inexplicable near-win of Brian Moran's old House of Delegates seat.

Looking forward, the e-mail sounds an ominous note. Northern Virginia was ground zero in the statewide shift to Obama last November, yet the implication is that Democrats have sat on their hands ever since, content in their victory. There is fear that this complacency might threaten the Obama push on health care and other issues.

Another data point is the DNC continuing to lag the RNC in monthly fundraising, despite the incumbent advantage. Remember that the Obama e-mail list has been brought in-house at the DNC, and fundraising returns from THE LIST (a.k.a. "the 13 million") count towards the DNC's bottom line. And yet, the same fearsome fundraising machine that utterly blew the doors off the GOP last year can't keep pace with the RNC's aging direct mail house file.

There is an inherent problem with "organizing" while in power and it's by no means unique to Obama. It's perhaps an early manifestation of the restlessness that gripped the conservative base in the latter Bush years (and the liberal base in the latter Clinton years). No matter what the organizational advantages were that were "banked" during the election, it's very, very difficult to transfer them into a "movement" to defend a power hegemony in Washington, D.C. The Bush people tried this in 2005-06 after building quite the machine during the 2004 re-election, and fell short of their lofty goals. Electoral machines don't transfer that well to non-electoral situations when people aren't in the mood for community organizing.

Nor does the Internet, which I've written quite a bit about, solve this problem. If anything, the same forces that make it easier for movements to form make it easier for them to de-mobilize after the fact, as the next big thing is always just around the corner. The yawning chasm between the burning passions of an election campaign and second-order movements (like Organizing for America is now) is especially apparent in the friction-free market for activism that it is the Internet.

Parting thought: Was Obama '08 simply the biggest flash mob ever assembled, rather than a "movement?"

Full Obama organizer e-mail after the jump.

For much of the build up to the 2008 Democratic primaries, the consensus among political oddsmakers, pollsters, and politicos (myself included) was that Hillary Clinton was virtually a shoo-in to win the Democratic nomination. After all, the Clintons were the most powerful name in the Democratic Party, and as a result the Democratic machine fought tooth and nail to ensure Clinton’s victory. However, after the Iowa caucus, it became clear that Barack Obama — the junior Senator from Illinois with less than a full term of experience under his belt — would provide some serious competition for the nomination. In the end, the Democratic machine backing Clinton was pitted against the grassroots who supported Obama, and a fairly incredible phenomenon in politics happened: the grassroots won!

The ongoing Senate race in Florida between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist presents the Republicans with the very same narrative. Crist has received the endorsement of the NRSC, while a large portion of the GOP grassroots and netroots has expressed an outpouring of disdain for the endorsement and are fighting to elect Rubio (or at least for the NRSC to remain neutral in the race). Although not quite at the Presidential level, this is very much the GOP’s version of Obama vs. Clinton.

Of course, the important question here then is, “Who ultimately controls the GOP, the grassroots or the machine?” — and obviously, the only way to answer this question is to see how the race turns out.

(Personally, I’ll be pulling for the grassroots. If you feel the same way, you can donate to Marco Rubio here.)

Mainstream media personalities have begun making a sport out of ridiculing “tea parties.” If you’re living on Mars, tea parties are spontaneously formed groups of activists disgusted with just about everything the federal government is doing. But in the marble bosom of the socialist salon, teaparties would seem to be the stuff of humor:

By the standards of the Obama campaign and MoveOn.org, the Tea Parties happening all across the country are not very organized. Contra Talking Points Memo, no single group "owns" or is instigating tomorrow's events. The closest thing one could call to a centralized Tea Party homepage is Eric Odom's TaxDayTeaParty.com. Freedom Works has popularized a Google Map which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times that's become the unofficial directory of the event. Newt Gingrich is driving attendance through his American Solutions (a/k/a Drill Now) list, as are a myriad of other groups.

Contrast this to a MoveOn or MyBO (now OFA) mobilization during the election. A single group would send out a call for a single day of action to its massive e-mail list (in MoveOn's case, this would go to 5 million people; in Obama's, to 13 million people). They would direct people to an online event planning tool, which would either have the hallmarks of MoveOn's internal toolset or the Blue State Digital "PartyBuilder" toolset. Host and attendee information would be hosted on a centralized database. Reminder e-mails would be sent at timed intervals through the same technology. It would be a relatively clean, seamless, and centralized process.

Nothing of the sort has happened with the tea parties, at least from a technology and logistics perspective. Organizers have had to self-report their events to various national groups. One group claims credit for putting one set of events; another group for a different set. It's a much messier process that belies the stereotype of the right as a group of mindless automatons.

This is why it's amusing to watch the left try to debate Jon on the charge of "astroturf." MoveOn virtually invented massively replicable online grassroots organizing -- which many would equate with astroturf, in that activity is actually being directed by a few people at the top, and thousands of people on the ground are (willingly) following orders.

If there are talking points, sample agendas, syncronized start and end times, or standard branding and collateral for the tea parties, I haven't seen them. When Tom Matzzie and Eli Pariser did it old school and decided to send an e-mail to drive people to, say, an Iraq War vigil, they instantly created a level of organization we haven't yet seen in the tea party movement.

And that's okay.

The lack of coordination is a sign of a still-young movement that's just learning to organize online in earnest. And arguably, the advantage brought by a massive e-mail list is much impressive now than when MoveOn pioneered the practice in 2002 and 2003, its heyday.

With viral distribution through Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, it's a lot easier to get a message out from an organizational baseline of zero. Riffing off Clay Shirky, it's the power of organizing without organizations. In the Age of Email, those who could aggregate large lists had all the advantages when it comes to organizing. This is still somewhat true, but word can spread faster through networks of influentials with hundreds and thousands of Twitter followers than it can one-to-many through a large list. There was always the hope that people would forward the e-mail to their friends, but one of the dirty little secrets of e-mail is that the "forward to a friend" button on most e-mail blasts is at best an orphan child. Only the most scurrilous (Obama's a  Muslim) or funny e-mails tend to spread purely virally.

As William Beutler wrote the other day, the left is seriously underestimating Twitter, and in a classic judo move, is parlaying the uncertainty of who's really behind the tea parties into charges of "astroturf." Occam's Razor would suggest this nebulousness is a sign of a lack of central organization, not the other way around.

For all its supposed online prowess, it could be that the left is starting to forget the value of distributed online organizing. The Stollers of the world have spent a lot of time studying the myth of the "vast right wing conspiracy" in a bid to centralize power within their movement under the new netroots institutions and take it away from single issue groups they don't control. To them, the only valid model once they've actually achieved power is a centralized one (see Townhouse, or the 8:30 Podesta conference calls). It may be true that the power brokers in their ideal world will look very different. They understood early on that one could use the Internet to crush the old power structure -- to create a new one in its place. But at the end of the day, the model they've settled on is one-to-many, and their world is run through large e-mail lists or big blogs like Daily Kos where it's still mostly about the blogger. The Obama campaign was still more about using the web to create a ruthlessly efficient organization than it was about creating an open community. 

The messier, more unpredictable, and more freewheeling examples of online activism -- from the Ron Paul campaign to tea parties -- have been on the right. The right's is a different model. One that the left -- and many of our friends the right -- do not completely understand yet.

I wrote this piece today in the Weekly Standard Online exploring the value of outside efforts aimed at promoting President Obama's legislative agenda. The raw political value of these activities is obvious -- capturing emails, phone numbers, and keeping partisans engaged. But I also believe there is another less obvious benefit.  I call it "making noise," so that those normally not paying much attention to politics sit up and listen.

We know Democratic partisans strongly support the White House agenda.  But that's only about a third of the electorate. Those with weaker partisan attachments are less engaged, know less about the President's agenda, and are therefore less intense in their support.   I believe groups like Organizing for America    and Unity '09 (the liberal-backed group that includes MoveOn.org Politico's Ben Smith writes about here ) help mobilize partisan Democrats, but also create the kind of political noise necessary to break through the din of other cultural and media messages -- a crtical tactic in reaching certain electoral blocs.

Less politically engaged Americans tend to hear the "loudest voice in the cafeteria." These efforts by liberal organizations and Democrats help project the White House agenda to this often hard to reach, but key constituency.

Some say it's difficult to translate support from a campaign to a legislative agenda.  That may be correct. But I also believe entities like Organizing for America and Unity '09 will have a much bigger impact on political communications than we currently understand.

In observing the debate between Dan Riehl and Jon Henke over the immediate future of the GOP, my belief is that both of them may end up being correct.

"[The GOP] lose[s]. In fact, for the next four years, that's going to be the answer Republicans are forced to face over and over again," wrote Henke about various big-government items on the Democratic agenda. "And there's almost nothing Republicans can do to stop it,"  he concluded.

Calling Henke's opinion "sad defeatism," Riehl suggested that the use of the new and traditional media can prevent either party in Washington from steamrolling "such massive legislation."

The eternally optimistic Robert Stacy McCain even sees potential electoral gain for the GOP: "I agree with Dan that a GOP comeback in 2010 is a real possibility, especially in the House, where the Obama Age seems to have inspired the Republican caucus to grow a pair."

It's my belief that the Democrats will try two general strategies to enact their fiscal agenda.  In some cases, such as the most recent stimulus bill, they will demand a whole lot and initially receive little GOP support.  To be sure, that's where the current bill stands at this moment.

My crystal ball tells me that the Dems will get most of what they've asked for after the eventual political compromises, though.  After all, most of the Republican debate isn't over whether we need a stimulus bill or not, but why we don't need the Democrat's version of an enormous spending package.

"We need a short term stimulus bill that will directly help people, create jobs, and provide a jolt to our economy," wrote Senator John McCain (emphasis added) in an e-mail yesterday.

The Washington Post predicts that Republican Senators won't mind spending $700,000,000,000.00 that we don't have.  They simply disapprove of spending $900,000,000,000.00 that we don't have.