New Power by Henry Timms

Author:Henry Timms
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781760559762
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

Slipping from Crowd Leader to Cheerleader: Obama in office

“If you want to know how I’ll govern,” candidate Obama promised, “just look at our campaign.”

President Obama took office with the promise that the more than 14 million Americans, like Jennifer Robinson, who had contributed in some way to his victory might now enter government with him.

Exley had laid down the marker before the election: “Obama must continue to feed and lead the organization they have built—either as president or in opposition.” But that was not quite how it panned out, as we’ve noted. Obama campaigned as a Crowd Leader, but he governed as a Cheerleader. While the rhetorical torch for new power stayed lit, he failed to build a genuine movement to help him govern, to help elect his successor, or to create a sustained and local grassroots to help his political party win up and down the ticket. Obama left office with some major legislative accomplishments and relatively high approval ratings. He had governed for eight years with no major scandal, and his original supporters still had a strong emotional connection to him. But his political opposition had won back the presidency, controlled both houses of Congress, and dominated politics at the state level.

The missed opportunity for Obama was that he had no real transition plan for his crowd. All the energy and commitment that people felt had nowhere to go next. As Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson has reported, in the critical two months after Obama’s election victory, Obama’s much-vaunted campaign largely went dark, a decision the political technology observer Micah Sifry called “criminal political negligence.” The administration then made the fateful decision to fold its organizing infrastructure—renamed Organizing for America (OFA)—and its more than 13 million members into the Democratic National Committee, becoming part of the official party machine.

This decision put real distance between Obama and his crowd, and limited its capacity to act to support his agenda; for example, it could not put pressure on those Democrats who were on the fence about key parts of the president’s agenda, like his health-care law. It also alienated the many political independents, Republicans, and far-left types who had connected with Obama, but had no interest in being part of the formal political infrastructure of the Democratic Party.

Obama, a new president facing a big economic crisis, was intensely focused on enacting his policy agenda and, perhaps awed by all the tools of state now at his disposal, slipped into old power mode.

He tried to mobilize his supporter base around major moments in the making of his health-care law, and with some success, but he’d already moved out of a movement mindset—and it showed. OFA asked supporters to make generic “pledges” on various issues (such as support for a public option in the health-care bill, which Obama quickly dropped), but it was too cautious and had not tended to the community carefully enough to be able to whip up any real passion. Of course, as the Obama crowd was suffering from neglect,

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