Jonathan Klingler's blog

A nice little tidbit from a Politico article on OFA from this morning:

It’s not that Obama’s grassroots army has been standing idle.

Jeremy Bird, the organization’s deputy national director, can tick off a host of behind-the-scenes accomplishments: More than 1.5 million people have taken more than 3 million actions — including canvassing, phonebanking and hosting local events — to promote the president’s plan.

 

More than a million people have signed a declaration supporting his top principles — lowering costs, providing more consumer choices, and expanding coverage. They’ve run advertising and, in a single August week, 60,000 backers of Obama's plan made personal visits to their local congressional office to register their support for it.

If you go to OFA's page with this declaration of principles we see the following:

• Reduce Costs — Rising health care costs are crushing the budgets of governments, businesses, individuals and families and they must be brought under control
• Guarantee Choice — Every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and doctor – including the choice of a public insurance option
• Ensure Quality Care for All — All Americans must have quality and affordable health care

Much ink has been spilt arguing that it is next to impossible to satisfy all three of these principles, particularly through the Dems' approach. However, I doubt many would disagree with these principles if merely snapping our fingers, using the Law of Attraction, or selling our thetans to Xenu would put them into practice. This is Hope-And-Change Pedro Sanchez talk at its best.

Now the kicker: out of 13 million people who are at least nominal members of OFA and presumably were engaged enough with the President to volunteer with OB2008, only around 1 million were willing to put their mark next to this.

When 12 out of 13 OFA members won't click a box next to a vague committment to making all of their wildest dreams will come true, I'd say Obama has jumped the shark.

Yesterday, Ralph Benko at the Examiner wrote a very interesting op-ed detailing the extraordinarily low participation that Organizing for America and MoveOn.org have been able to muster for recent petition drives and rallies. In a recent effort to direct members to call Members of Congress in support of the energy tax legislation, only 7,000 MoveOn members made calls out of a list of upwards of 5 million. Even more stark is the fact that Organizing for America, built from one of the largest and most innovative presidential campaign organizations in recent memory, couldn't even get a 1 percent participation rate in an email petition drive for the Obama budget.

Mr. Benko ascribes this to a disconnect between the elite Left and the populist left, mostly in the form of elitist disdain for the rank and file of the leftist base. This very well be true, but I think the failure of these well organized entities to deliver the numbers also has to in part be due to structural weaknesses that governing parties face when trying to mobilize modern-day activists. The Obama campaign was able to mobilize huge numbers of people in 2008 in support of a candidate who sold himself as the living embodiment of a package of vague policies and aspirations which meant something different to each person who supported him.

Most people don't care about politics- they're too busy working to get involved unless they feel threatened. However, according to research from people like Sidney Verba, those who do (on the right and the left) tend to disproportionately have financial security. We also know from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs that when people feel safe and have their basic needs fulfilled, they increasingly turn their attention to building relationships, gaining respect,  and accomplishing something meaningful with their lives. However, everybody has different ideas of what is important and meaningful, and a big part of satisfying the need for self-actualization requires fulfilling a purpose yourself.

This is where the trouble has come from for our leftist friends. Go back to August 2008. Obama's explosive campaign sold him as a vague manifestation of personal meaning to millions of people - this is evident through the creepy cult-like adoration we've seen since 2007 - and built an astoundingly huge organization from these folks. They then used them with great effectiveness by empowering these individuals to do things themselves, largely free from elite direction. Thus, the campaign provided a lot of people with a sense of purpose and meaning that translated into big results. For the left, Candidate Obama served as a package of loose principles that minimized disagreement and the battle was won through a hundred million acts of individual initiative in local communities.

Now, fast forward to August 2009. President Obama is in office with huge majorities- they should be able to muster great excitement in their people because they can pass anything- but that hasn't materialized in their legislative activism. President Obama issues clear executive orders, signs detailed legislation, and actual policies cannot satisfy everyone- even within his own movement. A party in power in government can't survive on loose principles that minimize agreement- it requires detailed policies that draw disagreement out of the woodwork. Furthermore, working just in local communities can't win legislative fights- everything has to go through elites- Representatives and Senators.

Calling a Congressman in support of concrete bills you don't totally understand or agree with simply cannot provide the same degree of personal fufillment and meaning as working on your own initiative to convince your friends and neighbors to support general principles you agree with 100 percent.

This is an unavoidable structural weakness of the party in power. When Republicans ran Washington from 2001-2007, we suffered from this problem. We all remember it, and the degree of debate at the Next Right illustrates that no matter what George W. Bush and Congress actually did, some of us would be unhappy. Furthermore, it was relatively easy for the Democrats to gin up noise against any policy, because they agreed on the loose principle of opposition. Successful public coalitions in favor of legislation require agreement on detailed policy while successful public coalitions in opposition only require agreement on loose principles.

Eventually, conservatives will be back in power in Washington, whether that happens in 2012 or 2112. We will face this structural weakness as a movement and we need to be aware of it and figure out how to work around it to get things done. However, I'm incredibly optimistic about the ability of conservatives versus liberals in accomplishing meaningful social change in the modern activism environment.

The Left requires government to act to address their concerns. It's central to their ideological program. We don't.

Social networking technology is moving at leaps and bounds and movements that organize people around a set of loose principles, let them communicate and unleash their individual talents and initiatives are getting things done. That is what happened with Obama-Biden 2008, and there's a fascinating effort behind the Designers' Accord that is getting things done within the design community for environmentalist causes that their liberal base likes. There's no central control, no elites telling people to do, only agreement on central principles and individual action and innovation.

We seek a vision of American society where people are independent and free to solve problems in their communities by acting together through voluntary action, not government coercion. I firmly believe we can accomplish a lot of positive change in American society by agreeing on a set of loose principles, empowering people to act and getting out of the way. We may even be able to make government irrelevant.

Some day, conservatives and libertarians will create an Accord for Reform consisting of loose principles that we all can agree on, that distinguishes the philosophy of family values, free-markets and individual liberty from the opposition, and gives people the tools to enact these principles in an increasingly effective and decentralized manner.

It may not be today, it may not be a year from now or even ten years from now. However, that day will come, and it will be a new morning for America.

Crossposted at RedState.

The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
- Sun Tzu

Patrick’s post today on de-gimmicking the conservative movement makes an excellent point. We need to choose our battles, find conservative policies with overwhelming public support, and vigorously advance them in non-ideological terms. The approach worked with the Contract for America in 1994, and it worked with Drill Here Drill Now last year. When we find conservative policies with overwhelming support and draw upon the American people to create change, it works very well.
 
President Obama's January 22nd executive order, which ordered the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, opened the door to such a winning 80/20 American issue. President Obama’s order will close the Guantanamo facility within one year of its signing and ordered an extensive revision of terrorist detainee policy which would determine where the Guantanamo detainees will go and what will happen to the detainees of the future. The executive order was a controversial document that has been assaulted from both the left and the right. However, most Americans overwhelmingly agree with conservatives on the key issue at hand and we should use this opportunity to advance sound national security policy, not gimmickry.
 
The Combatant vs. Criminal Battle and the Features of the Field
 
At its core, this is a struggle over whether terrorist detainees should be treated as civilian criminals or as combatant prisoners of war. Conservatives typically believe that terrorists should be treated as combatants, and liberals believe they should be treated as criminals.
 
This is a complex issue, and the major polls investigating the question can sometimes be misleading. For example, a recent ABC poll claimed that Americans supported trying detainees in civilian courts over releasing them to their home countries by a 2-1 margin. This may seem to demonstrate support for the terrorist-as-criminal position, but the question did not include the option of military tribunals.
 
Fortunately, when presented with the choice of providing detainees with civilian trials or using the military tribunal system, Americans strongly believe terrorist detainees should be treated as combatants, not criminals. In a January 27th Rasmussen poll, 69% said that terrorists should not be given all the rights of citizens, and 59% supported using military tribunals vs. 26% who supported using civilian trials to process detainee cases.
 
Furthermore, Americans do not want Guantanamo detainees (and presumably future detainees) transferred to the US, and certainly not in their own communities. A recent Opinion Dynamics poll reveals that 63% of all Americans, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, do not want prisoners from Guantanamo Bay moved to prisons in their community, and a 52-47% majority do not want them in the US at all.
 
It is important to note that Guantanamo Bay itself has a negative connotation in the minds of the public that puts downward pressure on polling regarding the central criminal vs. combatant debate. The Rasmussen poll did not mention Guantanamo Bay in its questions about military tribunals and measured a large 33-point terrorist-as-combatant majority, while the ABC poll measured support for ‘continuing to hold [detainees] at Guantanamo’ rather than military tribunals and returned a relatively small 53-42 majority in favor of the terrorist-as-criminal approach.
 
With this knowledge and the work of Frank Luntz in mind, it would be wise for those of us who hold the terrorist-as-combatant view to let the Guantanamo Bay facility close. We should instead focus on the future by pushing the Administration to adopt a forward-looking counterterrorism detainee policy that is based on the terrorist-as-combatant view held by most Americans when Guantanamo is out of the picture. Sixty-eight percent of Americans, including majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats, right-of-center terrorism experts Charles Stimson and James Jay Carafano, and even Newt Gingrich support the creation of a new set of clear international rules to set transparent guidelines for how countries can fight the War on Terror. If the process of creating these rules is transparent, the American people have the ability to provide their input into the process, and we have experts to publicly articulate the terrorist-as-combatant approach, the result would be a clearer, more stable system than what we have now which would ensure that dangerous combatants are not treated like fish in some catch-and-release system and allowed to return to the battlefield and kill again.  
 

The No Catch and Release movement is picking up steam this week.

For starters, Anthony Stackpoole of the Michigan Republican State Committee endorsed the plan, along with Dr. Bill Smith of the ARRA News Service.

Additionally, there is a push for movement participants to call Rep. Lamar Smith this week at his Washington, DC, office and thank him for introducing HR 630, the Enemy Combatant Detention Review Act. HR 630 prohibits a federal court from ordering the government to bring enemy combatants into the U.S. and ensures that an alien captured and detained abroad during wartime cannot be admitted and released in the U.S.

We are asking people to call Rep. Smith at 202-225-4236 on Friday, thank him for his leadership on HR 630, and ask him to endorse the No Catch and Release petition at www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives. 202-225-4236

The No Catch and Release petition calls for President Obama to listen to the majority of the American people (52 to 42 in a recent Opinion Dynamics poll) who are against transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States, and prevent such a transfer.  The Enemy Combatant Detention Review Act puts this key No Catch and Release principle into practice, and for that the bill deserves our support.

So far, there does not seem to be any plan for consideration of HR 630 by the House of Representatives, despite evidence of the bill's public support. This underscores the importance of taking action on this issue before it is too late.

We will keep you posted as things develop.

Last Friday, President Obama met with a group of terrorism survivors in the White House and announced that all charges were dropped against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2001. This event was mostly overshadowed by the uproar surrounding the spending bill in the Senate, but it marks a dangerous milestone as the Obama Administration begins to deal with the messy repercussions of closing the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

The President will face a number of tough decisions over the next year as he prepares to move detainees to other facilities, and it is certain that there will be a great deal of pressure on him to treat these detainees as common criminals and even to let go some of the 200 detainees considered too dangerous to release.

Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of treating the risk of releasing Guantanamo prisoners as a hypothetical issue. The Pentagon estimates that 62 former Guantanamo detainees have already returned to active involvement in terrorist organizations and that one has even risen to be the second in command of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

In response to this troubling turn of events, Students for Victory recently launched the No Catch and Release petition campaign. No Catch and Release will gather public support for three general principles for handling the Guantanamo detainees. Each of the three principles are already supported by majorities of the American people. President Obama has repeatedly stated that he wants to listen to the ideas of all Americans, so this is our chance to make our voices heard.

You can read and sign the petition at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.

In just five months, Newt Gingrich’s Drill Here Drill Now campaign prepared the environment that allowed the #dontgo Revolution to take place and win an important policy victory for energy independence. We may not have the eloquence of Newt or the resources of American Solutions, but we do have a fired up and united grassroots ready to act to make this country safer.

We at Students for Victory are urging President Obama to follow these principles and we are building a widespread coalition of activists, bloggers, and organizations who will work with us to do the same. You can publicly endorse the principles and join the coalition at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.

All Americans have the right to have their voices heard. We face an uphill struggle against organized groups that favor releasing prisoners our soldiers fought to apprehend, but one signature at a time, one message to a friend at a time, and one blog post at a time, each of us can make a difference and act to help keep our loved ones safe.

We hope you’ll sign the petition, join the coalition, and get involved in the movement at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.

The Democratic Party has liked to style themselves as very bottom up, but their ideology is very top down. Now we will have a chance to see what happens when they govern. -Patrick

Today, the Barack Obama transition team launched its new website, www.change.gov, and I think it would be wise for all of us who are interested in building the Next Right to check it out, as well as www.barackobama.com in case the latter is changed substantially. If you want to see how My.BarackObama.com works without joining, watch the tutorial video. It's impressive.

During the campaign, the Obama folks were able to do three remarkable things to build a people-powered online movement.

1. Create a nationally visible platform for attracting and building a responsive and interactive community
2. Leverage this community to build neighborhood-level teams and provide them with the tools and measurable goals needed to accomplish the task at hand
3. Devolve control over execution to neighborhood team leaders and individuals and let them unleash their own individual strengths to get the job done

If you take a really good look at BarackObama.com, the vast majority of it is nothing extraordinary. It has candidate bios and issue positions and looks generally pretty nice. What sets it apart is the ability to submit policy ideas of your own to the campaign for every issue area, MyBarackObama.com (which is explicitly designed to foster local organizing), and their Organizing Resource Center, which provides detailed tutorials and excellent tools for individuals to act on their own for the campaign. The unique aspects of the Obama online operation all fit into the three bullet points above, and created a truly effective campaign operation and allowed a movement to form.

Now, consider the new site, Change.gov. What sets Change.gov apart from any other government website is that it invites users to interact with the website and submit personal stories and ideas for the new administration. This fits into the first item from above, but the other two are noticeably absent. This is important.

The design of Change.gov is important for one reason. Barack Obama ran on a campaign of fundamentally changing the way Washington works, and to some extent, the innovative aspects of his campaign were sold as glimpses of a new, people-powered government under an Obama administration. If we take Change.gov as the government website of the future, we can look forward to plenty of feedback forms but not much more. We'll see how this works out over the long run, but I think it will prove more difficult than expected to carry the campaign model over to government operations.

Now we begin to see the inherent contradiction of the left's netroots organization. They have created a tremendous capacity to organize people to act voluntarily for the accomplishment of the movement's goals. Philosophically, this goal is to win control of the federal government and use it to fix the ills of society. However, in the end, the federal government runs things from the top-down, and bureaucracies by their very nature are slow and unresponsive. Once the left's open, decentralized and local movement infrastructure wins control of the federal government, it hands the keys over to elected officials and its job is simply to keep those folks in office.

In large part, the Obama campaign built itself on the postmodern shift in American society towards self-actualization, meaning, customization and connectedness which has been explored in the literature on design, by political scientists like Ronald Inglehart, and expressed in the new type of business model featured in magazines like Fast Company. 21st century Americans demand more self-actualization in every aspect of their lives and Barack Obama was able to deliver on this politically through his campaign.

However, the federal government idealized by the Left as the solution to every problem simply is not capable of providing everyday citizens with customized services, active involvement, local solutions and most importantly, meaning. It is the job of bureaucracies to treat everyone equally, and what makes government separate from other entities is that it fundamentally acts through coercion rather than through meaningful individual participation. In the end, the biggest promise of the Obama movement cannot be delivered because of its inherent contradictions.

Now imagine what conservatives and libertarians could do to improve society through voluntary action if we developed our own version of My.BarackObama.com. The possibilities for non-governmental solutions are almost limitless. That's real hope for change.

Patrick makes a very good point about the necessity of building platforms for action rather than individual websites in his post yesterday. I think it is clear that we should be setting up structures that facilitate and drive participation in key aspects of the movement. We can get a lot more done by working together through platforms dedicated to specific tasks than providing a thousand blogs crowding the echo chamber.

Unfortunately, in order to build these platforms and maintain them, we need to have people who have the technical knowledge to do it. I know enough about this stuff to create the website for Students for Victory, but I honestly have no idea where to start on opening things up to SFV members to help them take the lead on their own initiatives.

How many conservative activists out there even know how to put something together that approaches what we're talking about building? We need some sort of tech clearinghouse for the Rightroots that can teach tech-minded activists how to create and manage these sort of mass-participation websites, and link them together so that we have 20 of them working together as a team with a common purpose on a given project, like those we've discussed over the past few days.

If we had something like that, I know I would sign up. Are there any takers?

The return of the Guerilla Congress today was a huge encouragement and it is really exciting to see what the House GOP can do when it sets its mind to it. The Dontgo movement is growing minute-by-minute and people want Congress to return to work and pass the American Energy Act.

Everybody is taking leadership in his or her own way. We've got Danny Glover and Jason Carini working on media distribution channels, Media Lizzy and Jenn Sierra promoting the events on internet talk radio, Robert Bluey and Reps. Culbertson and Wittman twittering from the floor, and Eric Odom setting up websites for the Dontgo movement. People are offering to drive visitors to the Hill, collecting money to buy food for Members, and creating promotional flyers, all on their own.

This is possible because a large group of people have been inspired by the Guerilla Congress and it touches on themes that all of us recognize. This event, at least for me, reminds me of why I became a Republican in the first place. Transparency, smart usage of modern technology, principled free market policies, and the thrill of fighting the establishment is what the Republican Revolution was all about.

Over the past two days, many people have worked to build an alternative to the MSM to get media from the floor out to the general public. However, as the phantom sessions gain more attention, it will become harder and harder to smuggle media out of the House chamber. What we need to focus on now as a movement is how to bring the American people into their House.

We can pump tweets out continuously and get some precious video or audio out from time to time to maintain page A13 attention, but we need crowds of energized Americans clamoring for change in the Capitol to take things to the next level. Right now, the MSM is dismissing the Guerilla Congress as a GOP stunt, but that will be much harder to do if there are long lines of excited and angry people waiting to get into the chamber specifically to take part in the phantom sessions. I know from experience that constituents are usually bored and disappointed when visiting the House gallery - if they are engaged and excited, that is a news story in itself.

We can make this happen. During the summer, a flood of people drive to Washington for vacation and take exhausted kids around the Mall in the humidity and heat, trying to show them the monuments and teach them about American democracy. They have just driven hundreds of miles and spent large amounts of money on gas - more than most other Americans would. They are almost the ideal target audience for the shadow sessions, and they have every right to be mad that the Dems skipped town for a vacation of their own when their vacations are cut short or made less enjoyable because of the price of gas.

If we build on this foundation, and add in the opportunity to spend time inside with the AC and let their kids go on the House floor while it is in a pseudo-session to interact with 20-30 members, we can probably draw people in. What we need to figure out is how to frame it, publicize it to tourists and do it right. It's an opportunity we can't afford to pass up.

Promoted. -Patrick

On Sunday, over thirty Republican Members announced that they would return to the House of Representatives to continue the Guerilla Congress's phantom sessions. Members will continue to discuss the need for an 'all of the above' energy plan with visitors, and keep the pressure on the Democrats to reconvene the House and allow a vote on offshore drilling.

The session is expected to begin around 10 AM Eastern. Twitter users on the #dontgo feed and members of the Facebook group, 'Rock the House! I Support the Guerilla Congress' have organized to capture video, audio and images from the event and distribute it throughout the web and to the MSM.

Those who are stepping up to get footage from the event are coordinating on #rth, and Eyeblast.tv has offered to promote any media uploaded to the website. If you plan to report from the event, be sure to stick to #rth and upload to Eyeblast.tv. From there, we will need the conservative netroots to alert the media about the Eyeblast content and promote it as much as possible.

Be sure to follow http://dontgo.us and Rock the House for continuing developments tomorrow.

On Friday, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to adjourn after Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked Republican efforts to include a provision for expanded domestic drilling in energy legislation. All 199 Republicans voted against adjournment while enough Democrats voted for adjournment for the motion to pass by one vote.

In response to Democratic refusals to create a truly comprehensive energy solution that includes provisions for domestic oil production and expanded use of nuclear power, 22 Republican members remained on the House floor after the lights and cameras had been turned off to demand that Congress return to work. While many Americans can't afford to fill their gas tanks for summer trips, House Democrats voted to ignore efforts to ensure energy independence to go on vacation.

The 'phantom session' held by Republicans after adjournment allowed GOP members to talk with visitors and bring them to the floor while highlighting the Democrats' refusals to put every viable option in the energy bill. After broadcasting information on the phantom session using cell phones and Twitter, the GOP scored a PR coup. Some members are considering returning during the summer to keep the pressure on the Democrats and force Congress to reconvene so that the House can pass a real energy solution for America.

We should hold the House accountable for every day spent without passage of a comprehensive energy bill, and there should be a Republican member on the House floor every day talking with the American people about the need for Congress to get back to work.