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.
