The Atlanta Car and Bike Show lasts for one day only, and on a recent hot summer afternoon, the line to get in snaked for hundreds of yards through the carpeted interior of the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta. Inside the cavernous hall, live hip-hop thundered from a stage as thousands of black Atlantans meandered through the displays, scoping tricked-out cars, motorcycles and one another.
But before attendees got to the cars and music, volunteers from the Obama campaign were doing their best to make sure they spent a moment on civics. Serena Bland and her husband, Adrian, paced up and down the entrance to the hall with Register to Vote signs, urging people toward the voter-registration booth a dozen feet away. There, Anderia Bishop chatted and joked and generally poured every ounce of her considerable enthusiasm into persuading even the skeptical or indifferent that registering would be the best five minutes they ever spent. "We're chasing people through the park," Bishop said of her local volunteer group's activities. "We're going out onto the corner. This is huge. Huge."
A young man approached the table and was pleasantly surprised to learn that felons in Georgia who've completed probation can vote. "If I'd a-known it was this easy," he said in disbelief, "I would have been done!" After completing the form, Bishop folded it and deposited it in an ersatz ballot box. The sign beside it read, Voting Is a Sacred Right and a Moral Obligation.
A middle-aged woman with her daughter in tow took an application and began to fill it out. Not content with just one, Bishop asked the daughter if she was registered to vote. Clad in a velour turquoise jumpsuit (with short-shorts), wearing hoop earrings and snapping her gum in near caricature of insouciant youth, she shook her head. Bishop then proffered a clipboard, but the daughter pouted, "It's too much to write."
"It's not too much to write," Bishop replied sweetly but firmly, the clipboard still extended. "It takes a minute. You're gonna be here while your mother's filling it out anyway."
With that, the young woman dropped her shoulders and, with the air of a suffering martyr, took hold of the clipboard and began to fill it out.
Bishop nodded her head in quiet triumph: add another to the tally.
As the daughter sauntered off to the bar after handing Bishop the completed form, I wasn't sure whether I'd just witnessed the birth of a new voter or an exercise in futility. For the Obama campaign, which is undertaking the largest voter-registration drive in the history of presidential campaigns, victory may very well hinge on the answer.
In 2004 George W. Bush carried Georgia by eighteen points. Though it has been sixteen years since a Democrat last won the state, this year, to the surprise of many, the Obama campaign has announced that Georgia is one of the twenty-three states it is targeting. By the time of the convention, it will be home to 160 field organizers in twenty offices. In June, when Obama campaign manager David Plouffe came to Washington to give a PowerPoint presentation to the press corps laying out the campaign's strategic vision for the election, he stressed that Georgia was home to 600,000 unregistered African-American voters, all of whom the campaign was going to work hard to register and turn out. "Our volume," he said of the nationwide voter-registration program, "is going to be enormous." (Obama will also likely be aided by the candidacy of Georgia native Bob Barr, running on the Libertarian ticket.)
The website Progress Illinois commissioned statistician Nate Silver to use his sophisticated electoral prediction model to estimate by just how much Obama would have to increase turnout among African-Americans in order to be competitive in some of the red states he has targeted. Silver concluded that, nationwide, each increase of 10 percent in African-American turnout from the 2004 baseline would result in about thirteen electoral votes. In Georgia, he predicted it would take a 50 percent increase in African-American turnout to put Obama at even odds to win.
Fifty percent is a massive increase: when you control for socioeconomics, African-Americans in the South vote at slightly higher levels than whites, and historically, increases in black turnout in the region have tended to provoke equal and opposite increases in white turnout for the opposing candidate. But then again, this is all uncharted territory. We've never had a black man one election away from the presidency. And there's never been a registration effort like Vote for Change, the name the Obama campaign has given to its fifty-state registration push.
At a panel at Netroots Nation in July, Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand described the philosophy behind the undertaking. "The way to change the political process," he said, "is to change the face of the electorate. Because it's not about getting Barack Obama elected, it's about whether we're gonna have a progressive majority."
It makes sense. The electorate is older, whiter and richer than the nation as a whole. As of 2004, there were 55 million unregistered eligible voters, among whom traditional Democratic constituencies are overrepresented. Eighty-two percent of those with bachelor's degrees are registered, while only 53 percent of those without a high school diploma are. Blacks trail whites by about ten percentage points in registration, and Latinos trail whites by almost 20 percent. Single women, who are reliably progressive, lag behind married women by thirteen points. A full eight out of ten voters over 55 are registered, but among 18- to 24-year-olds, the only age demographic Kerry won in 2004, that number is only six in ten.
Given all this, one would think that a new voter approach would be a no-brainer for Democrats. But it turns out that transmuting nonvoters into voters requires a tremendous amount of painstaking labor and a massive volunteer mobilization that few campaigns have the financial or organizational resources to pull off. Indeed, before Iowa, old hands were scoffing at Obama's plan to rely on new voters, particularly the young. But youth turnout in the caucus doubled, and young voters turned out (perhaps for the first time in American history) at the same rate as senior citizens did. Clearly, the Obama campaign had figured something out that others hadn't.
Vote for Change officially kicked off May 10, with 1,000 events around the country. At a rally in Chicago, several hundred supporters showed up at Plumbers Union Hall just west of the Loop, where Chicago Congressman Danny Davis warmly congratulated them on their presence: "You look so beautiful on a Saturday morning!"
Emil Jones, president of the State Senate and a mentor of Obama's, followed Davis on stage and homed in on the campaign's historical significance: "I'm 72 years old, and I certainly hope I live long enough," he said to soft amens of agreement. "This young man is going to be President, and I wanna be around to vote for him." Mayor Richard Daley, who had been billed as a headliner, entered the room in Saturday casual and received a standing ovation from the mostly black crowd. He offered appreciation right back. "Give yourself a round of applause!" he urged the crowd, and they happily obliged.
Voter-registration drives have a particular resonance for black Chicago. Indeed, for students of Chicago politics, Daley's rapturous reception contained a dissonant note of irony; twenty-five years earlier, Daley's first campaign for mayor ran up against an unprecedented registration drive that managed to elect his rival, Harold Washington, as the city's first black mayor.
After the death of Daley's father, Richard J. Daley, in 1976, Chicago's South Side Irish machine limped along weakly, and by 1983 a small coalition of the city's black activists and businessmen were confident enough to try to put one of their own in the mayor's office. They began to organize a voter-registration drive, but when they tried to persuade the talented and savvy Congressman Washington to run, he was skeptical of his chances. He told the activists that if they registered 50,000 new black voters, he'd run. Organizing through churches, community groups and local businesses, they added more than 100,000, and Washington triumphed over Daley and incumbent Jane Byrne in the three-way Democratic primary with an unprecedented 79 percent turnout of registered black voters. That fall he beat a white Republican to become mayor.
One of the black Chicagoans who played a role in Washington's victory was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who launched his first campaign for President the next year. In both 1984 and 1988, Jackson made voter registration a central part of his campaign strategy. His grassroots volunteers, ACORN, several unions and a coalition of civil rights groups would follow up after his events, signing up new voters and filling the rolls in state after state, especially in the South, where white Democratic politicians would later attribute their victories to what they euphemistically called the "new voter." All told, they registered between 2 million and 3 million voters in '84 and '88 combined.
Four years after Jackson's second run, a voter-registration organization called Project Vote recruited Barack Obama, just out of Harvard Law School, to spearhead another massive registration drive in Illinois. Founded in 1982 by liberal attorney Sandy Newman, Project Vote was conceived as a way to fight back against Reagan-era policies by registering the victims of those policies to vote as they stood in line at social service agencies. The project quickly grew in scale, registering poor and minority voters wherever they could be found. When Newman called Obama in 1992, Obama had just signed a contract for his first book and was hesitant about missing the deadline for his manuscript. "I didn't make any bones about the fact that this was sixty-hour-a-week work and we paid a pittance," recalls Newman. But Obama was sold.
When Obama arrived, black voter registration and turnout in Chicago were at their lowest points since record-keeping began. Over the course of a few months, Obama recruited staff and volunteers from black churches and community groups and helped train 700 deputy registrars. He put together a fundraising committee chaired by white politicos and black business leaders, and saturated black radio with ads declaring, "It's a power thing." Project Vote fliered black neighborhoods and sent volunteers door-to-door in high-rise housing projects; minority franchise owners of McDonald's restaurants allowed people to register voters on-site and donated paid radio time to the campaign. Other businesses, labor unions and foundations also kicked in funding.
Overall, the drive added an estimated 150,000 voters and, though nonpartisan, helped elect Carol Moseley Braun as the first black woman ever to serve in the US Senate. By the time the campaign was over, voter registrations in the nineteen predominantly black wards outnumbered those in the nineteen that were predominantly white, a first in Chicago history. Statewide, black registration went up 11 percent. It was, says Newman, "the most successful voter-registration effort in Chicago history."
Back at Plumbers Hall, the pep-rally feel gave way to the mundane logistics upon which voter registration thrives or fails. In Cook County, anyone who wants to collect registration forms must first be certified as a deputy registrar, and attaining that certification was really what the event was all about. A representative from the Cook County Clerk's office took the stage to administer the training. "You can't register people where alcohol is being served," she admonished the assembled cheerfully. "Now, turn to your manual."
Registering people to vote is harder than it might seem. That's by design. "The registration and the balloting system is constructed," says Frances Fox Piven, who has spent a career as an activist and academic advocating for opening up access to the ballot. "Somebody had to put it in place." In the wake of the Civil War, as Southern blacks and Northern immigrants suddenly flooded the voting booths, voter-registration requirements began cropping up, devised by established interests to make sure too many of the wrong types of people weren't voting. What was once a one-step process (people just showed up and voted) became a two-step process, and not surprisingly voting participation fell among the poor, immigrants and African-Americans--precisely the demographics those in power were attempting to keep out.
While the 1965 Voting Rights Act banned the most obviously racist uses of registration laws, many states have implemented policies, like voter-ID laws and felon disenfranchisement, that have the effect of suppressing turnout most acutely among poor, marginalized and nonwhite voters. The racial subtext of these policies is often crystal clear: opening the Alabama Constitutional Convention in 1901, which would include a provision disenfranchising anyone convicted of a crime of "moral turpitude," a legislator announced the convention's intent to "establish white supremacy in this State."
More recently, conservative state legislators have also sought to tie up would-be voter-registration drives in spools of red tape. In New Mexico, to cite just one example, a law pushed through by Republicans imposes draconian restrictions on any person or organization registering voters and entails a series of penalties for anyone who, intentionally or not, fails to comply. (The Brennan Center for Justice has filed suit, claiming the law is unconstitutional.) "What we've learned is, you have to develop a whole system to understand what the laws are," says Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote. "Then you manage people to those laws. It becomes a very difficult process."
Slater would know. No group has quite as much experience navigating this treacherous terrain as Project Vote. Over the past two decades Project Vote, along with its frequent partner ACORN, has added several million people to the rolls. (Because of this work, ACORN has become something of a right-wing bogeyman, and its voter-registration efforts are frequently targeted for investigation, even prosecution, by zealous Republican AGs.) Precisely because registration has grown so difficult and complicated, Slater thinks the Obama campaign is going to have a "challenging time" achieving its ambitious registration goals.
Given the amount of effort the GOP has put into making it hard for marginalized people to vote, one would imagine that Democrats would put equal force behind making it easy: as a moral imperative and a political opportunity. But as a general rule, they haven't. Many reforms that Democratic politicians have pushed, like Oregon's vote-by-mail regime, succeed chiefly in making it more convenient for middle-class people to vote and do little to increase participation among poor and minority voters. Indeed, one 2005 MIT study concluded that vote-by-mail laws actually increase socioeconomic biases in the electorate.
"If all that was going on was the game of party competition, then the Democrats should want to resist obstacles put in the way of black or low-income voters," says Piven. But, she notes, "there's a great deal of uncertainty and unease about these potential voter groups. They will push for policies that the party as a whole doesn't want.... Democrats don't really want this constituency except in emergencies."
That might be true. But politicians' disinclination to pursue enfranchisement as a strategy is probably also due to the considerable obstacles to mass registration that so many states have erected, and a campaign industry allergic to innovation. Says Newman, "I think in general most progressive politicians would like to see more poor and minority voters registered. They just don't know how to do it."
There is no magic to large-scale voter-registration drives; just numbers, technique and brute force. As Project Vote has learned, turning out the newly registered is possible--if you capture their data and contact them, by phone and mail and in person. (Even without follow-up contact, Newman estimates, as many as 70 percent of new registrants turn out.)
But finding the unregistered is a challenge, and with no definitive list, campaigns are left to fish in promising waters: sometimes they get nibbles; sometimes they don't. Since the process is so inherently inefficient, it's simply cost-prohibitive to pay people to register voters, when those dollars can be spent on advertising, mail or door-to-door outreach to registered voters. The only way a campaign can implement a registration drive on a sufficient scale is to make sure that volunteers do the lion's share of the work.
That's the reason the Obama campaign can take on Vote for Change: throughout the primary, it built a nationwide organization that not only draws in volunteers by the thousands but trains and empowers them to become de facto organizers.
The vision is laid out in a 368-page manual that the campaign assembled during the waning months of the primaries and has distributed to each office. It steps through running a grassroots operation from day one to election day. "'Respect. Empower. Include.' guides everything we do," the manual stresses, noting the field organization's internal motto. "Empowerment requires creating structure that allows all members of the team to make this campaign his or her own. We must go beyond simply assigning volunteers tasks, to allowing well-trained and supported volunteers to have real ownership within the campaign."
In the abstract this can sound like anodyne management-speak, but on the ground it's real. "We didn't run a primary campaign where we said, Come and volunteer but we want you to stay as a volunteer with a tangential connection to the campaign," says Jason Green, who runs Vote for Change. "It was very much the inclusion piece that allowed us to get to this point. We have volunteer leaders that are managing other volunteers."
On a Saturday morning in a bucolic park in Roswell, Georgia, north of Atlanta, I see this in action. Tamara Stevens and Sherryl Harvey are staffing a table underneath a concrete gazebo festooned with flags, Obama schwag and a sign that says Register to Vote. They're the volunteer leaders of the GA-400 for Obama group (the name comes from the highway that runs through the northern Fulton County suburbs), which boasts 350 members. And they're a microcosm of the Obama coalition: Stevens, the volunteer coordinator, is a white upper-middle-class small-business woman and lifelong Republican; Harvey, the team liaison, is a therapist who moved to Atlanta from Trinidad with her parents when she was a child.
When I arrive, Stevens is arguing with a libertarian neighbor about Obama's tax policy, about which she displays an impressive command. I ask her what prompted her conversion to Obama: "I'm not gonna lie," she says with a laugh. "It was Oprah."
She and Harvey run the operation with a combination of good cheer and businesslike efficiency: they've purchased Obama bumper stickers and pins in bulk, which they resell at retail prices, using the profit to fund the group's incidental costs. The table is spread with pens and clipboards (with an emergency cellphone number affixed to the back), all neatly aligned with reams of voter-registration cards, bottles of water and snack bars. Every Saturday and Sunday, they set up this table (what they called, in a revealing bit of organizer lingo, their "staging area") just across from a local farmers' market.
Throughout the morning, members of the GA-400, who've been alerted through e-mail, MyBarackObama.com and phone calls about the registration activities, shuffle through. When one of the regulars shows up, having failed to RSVP online, Stevens chastises her good-naturedly. "You never RSVP, and I never get you on my sheet. I'm like an anal teacher: you need to be on my attendance sheet."
Those who've already been trained sign in, grab clipboards and are directed by Stephanie Hester, the locations coordinator, to one of about a dozen high-visibility registration areas around the metro region. (Hester calls local businesses ahead of time to ask if they'll permit a table in front of their storefronts.) Those new to voter registration, like three gangly white teenagers and an elegant black woman, are assembled around the table, where Harvey gives a ten-minute training session, explaining what information is required on the forms and the stipulations of Georgia law.
There isn't a single paid staff member overseeing any aspect of the operation.
Roswell is affluent and Republican, so many of the volunteers are sent to the far reaches of the metro area to find the unregistered. Midway through the morning, I hop in the car with Hester and a few other volunteers and drive to Five Points, a neighborhood in the heart of downtown Atlanta. On a hot Saturday afternoon, it's bustling with shoppers, preachers, panhandlers and hustlers, a scene reminiscent of Times Square in the 1980s: vibrant and seedy at the same time.
Here, the entire undertaking seems a steeply uphill battle. Somewhere near 300,000 new voters were registered in Georgia in the run-up to this year's primary, which means the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked and many of those who remain unregistered are what might be called the hard cases.
The four volunteers fan out on Peachtree Street outside the MARTA stop, hawking registration in a manner not unlike the gentlemen down the block in suits and bow ties hawking the Final Call. We walk through a cluster of men playing three-card monte, and when Hester, who's petite, energetic and fearless, asks one if he's registered, he cuts her off, saying emphatically, "The Klan is gonna get him!" On the corner, we approach a man in a guayabera shirt and white brimmed hat who is preaching to no one in particular. "Obama is not the hope," he tells us, declining the clipboards. "God is the hope." Two young men walk by pushing strollers. Daniel Hanley, a young white man in a Got Hope? T-shirt asks if they'd like to register. They shake their heads and tell him they're both on parole. Hester then asks the Nation of Islam emissaries sharing the block if they'd like to register. "Sister," one responds sharply, "I've got a question for you. Do you think Obama is strong enough to deal with the Illuminati?"
Occasionally, our group nabs a new registrant: Hester persuades a young man loitering outside a clothing store to register after a ten-minute conversation, though his capitulation seems motivated more by interest in Hester than by politics. But it's a scattershot endeavor at best, nothing like the steady flow of registrants filing past the table over at the Car and Bike Show, where I later learned Bishop had managed to register 205 people in a single day.
Even with the hit-and-miss approach, the GA-400 volunteers nabbed 180 registrants. All in all it was "not bad," according to Charlie Anderson, an organizer with the campaign based in Atlanta. "That's just OK for them," he texted me later. "GA 400 has gotten 365 in a day before. Most importantly, both will be at it again tomorrow."
At one level, the voter-registration push is a campaign strategy like any other: running ads in certain states at certain times, choosing and crafting a message, deciding which issues to emphasize. Like the rest of the campaign, there is a singular, overriding focus: winning. And in many of the closest states--New Mexico, for instance, where Kerry lost by 11,620 votes, or Ohio, home to several massive universities and millions of black voters--Vote for Change could provide the margin of victory.
But the bigger question is whether it will make a difference, when it's time to govern, that electoral victory came thanks largely to millions of new young, black, Hispanic and poor voters. The academic literature on the topic gives some reason to hope that it will. In 2005 James Avery and Mark Peffley published a paper studying the effects of the composition of the electorate on welfare policy. What they found confirmed Sandy Newman's initial intuition: in places where working-class and poor people vote at similar levels to upper-middle-class voters, politicians are less likely to adopt strict welfare-eligibility requirements.
This is the signature principle that underlies Project Vote, as well as Piven's lifetime of activism: that a democratic society with an enfranchised constituency of the poor and marginalized will look very different from the status quo. But unless these new voters are somehow organized and capable of asserting themselves after the election, it'll be all too easy simply to take them for granted.
At a panel on the Obama campaign's organizing approach at Netroots Nation, Ohio general election director Jeremy Bird relayed an anecdote that gives a brief glimmer of what this new enfranchisement might mean for our politics.
After the Democratic primary in South Carolina, one of the most active Obama volunteers in the city of Florence, a 37-year-old attorney named Steve Wukela, decided to run for mayor against a thirteen-year incumbent named Frank Willis. Wukela ran at Willis from his left. With a motto of "Real Democrat for Real Change," he castigated Willis for having donated to George W. Bush and for standing by "while sales taxes were increased on the poorest among us, shifting the burden to those least able to afford it." Wukela activated the volunteers he'd met going door-to-door for Obama, implementing a voter-contact model he'd been trained in by the campaign and reaching out to new voters. "Everyone said, Steve, that's nice, the Obama campaign was nice, but you probably shouldn't try to unseat a thirteen-year incumbent," explained Bird. "You're getting a little ahead of yourself."
But there was a constituency for change, thanks in part to the voter-registration activities of the Obama campaign, which had registered 8,000 new voters in Florence during the primary. And when votes in the mayoral election were tallied, Wukela had eked out an upset. By one vote.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/why-this-fifty-five-year_b_105061.html
This is a great day for those of us who have been fighting for Senator Obama! I'm a good example of why he'll win in November. I'm the least typical Obama supporter. And there are many more like me.
I cut my political teeth in the seventies through the early eighties as an organizer in the antiabortion religious right. I'm a fifty-five year old white man who has been a conservative most of my life. I've been a Republican activist who campaigned for McCain in 2000. I'm a big fan of the military. My son served in the Marines. If Obama can reach me he can reach anyone.
My support for Obama has cost me friends. For instance the Bush family gave one of my recent military-related books (Keeping Faith-A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps) a ringing endorsement. After Laura Bush read an excerpt out on Meet The Press sales skyrocketed. I probably won't get too many more of those sorts of endorsements. But the chips are down and the presidential choice this year is too important not to not fight for.
We can't afford McCain. He'd be a president with a desire to be vindicated and "win" at all costs in Iraq. Iraq never attacked us. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The terrorists were not in Iraq while Hussein was in charge. We opened the door for them. We aren't bringing democracy to Iraq. This was a war of dumb choice launched in a part of the world that can't ever be fixed by our military.
The next president will inherit the mess George W. Bush created with a big assist from Senator McCain. Above all we need a completely fresh start. And of only Senator Obama can provide that.
McCain has taken his lack of judgment about Iraq to the next level. McCain won't do do what is good for America, or even good for our military men and women. For instance, he is against the new GI Bill that would give fair educational benefits to our men and women. McCain doesn't want to give them anything that might entice them to do anything but go to war, again and again and again. McCain serves the warrior god of his warrior ancestors, not America's best interests.
As I see it our choice is between a heroic old man whose time has long past and who will perpetuate failed policy, and a brilliant, openhearted new founding father of the new post-racial, post-divided America the likes of which we have not seen.
How do my old pro-life views square with Obama's pro-choice beliefs? Very well. Today when I listen to Obama speak (and to his remarkable wife, Michelle) what I hear is a world view that nurtures life. Obama is trying to lead this country to a place where the intrinsic worth of each individual is celebrated. He is a leader who believes in hope, the future, trying to save our planet and providing a just and good life for everyone. This makes him someone who is actually pro-life as opposed to Bush who paid lip service to right wing religion but did the opposite of nurturing life at every turn, including senselessly killing our soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
The society that Obama is calling us to join him in striving for is a place wherein life would be valued not just talked about. As he said in his speech delivered on February 6 in New Orleans, "Too often, we lose our sense of common destiny; that understanding that we are all tied together; that when a woman has less than nothing in this country, that makes us all poorer." Obama was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but his words also apply to our overall view of ourselves.
How do my pro-military views square with Obama? Very well.
Republicans may talk about patriotism but through their stubborn support for Bush's Iraq war they have become our military's worst enemies. And many of us in the military family have had it with the Republican's bellicose nonsense -- Bush's "Bring it on!" and now McCain's version; "I'll chase bin Laden to the gates of hell!" and "We'll win!" Enough is enough.
Obama comes to us from outside the system that has produced our present multiple crises of wars of choice and a failing economy. He does what all truly great leaders do: he speaks to the soul in plain self-revealing words of hope.
I think we all vote on an emotional level, whatever we say about our "reasons." And I know that I'm not the only tired culture warrior from the right who feels relieved and uplifted and -- most importantly -- believes Obama when I hear him talk about bringing us together to shape a better future. I also believe that he is an authentic man of faith. His sincere inclusion of Christian faith in his conversation with us rings true to this preacher's kid.
Obama touches me. He has a prophetic authenticity that reminds me of W.E.B. Du Bois' prayers that Du Bois sometimes wrote for his students. Obama also brings a touch of Billy Graham with him to the podium. His is a deeply spiritual call. And his critics that have dismissed Obama's ability to inspire as "mere words" are dead wrong.
We have never needed inspiration more. And we have never needed a president to inspire the rest of the world more. Every international opinion poll shows that Obama is not only the most popular American leader, perhaps ever, but more popular than any other world leader today.
Obama offers civility. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion. Obama does not play on our fears. Electing Obama will also tell the world--and most importantly ourselves--that we can grow, learn and move on when it comes to race. We can heal our wounds. We can set an example again.
Obama is worth fighting for. He is worth losing old friends for. History has given us an unlikely lifeline. Do we have the decency and sense to open our hearts? What a great moment this is!
This is a good article on Bloomberg.com.
Pelosi says its the candidate with the most delegates get the nomination.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aPwXyHat6x9A
Obama '08
This is an interesting interview. Perhaps Senator Clinton's surrogate should show this to Senator Clinton as a reminder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYebJkM-tVY&feature=related
How Hillary's latest math hurts the party.
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Give credit where it's due: Hillary Clinton has shown grit and determination in finishing out the race. She has proved herself a strong campaigner. And in the week since West Virginia, she has stopped the cheap shots that had marred her campaign this year.
But Clinton has continued with one claim that could have a pernicious effect on the Democrats' chances in November. While she knows that the nomination is determined by delegates, Hillary insists on saying at every opportunity that she is winning the popular vote. And she has now taken to touting the new HBO movie "Recount," which chronicles the Florida fiasco of eight years ago. Everyone can agree that the primary calendar needs reform. But popular-vote pandering is poison for Democrats. For a party scarred by the experience of 2000, when Al Gore received 500,000 more popular votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency, this argument is sure to make it harder to unite and put bitter feelings aside.
Oh, and it's not true.
Let me go through the numbers without making your head spin.
After Kentucky and Oregon, Obama has an official popular vote lead of 441,545.
This does not include Iowa (where Obama first broke from the pack), Nevada (where Hillary won the popular vote narrowly), Maine (where Obama won easily) or Washington state (another strong Obama state). Why? Because these caucus states don't officially report their popular votes. But if we're going to truly count all the votes, official and nonofficial, as Hillary advocates, you can't very well not include caucus states.
Adding in the unofficial tally from caucus states, as estimated by ++realclearpolitics.com++ based on official caucus turnout and the number of local delegates selected at the precinct level, that gives Obama a lead of 551,767.
Now we come to Florida and Michigan, whose popular votes Hillary says should be counted. The argument for counting them is no better than for counting the caucus states (and maybe worse, considering that these states violated party rules by moving their primaries up on the calendar, and no one campaigned there). But for the sake of argument let's count 'em. That gives Hillary a lead of 71,314.
HILLARY WINS POPULAR VOTE!
Not so fast. If the Democratic National Committee completes its expected settlement on May 31, Florida and Michigan will each get half of their votes counted. Translated to popular votes, that would subtract about 325,000 votes from Hillary, putting Obama back into the lead.
Beyond not being official numbers, there's another problem with counting Michigan in these totals. Obama wasn't on the ballot there. You can say this was his own choice, but that doesn't change the fact that had he been on the Michigan ballot he would have received a lot of popular votes. How many?
Try 238,168. That's the number of Michiganders who voted for "uncommitted." Were they possibly genuinely abstaining? Maybe a few hundred of them at most. The rest were clearly Obama supporters who launched a grass-roots campaign. Everyone in Michigan knew on January 15 that a vote for "uncommitted" was a vote for Obama.
That means that by a generous definition of popular votes (and remember, Clinton wants to enfranchise as many people as possible in her count), Obama leads by about 166,000 votes.
With a big win in Puerto Rico, Clinton could possibly erase that margin (plus several thousand more that Obama is expected to net in Montana and South Dakota). She could then proclaim that with the help of Puerto Rican voters who cannot vote in a general election, she is the popular vote winner.
The shorthand many Clinton supporters are already taking into the summer is that she won the popular vote but had the nomination "taken away" (as Joy Behar said on "The View") by a man.
What a helpful message for uniting the Democratic Party.
If the Obama people have any sense, they will demand in their negotiations with the Clintonites that Hillary cease and desist in her specious claim to have won the most popular votes.
Given that more than 35 million voters took part in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, the math games on both sides look awfully silly. Everyone should agree to call it a tie.
© 2008
May 21, 2008 02:53 PM
Will Thomas is an Associate News Editor and Political Reporter at the Huffington Post. Previously, he worked as a researcher for Talking Points Memo and TPMmuckraker. He lives in New York.
It's refreshing when someone makes the effort to advance the discussion of this year's election beyond debating a black/white divide. So when that someone is oft-mentioned potential Democratic running mate Jim Webb, it's worth taking note.
Webb appeared on Morning Joe today to speak about his newest book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, and to dodge questions about whether he would accept a spot on Barack Obama's presidential ticket. But since the Kentucky primary had just provided pundits with fodder to discuss the ever-popular "Does Obama have a working whites problem?" Webb weighed in on the election results and his Scots-Irish heritage.
The Virginia senator suggested that race is indeed a factor in Obama's poor performance among white voters along the east of the country, saying, "we shouldn't be surprised by the way they're voting now." But he bristled at what he suggested is a simplistic interpretation of the issue. "When I hear people say this is racism, my back gets up a little bit, because that's my cultural group."Webb sought to explain what motivates Scots-Irish Americans. First, says Webb, it's not a generic race or geographic label, but rather "a very powerful cultural group that's always underestimated, and it's not always in the Appalachian mountains." And the issue is not Obama himself, who Webb thinks is "saying a lot of good things that will appeal to this cultural group in time."
Rather, Webb -- whose previous book Born Fighting explores the effect of Scots-Irish culture on America's formation -- argued that Scots-Irish voters' unwillingness to support Obama is less about the candidate himself, than about a sense of injustice among the community manifested by the government assistance afforded to minorities in the post-Civil Rights Era:
This isn't Selma, 1965. This is a result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white, and these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. And they're basically saying let's pay attention to what has happened to this cultural group in terms of opportunities.
Webb even drew a parallel between this bloc and African Americans, suggesting that their grievances with and needs from the federal government are remarkably similar.
Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have long history and they both missed the boat when it came to the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive. There's a saying in the Appalachian mountains that they say to one another, and it's, "if you're poor and white, you're out of sight." ... If this cultural group could get at the same table as black America you could rechange populist American politics. Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.
If this cultural group could get at the same table as black America you could rechange populist American politics. Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.
A powerful coalition indeed. If only there were two politicians who understood these cultures, and had the desire and capacity to unity them for a common cause...
[WATCH -- race discussion starts at 4:30]
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The Huffington Post | May 20, 2008 09:52 AM
Yesterday, Time's Joe Klein noted that he could find no evidence that Sen. Barack Obama had ever specifically said he would negotiate with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
On Friday, I promised to check into whether Obama had ever said that he would negotiate--specifically, by name -- with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Indeed, according to the crack Time Magazine research department and the Obama campaign, he never has. He did say that he would negotiate with the Iranian leadership -- but, on matters of foreign policy and Iran's nuclear program, the guy in charge is the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As of today, John McCain was still accusing Obama of wanting to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. Why doesn't the McCain campaign and other assorted Republicans ever accuse Obama of wanting to negotiate with Khamenei? Well, because Khamenei isn't quite the flagrant anti-Semite Ahmadinejad is...and, as we keep hearing, Obama has a Jewish problem.
Later in the day, Klein confronted McCain with this question at a press conference. For a foreign policy "expert," McCain clearly has a pattern of getting the basic facts wrong. McCain insisted that ultimate political authority in Iran rests with Ahmadinejad -- even mocking Klein when he challenged him on it. In fact, according to the CIA's World Factbook, ultimate political authority in Iran rests with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, not the president.
Here's the exchange:
KLEIN: I've done some research, and um - MCCAIN: I have too.KLEIN: Also checked, also checked with the Obama campaign and he never, he's never sai -- mentioned Ahmadinejad directly by name. He did say he would negotiate with the leaders, but as you know - Ayatollah,MCCAIN: (Laughing) Ahmadinejad is, was the leader.KLEIN: But if -MCCAIN: Maybe I'm mistaken.KLEIN: Maybe you are, because -MCCAIN: Maybe. I don't think so though.KLEIN: The Supreme, you know, according to most diplomatic experts, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the guy who's in charge of Iranian foreign policy and also in charge of the nuclear program, but you never mention him. Do you, you know, um, why do you always keep talking about Ahmadinejad since he doesn't have power in that, in that realm?MCCAIN: Oh I thin-Again, I respectfully disagree. When he's the person that comes to the United Nations and declares his country's policy is the extermination of the state of Israel, quote, in his words, wipe them off of the map, then I know that he is speaking for the Iranian government and articulating their policy and he was elected and is running for reelection as the leader of that country. Yes sir, go ahead.NEW REPORTER: One more quest-MCCAIN: I mean, the fact is he's the acknowledged leader of that country and you may disagree, but that's a uh, that's your right to do so, but I think if you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they'd know. Go ahead. Or anyone who's well-versed in the issue. Ilan Goldenberg of the National Security Network notes:Let's be clear: Iran has a very complex system of government with varying institutions, but at the top of it sits Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who essentially has only accountable to the Council of Guardians made up of clerics, many of whom are appointed by Khamenei. So, Ahmadinejad is not the leader. And as the Council on Foreign Relations explains, especially in the area of foreign policy, Ahmadinejad has very little influence. On top of that as Klein points out, the President's job is to educate the public on questions of policy. So if the "average American" thinks that Ahmadinejad is the ultimate leader of Iran, it's up to the President to dissuade them of this notion - not reinforce it. Back in 2002 more then half of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and President Bush did nothing to disprove this assumption (In fact, while never directly claiming that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Administration did everything it could to reinforce the notion). That doesn't mean our policy should be based on those false assumptions.
MCCAIN: I have too.
KLEIN: Also checked, also checked with the Obama campaign and he never, he's never sai -- mentioned Ahmadinejad directly by name. He did say he would negotiate with the leaders, but as you know - Ayatollah,
MCCAIN: (Laughing) Ahmadinejad is, was the leader.
KLEIN: But if -
MCCAIN: Maybe I'm mistaken.
KLEIN: Maybe you are, because -
MCCAIN: Maybe. I don't think so though.
KLEIN: The Supreme, you know, according to most diplomatic experts, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the guy who's in charge of Iranian foreign policy and also in charge of the nuclear program, but you never mention him. Do you, you know, um, why do you always keep talking about Ahmadinejad since he doesn't have power in that, in that realm?
MCCAIN: Oh I thin-Again, I respectfully disagree. When he's the person that comes to the United Nations and declares his country's policy is the extermination of the state of Israel, quote, in his words, wipe them off of the map, then I know that he is speaking for the Iranian government and articulating their policy and he was elected and is running for reelection as the leader of that country. Yes sir, go ahead.
NEW REPORTER: One more quest-
MCCAIN: I mean, the fact is he's the acknowledged leader of that country and you may disagree, but that's a uh, that's your right to do so, but I think if you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they'd know. Go ahead. Or anyone who's well-versed in the issue.
Ilan Goldenberg of the National Security Network notes:
Let's be clear: Iran has a very complex system of government with varying institutions, but at the top of it sits Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who essentially has only accountable to the Council of Guardians made up of clerics, many of whom are appointed by Khamenei. So, Ahmadinejad is not the leader. And as the Council on Foreign Relations explains, especially in the area of foreign policy, Ahmadinejad has very little influence. On top of that as Klein points out, the President's job is to educate the public on questions of policy. So if the "average American" thinks that Ahmadinejad is the ultimate leader of Iran, it's up to the President to dissuade them of this notion - not reinforce it. Back in 2002 more then half of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and President Bush did nothing to disprove this assumption (In fact, while never directly claiming that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Administration did everything it could to reinforce the notion). That doesn't mean our policy should be based on those false assumptions.
On top of that as Klein points out, the President's job is to educate the public on questions of policy. So if the "average American" thinks that Ahmadinejad is the ultimate leader of Iran, it's up to the President to dissuade them of this notion - not reinforce it. Back in 2002 more then half of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and President Bush did nothing to disprove this assumption (In fact, while never directly claiming that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Administration did everything it could to reinforce the notion). That doesn't mean our policy should be based on those false assumptions.
If I can find who is in charge of Iran, seems like McCain need to read Wikipedia.
The Supreme Leader is elected by the Assembly of Experts, which is also in charge of overseeing the Supreme Leader, and has the power to dismiss and replace him at any time. As the name indicates, the Supreme Leader is considered as the ultimate head of the Iranian political and governmental establishment, above that of Iran's president. According to the constitution, he has the last say in internal and foreign policies, control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and control of state broadcast and others (see below).
The President of Iran, who is elected by the public vote, is the Executive President (Head of government). In 1989, the Prime Minister's office was merged with the figurehead President's office to form the current post of President of Iran. However, certain executive powers, such as commandment of the armed forces and declaration of war and peace, remain in the hands of the Supreme Leader.[4]
What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
the liberal media
by Eric Aterman
Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.
Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not [calling chaos in Iraq a civil war] was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.
2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.
3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving [Obama] a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight."
4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather's story on George W. Bush's draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS's parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book's publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS's own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.
5. Its members are so in thrall to the powerful conservative Republican figures they cover that they make up excuses for their self-serving behavior. Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, Mark Halperin, former political director of ABC News, now a top analyst for ABC and Time, offered his views on the reason Senate minority leader Trent Lott was resigning: "I think that this is a true 'wants to spend more time with his family' case." Halperin was apparently unaware that Lott--whose politically connected brother-in-law was recently indicted on bribery charges--himself failed to offer this lamest of excuses and also that his resignation came just in time to avoid the enactment of a tough new ethics law relating to retiring legislators and their future lobbying practices.
6. Its members ignore the substance of politics and instead focus obsessively on atmospherics, leaving voters clueless about the politicians for whom they are expected to vote. "I've always felt that we did a disservice to voters and the public by filling the news hole with too much horse race and not enough information to let them make a decision on who the best President would be," Halperin explains in a new book. "We should examine a candidate's public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance," he then added in a widely quoted mea culpa on the New York Times op-ed page. Alas, within a week of writing those words, Halperin published two pieces on the Time website that focused exclusively on the various campaigns, with nary a substance-related syllable in either one.
Stung by the news that two aides once lobbied for the Burmese junta, John McCain last week rolled out a sweeping new conflict-of-interest policy for his campaign, requiring all staffers to fill out questionnaires identifying past or current clients that "could be embarrassing for the senator." Aides say that McCain was furious over the Burma connection (which he learned from a NEWSWEEK story) and was "adamant" about banning campaign workers from serving as foreign agents or getting paid for lobbying work.
But the fallout may not be over. One top campaign official affected by the new policy is national finance co-chair Tom Loeffler, a former Texas congressman whose lobbying firm has collected nearly $15 million from Saudi Arabia since 2002 and millions more from other foreign and corporate interests, including a French aerospace firm seeking Pentagon contracts. Loeffler last month told a reporter "at no time have I discussed my clients with John McCain." But lobbying disclosure records reviewed by NEWSWEEK show that on May 17, 2006, Loeffler listed meeting McCain along with the Saudi ambassador to "discuss US-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia relations."
Another potential problem: Loeffler's firm started paying $15,000 a month last summer to one of its lobbyists, Susan Nelson, after she left to become McCain's full-time finance director, said a source familiar with the arrangement (who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters). Campaign officials were told the payments were "severance" for Nelson and that they ended by November. But in "February or March," Loeffler rehired Nelson as a consultant to "help him with his clients" while she continued on the McCain payroll, according to a campaign official who asked not to be identified talking about personnel matters. Federal election law prohibits any outside entity from subsidizing the income of campaign workers. McCain's officials say they have been assured that Nelson did actual work for Loeffler's lobbying clients—and that the payments were proper. But after NEWSWEEK posed questions about the matter, they confirmed Loeffler's resignation and the termination of Nelson's consulting contract. (Loeffler and Nelson did not respond to requests for comment.) Also last week, energy adviser Eric Burgeson was ousted.
If other staffers are not in compliance with the new rules, "they will become so or they will leave the campaign," said McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker. She also accused the Obama campaign of an "absurd double standard" because it has not disclosed the names of all advisers who may have lobbying ties. Responded Obama spokesman Bill Burton: "Washington lobbyists don't give money to our campaign, and they're not going to run our White House."
Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is steering the candidate’s wealthy supporters away from independent Democratic groups, calling into question what had been expected to be the groups’ central role in this year’s Democratic offensive against Senator John McCain. Obama’s national finance chairwoman, Chicago hotel mogul Penny Pritzker, told supporters at a national finance committee meeting in Indianapolis May 2, and in other conversations, not to give money to the groups, people familiar with her comments said. “From the beginning of this race Obama has told supporters that if they want to help his effort, they should do so through his campaign,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who confirmed that Pritzker has told donors not to give to the groups. “And he means exactly what he says.” Most presidential candidates say they don't encourage the outside groups, and donors are accustomed to taking those words with a grain of salt. The candidates' words are typically seen as mere legal defenses against allegations that the campaigns are illicitly coordinating with outside groups. The donors have been considering entreaties from Progressive Media USA, run by conservative-journalist turned liberal media critic David Brock; from former Clinton aide John Podesta’s Fund for America; and from America Votes, a group backed by billionaire George Soros that focuses on voter mobilization, among other efforts. But in recent days, major donors have begun to conclude that Obama is serious in trying to cut off funds to the outside groups. “It’s given donors pause,” said one prominent Democratic donor of Pritzker’s words. Donors and Democratic activists have been quietly debating Obama’s motives: Is he simply interested in keeping his Democratic efforts within his campaign, which is so well funded he doesn’t need outside help? Or is he, as some believe, cutting off funds to groups whose leaders — Brock and Podesta — some Obama aides view as too tightly linked to Clinton? In either case, Pritzker’s words are the latest in Obama’s remarkably swift and complete consolidation of Democratic Party power. It’s an unprecedented seizure of control that has built him, over the course of a year, the most powerful field organization and the largest financial network in American politics, leaving many existing structures — traditional party organizations in many states, the Clintons’ long-nurtured national network — in the dust. Just last summer, Matt Bai’s widely accepted analysis identified the “billionaires” and the “bloggers” as the key, emergent players in the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. But Obama has marginalized both groups. Pritzker’s words are part of a move to keep Obama’s grip on the sole important funnel of Democratic money this year. And his campaign has largely ignored the existing network of liberal bloggers, and actively opposes their embrace of fierce partisanship. “Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship,” the blogger Matt Stoller wrote recently of Obama’s “consolidation of the party,” which he called “stunning.” Many of the figures Obama has shut out have, sometimes grudgingly, embraced the sheer effectiveness of his organization, and his potential to create a lasting new Democratic majority. The open question is whether Obama’s movement is about something more than the candidate, and whether it will cohere after he wins or loses in November.
“Will the Obama movement be a real movement that pushes its leader to keep his promises?” Micah Sifry wrote recently on the blog TechPresident. “Or will it be more of a personalized movement of followers attracted to a charismatic star?” Obama’s campaign has been remarkably effective so far this year at maintaining a coherent message, built around Obama’s biography and his appeal for a new kind of politics. Part of his success has been tight message discipline: The campaign has been virtually leak-free, and the line of control from Obama to his chief strategist David Axelrod to campaign manager (and Axelrod business partner) David Plouffe is unchallenged. Many involved in the independent efforts find it hard to quibble with that success, and may have second thoughts about continuing that work over Obama’s explicit objection. “If he were to make a definitive statement, we’d have to think hard about it,” said one. The campaign’s opposition to the outside groups is, donors and activists said, being felt more sharply by the groups established to attack McCain through television advertising, as the lavishly funded Media Fund attacked Bush in 2004. Brock, the chairman of Progressive Media USA, declined to comment on Obama’s stance. Martin Frost, the president of America Votes, also suggested that the Obama campaign stance had had more impact on media groups than on ones focused on turnout. “We’re continguing with our fundraising and things have been going well for us,” he said. “You really need to ask someone who’s dealing with the media aspect.” But Democrats who support the work of the media 527s say Obama’s making a mistake. Progressive Media USA has aired anti-McCain television ads and developed a website intended to be a hub for negative information about McCain. “Obama needs a baseline to the melody of his positive message,” said a Democratic strategist who backs the group’s aims.
This is a must see. Answer to the Fox new lies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8SZvWzP58s
My sources inside the Obama campaign say they currently have more than 800,000 registered users on my.barackobama.com, the campaign's custom-built social network platform, which has helped spawn the planning of more than 50,000 offline events and the creation of more than 10,000 local or themed groups in support of the campaign. They also claim more than 1.5 million individual donors (no, they didn't give me a more exact number).
Whether Obama wins or loses in the fall, this network is going to be a game-changer. So I'm planning to spend more time digging in and writing about its internal dynamics, culture and leaders. People may not realize this enough, but presidential campaigns that bill themselves as movements often have a real movement element, and the seeds they plant and forces they unleash can have dramatic effects. The Goldwater campaign of 1964 was the spawning ground of the New Right. The McGovern campaign of 1972 brought a new generation of Democratic activists into national politics (including people like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Gary Hart, for starters). The Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 helped propel African-Americans into power in cities all over America (think of the David Dinkins success in NYC in 1989). And the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 not only propelled him into his leadership position at the Democratic National Committee, but it also created a new wave of internet-savvy organizers who are everywhere in this cycle.
Will the Obama movement be a real movement that pushes its leader to keep his promises? Or will it be more of a personalized movement of followers attracted to a charismatic star? Will the network talk laterally and organize pressure upward? We don't know the full answer yet.
At this point, I'm just collecting string. This comment on the Obama blog last night, which picked up on my post about the potential of the world live web, is pretty interesting:
After reading the late night open thread I had to go and visit Hillarys website. I do that from time to time to see what is going on over there. Frankly I find Hillarys site over stimulating and yet extremely boring. There is so much going on all of reminds me of a poorly constructed sales brochure. Hillblazer, FactHub, Hillary Hub, and a blog that is censored. It looks exciting but managages to disapoint. There are so many colors and flashing lights on that website you feel like you are at a carnival and you know you're about to lose money or dignity. Her website is not constantly changing and providing information up front. You have to search her site to find the delegate count because she does not want her supporters to care about that. She does not show the map of states because she does not want her supporters to see the drastic difference in the amount of contests won. Her blog does not have devoted regulars like lace, bahamasforobama, or SaSa. She is only on six web communities-obama is everywhere. We have blog posting comments often go into the the high hundreds, she rarely breakes 150 yes she has had more traffic in the past day or two because of the primary but check back on friday and you will see a significant drop off. There is no question that Obama gets significantly more comment postings.This blog is streamlined and color coordinated, it is constantly updated and visually pleasing to the eye. It is consistant with the use of the logo, and entertaining. It allows it users to freely communicate with each other and the campaign. It is filled with information both from the campaign and the users. We dont censor, you can tell by the amount of trolls lurking throughout, some being very destructive.Importantly this blog is filled with hope, encourage, a sense of community, we share and we are charitable to each other, and it is all played out on this blog. Yes, we are unique. Guys I just came back from Indiana I drove thirteen hours each way. Things were so intense there I did not get a chance to blog while I was there. I did get to see our leader and next president in Indianapolis. I took some great pictures and I plan to post later when I write about the trip.
After reading the late night open thread I had to go and visit Hillarys website. I do that from time to time to see what is going on over there. Frankly I find Hillarys site over stimulating and yet extremely boring. There is so much going on all of reminds me of a poorly constructed sales brochure. Hillblazer, FactHub, Hillary Hub, and a blog that is censored. It looks exciting but managages to disapoint. There are so many colors and flashing lights on that website you feel like you are at a carnival and you know you're about to lose money or dignity.
Her website is not constantly changing and providing information up front. You have to search her site to find the delegate count because she does not want her supporters to care about that. She does not show the map of states because she does not want her supporters to see the drastic difference in the amount of contests won. Her blog does not have devoted regulars like lace, bahamasforobama, or SaSa. She is only on six web communities-obama is everywhere. We have blog posting comments often go into the the high hundreds, she rarely breakes 150 yes she has had more traffic in the past day or two because of the primary but check back on friday and you will see a significant drop off. There is no question that Obama gets significantly more comment postings.
This blog is streamlined and color coordinated, it is constantly updated and visually pleasing to the eye. It is consistant with the use of the logo, and entertaining. It allows it users to freely communicate with each other and the campaign. It is filled with information both from the campaign and the users. We dont censor, you can tell by the amount of trolls lurking throughout, some being very destructive.
Importantly this blog is filled with hope, encourage, a sense of community, we share and we are charitable to each other, and it is all played out on this blog. Yes, we are unique.
Guys I just came back from Indiana I drove thirteen hours each way. Things were so intense there I did not get a chance to blog while I was there. I did get to see our leader and next president in Indianapolis. I took some great pictures and I plan to post later when I write about the trip.
The "our leader" stuff always makes me wonder about the self-direction of the Obama movement. On the other hand, if the campaign isn't censoring comments, that's a good sign. Frankly, I don't think we know the answers yet to the questions I raised above.
