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Feb 13 2009, 2:21 pm by Marc Ambinder

Organizing For America: A Test Run

Organizing for America, the current incarnation of the Obama campaign, considers its economic recovery meeting program a huge success.  How so? Without ground organizers, they held 3,600 meetings in all 50 states and Americans submitted more than 31,030 stories about their economic plight.  See them here.  Here's my question: what happens now?  Did these stories influence Congress? Or was this more of an exercise... a way to see how Obama supporters would respond to a call. No, I'm told, the point was to gather the stories to post them in a way that puts a human face on the crisis.   But.. who's looking at the website?  Local newspapers and TV stations, according to Obama political aides. The goal is to get local coverage from all of the stories.  We'll see.  The scale of the response has been impressive, but its effects and ultimate purpose are unclear.

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Comments (5)

Devanshu Mehta

I believe the purpose might have been reflected in more subtle ways-- letters to editors, opinion polls and so on. A public and media opinion force multiplier.

Arlene

The story request landed with a thud in our group. We didn't understand the purpose or benefit.

We had many questions that were left unanswered. The video from Gov. Kaine was harshly reviewed -- too many unanswered questions and incomplete answers.

This crisis is enormous and unprecedented and OA only asks us you how for stories? A lost opportunity, and apparently a lack of imagination.

The mid-December house party was a very different experience -- from the very thorough preparation for the hosts, to the directions for the discussion, and then the request for a community service project in January.

I hope Organizing for America gets it's act together. People want to do much more.

fort-da

Marc, isn't this a re-post? Um, LAZY much?

Or just waiting for the GOP talking points to hit the inbox?

slag

This doesn't appear to be a re-post. This is a follow-up post, which is something I appreciate. It's all too rare.

And I agree with Arlene's comment. Except, as one commenter noted in the previous post, time was seemingly a factor in determining what they could get out of OfA on the stimulus. Either way, I'm with Arlene on setting clear expectations, and I agree that Kaine's Q&A was far from complete. I'm sure improvements are coming. It's been less than a month.

JMackin

I have participated in all of the requests for organizing, and I launched a "Change is Coming" group that set up a website for continuing action. The problem is that there is so much activity out there that we find ourselves duplicating a lot of what exists already. We created a chat site and are trying to see if there's a purpose (we chose green energy) beyond what exists in other groups in our activist area. So the Obama groups so far have just been pipelines to support Obama initiatives. That doesn't feel like what we want to do, but there is no real vision yet of how that Obama activism translates into something ongoing. We all love Obama but don't see ourselves as mere cheerleaders for his agenda. We reserve the right to be critical if we feel it's necessary. So the question remains: what do we do with our activist tendencies that can be ongoing? No answer yet, but I have signed up to actively campaign for Paul Hodes. (I live in NH and was appalled at the Judd Gregg show).