Imagining OFA's Alternate Beginnings
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, February 4 2010
Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe emerges as the main villain in Tim Dickinson's examination of how Organizing for America lost its magic in the early days of the Obama Administration. Some of Dickinson's criticisms would resonate more strongly were the national Democratic party not organized as a loose-knit collection of interests and was instead, say, the Mafia. Plouffe was at a DC book party while Massachusetts was burning! "Plouffe and OFA," the latter of which gets treated as the former's alter ego, "permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy's seat." Martha Coakley and the people of Massachusetts might have had a thing or two to do with that.
The decision made by Plouffe and others to attempt to install Organizing for America into the Democratic National Committee comes into focus in Dickinson's piece. Dickinson calls it "a truly bizarre call." And here, Dickinson switches from a personality-driven narrative to what seems to be, boringly enough, central to the OFA story. Institutional structure -- and the choices made around it -- seems to underlay so much of what went down with OFA in the early going, including the Coakley affair. At the end of the two-year-plus campaign, Obama, Plouffe, David Axlerod and others had just poured their hearts and souls into getting a seat at the table; Plouffe was, by all accounts including his own The Audacity to Win, exhausted. The less likely choice would have been to go back outside to rallying in the streets. Organizing a version of Organizing for America as a grassroots organization rather than as an extension of the DNC would have meant that the Obama operation would have translated into the Obama operation taking on two jobs rather than the one (very big) one they'd just been given by the American people. (A reasonable question alluded to in Dickinson's piece is how would a free-floating OFA would have funded itself.)
Reading Dickinson, it seems like Organizing for America's future as a grassroots organization would probably have been better served had Obama actually lost. Once the win was won, all the considerable momentum from the campaign flowed into the presidency. No one with the authority or power to do so had was willing to pour the necessary time and resources into simultaneously converting Obama for America into a sustainable Organizing for America organization. Maybe it was a calculation. Or maybe it was a tremendous mistake. Organizing for America's executive director Mitch Stewart admits to Dickinson that the organization has make a few of those in its first year. "Organizing for America did not properly plan for that first week of August," Stewart told Dickinson, referring to the townhall protests of this summer where tea partier objections to health care reform were allowed to echo without much organized pushback.
You can read Dickinson's full piece here.