Organizing for America's House Parties: Selling Health Reform Door to Door
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, June 8 2009
Organizing for America, the citizen-organizing wing of the Democratic National Committee that was created to capture the momentum -- and mailing lists -- of the successful Obama campaign for the White House, held what it called its "Health Care Kickoff" this weekend with thousands of house parties across the country.
This weekend's OFA events were no grassroots experiments in collaborative legislation writing. As Matt Bai detailed in a piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, the Obama White House is desperate to avoid the mistake of the Clinton Administration: delivering onto Capitol Hill a fully-drafted health care plan, only to be stymied by a willful Congress not eager to take precise marching orders from the president.
And so, the eight-minute video sent to house party organizers to show at their events dedicates even time to highlighting the president's passionate public messages the fierce urgency of health care reform and specific guidance from OFA's political director on how supporters can buoy the president's plan. Health reform advocates, he stressed, should work on refining their personal health care narratives, a persuasion technique widely used by the Obama field campaign. And they should be committing to memory the president's three general principles on health care reform, which we might call the four Cs: cost, choice, and complete coverage.
Reuters' Carey Gillam has scenes from an OFA Health Care Kickoff meeting in Kansas City -- which is likely a good rough guide to how other house party events went, given that the two-hour events were largely scripted by OFA.
As per usual with OFA promotional films, there is a strategy maps hanging in the background of this weekend's health care video. A close look might reveal just how Obama plans to carve up the country when it comes to selling health care reform. The U.S. is divided up into six sections: the west coast and mountain states, the central south, the midwest, the Great Lakes states and a bit of the mid-Atlantic, the northwest, and the southeast U.S. Over each section hovers the name of an OFA organizer. Have a peek at the five-minute mark. (Photo of OFA health care kickoff meeting in Shippensburg, PA, courtesy of OFA)