Was Organizing for America Ever "Movement" Material?

Washington Monthly's Charles Homans has a measured look at what has become of Organizing for America that places the after effects of the Obama presidential campaign in the context of past presidencies and past "movements." Our Micah Sifry has, of course, been digging into the idea that OFA has failed to live up to its potential in its first 12 months of life, but I'll piggyback off of Homans' piece to add my two opinionated cents here. Maybe four.

By way of context, several months back I blogged (dang archives -- I can't find the post) that Organizing for America's leadership didn't seem to be going into the endeavor with a very well developed theory of change. I took some heat for saying it at the time by folks who argued that folks like Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird are among the very best field organizers in the business. But Homans piece makes me think I was pretty spot on in thinking that OFA's mission did match all that well with the way people were talking about their expectations for the organization. That's not to tag OFA's leadership with all that much blame, though. Once the decision was made to, as Homans reports, to ignore the call coming from Steve Hildebrand and others to detach OFA from the Obama apparatus and to instead turn it into what amounts to the field wing of the Democratic National Committee, the goals for the organization were already narrowed.

What the DNC has traditionally focused on -- electing Democrats to public office, and figuring out ways to pay for that effort -- wasn't much of an opportunity in 2009. An off year, there just weren't that many races happening. It doesn't yet seem obvious that OFA has already squandered the chance to turn on the jets when it comes to turning out more voters and putting more Democrats in office in '10. Who knows, Organizing for America might yet still prove to be very good at the ground game. Or at least better at it than the Democratic Party has been in cycles gone by. If that happened, you could make the case that it would be a substantial gift bequeathed the Democratic Party by Obama.

But better-oiled field organization does not exactly a progressive movement make. So, could OFA ever have become a self-sustaining, stand-along "movement," something along the lines of SNCC or the United Farm Workers Movement or '80s conservativism? The first two had core, emotional issues at their center -- civil rights, labor rights, the degradation of poverty. The latter was based on a fairly well-defined worldview that you might boil down to freedom from a repressive government, and a strong United States of America. I'll admit, I've found myself scratching my head over the last several weeks to figure out what exactly happened during the course of the Obama campaign that had people broadly convinced that OFA was poised to turn into a vibrant political network once the "O" went from standing from Obama to Organizing.

It's not ideology, is it? I think it's fair to say that the Obama campaign was never ideological, not really. (Though this is one point in particular on which I'd love to see some some debate.) There doesn't seem to have been a unifying thread of political thinking that tied together the Obama package of politics, at least not one that we can find mirrored in the U.S.'s political history of late, i.e. liberalism or even Clintonian "third way" thinking. Neither did Obama's short Senate tenure reveal any strong ideological bent. There wasn't even any Wellstonian "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," a la Howard Dean. The Obama vs. Hillary Clinton primary battle, which arguably served to turbo boost the growth of the Obama campaign organization, wasn't about ideology as much as it seemed to be about, for lack of a better thing to call it, an orientation towards politics. Obama offered a distinct alternative to how one approaches politics, talks about politics. But it isn't really clear to me how you translate that strategic approach to something that provides the motivation that continuing political movements would seem to need to thrive.

But enough from me. Here's Homans on what seems to be the mismatch between expectations of what OFA was capable of becoming and what it was tasked with doing:

[T]he problem isn’t that OFA is screwing up—it’s that the Obama White House has been using Plouffe’s invention for the wrong task. An organization of this nature is a marginal-at-best tool for advancing specific legislation. But with the right cues from its patron in the White House, OFA could be a powerful tool for expanding and remaking the Democratic Party—a mission that would, in the end, do far more to further Obama’s agenda than a few hundred thousand phone calls.

One final thought, and it's the thought that has been sticking with me throughout the great and useful debate over what will become of Organizing for America. It seems to me strikingly incongruous that a movement that was animated by the revolutionary idea that -- as Obama repeated again and again during the campaign -- "we are the ones we have been waiting for" would be waiting for marching orders from those working inside the DNC building.