OFA's "Time to Deliver" is Now; Watching Obama's Army Flex Its Muscles
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 20 2009
Today, President Obama is doing something no sitting U.S. President has done before. He is using his massive network of grass-roots supporters, which has been undergoing a reboot since Election Day, to go between the legs of Members of Congress and generate pressure from below on them to pass health care reform. Today is a big test of Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's political arm at the Democratic National Committee. OFA's leaders are calling on its supporters to generate a massive wave of phone calls to Congressional offices and district offices--100,000 or more in one day. They've got a barometer up showing more than 1,100 2,468 28,000 calls so far. (It jumped 1,300 in the 15 minutes since I started writing this post. And about 25,000 more in the last hour.) Will they succeed? And will the calls sway any wavering Members?
On the first question, a few fresh data points. First, OFA now has paid staffers in nearly all fifty states--Wyoming and Oklahoma being the last on the list. Since early June, when OFA began organizing in earnest around health care, it has amassed a quarter-million individual donations. Assuming an average of $30 per donation, that's a healthy war-chest. Its state staffers have been busy doing trainings with community activists and neighborhood team leaders. And the organization got its supporters into about 450 congressional town hall meetings in August.
While not nearly as robust as the Obama campaign organization, it's fair to say that OFA is now a new kind of political muscle, one that has troops in every state and, to some degree, a networked base that has the potential to influence what the leadership wants it to do. For example, in addition to continuing to use the myBO platform, OFA has been setting up state level Twitter lists and Facebook groups. But questions still remain among grassroots volunteers about how much this is still a top-down message machine, as opposed to a new kind of movement organization.
We'll save those questions for another day. Right now, here's the picture of what's going on today: just over 1,000 "Time to Deliver" phone-banking meetings all over the country, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Here's a somewhat clearer view, courtesy of Google Earth.
And here's a sample of the emails going out, this one from deputy director Jeremy Bird:
After months of negotiations, the health reform debate is about to move to the full Congress for the first time. With the insurance industry lobby pulling out all the stops to derail progress, we need everyone who supports reform to weigh in. So here's the plan: Set a new OFA record by getting 100,000 calls to Congress placed or committed to on a single day.
On Tuesday, October 20th, OFA volunteers will gather at "Time to Deliver" call parties and neighborhood outreach events across the country. We'll get together in living rooms and public locations, and reach out to friendly voters whose voices are particularly critical in this debate. We'll talk to them about the President's plan and then we'll ask them to call on their representatives to support reform.
President Obama will be joining a call party and then speaking directly to all the other events that evening via an exclusive live webcast, sharing the latest info on the fight for reform and our campaign for change.
It's an ambitious plan -- and it depends on you.