All organizations love to have great email lists. On his way to winning the presidency, Barack Obama corralled 13 million names on his list. The idea was that these supporters were supposed to continue mobilizing to help the President once he got into the White House. Alas, as this piece in The New Republic reports, they have been unusually quiet. It seems that the thrill and drama of conquest was more seductive than the drudgery of governing.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The reason was Organizing for America. Last year, after winning the presidency, Obama decided to keep intact the backbone of his stunningly efficient, innovative campaign. Previous presidents had outsourced their activism to interest groups; Obama was going to create his own. OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda (and keep them engaged for 2012). "We've never had a political leader who has continued their organizing while in office like this at this scale," Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn, told NPR in January.As right-wing protesters dominated the news this summer, it would have seemed the perfect opportunity for Obama's much-touted organizers to drown out the conservatives with some coordinated agitation of their own. But they barely made a ripple. Where were they? And how could such a formidable grassroots operation--having just put Obama in office--fall quiet so quickly?
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