Where is Obama’s army?
As the healthcare debate was accelerating this summer, the president sent an e-mail message to his followers, saying, “This is the moment our movement was built for.” But so far, Obama’s forces have failed to seize that moment. Governing turns out to be a lot harder than campaigning.
Even more frustrating to the White House, opponents of healthcare reform are utilizing many of the same tools and tactics, from blast e-mails to viral videos, that Obama employed so effectively last year.
The Internet is most powerful as an organizing instrument when it engages and energizes people behind a clear message and a well-defined goal. Last year, Obama’s mantra was “change,” and his goal was an electoral victory. This year, his opponents are the ones with a one-word slogan – “no” – and a sharply focused cause: Stop the president.
Team Obama came out of the election with 13 million e-mail addresses and an enormous reservoir of goodwill. The political operation was renamed Organizing for America and housed at the Democratic National Committee, where it remains a huge potential asset. But Obama’s first seven months in office have revealed the problems and limits of transforming a campaign apparatus into a legislative engine.
For one thing, Obama staffers were appalled last January when they discovered that government-issue computers and software lagged far behind their state-of-the-art campaign equipment. For another, campaign officials had given their new-media team far more resources, status and freedom than a comparable unit established in the West Wing. (About 80 staffers worked on new media during the election, while only a dozen were assigned that task in the White House.)
More seriously, the Internet culture is well suited to a campaign because it prizes spontaneity, risk-taking and bottom-up enterprise. Once in the White House, Team Obama became a more timid, top-down operation, in part because the stakes were so much higher and the scrutiny so much tighter.
One incident illustrates this point. When opponents started spreading distortions about the Obama health plan, Macon Phillips, Obama’s director of new media, sent supporters an e-mail, urging them to report “fishy” claims to the White House Web site. Opponents immediately accused the administration of compiling an “enemies list” and stifling free speech, and the initiative was quietly shelved.
Organizing for America has been thwarted by a series of problems, starting with battle fatigue. A New York Times report from Iowa headlined “Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Web” quoted one volunteer as saying, “The enthusiasm is not there like it was a year ago. Most people, when they get to Nov. 5, put their political hat away, and it doesn’t come out for three years.”
