Jandos Rothstein
By Barack Obama
Crown
I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and judicious voice in my head was like having a long, comforting talk with an old friend. His retelling of the challenges of his first two and a half years, from the global financial crisis and the passage of Obamacare to the Democrats’ midterm collapse in 2010 and the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is full of revealing details and discerning insight.
But there’s a strange lacuna in A Promised Land, a missing thread that I kept looking for but never found. That thread is his popular base. To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton, who had been building political support with her husband, President Bill Clinton, for decades. At its height, at the end of the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign had 13 million email addresses (20 percent of his vote total). Almost four million people had donated to him. Two million Obama supporters had created an account on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform, which they used to organize 200,000 local events. Seventy thousand people used MyBO to create their own fundraising pages, which raised $30 million for his campaign.
Read more Prospect book reviews
But as is by now well known, once Obama entered office, he abandoned this army and staked his presidency on the inside-the-Beltway strategies of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It’s never been clear to me that Obama had to drop this ball. After the 2008 election, Obama’s trusted lieutenant and campaign manager, David Plouffe, took a well-earned long leave of absence to enjoy his new role as a father. Plouffe could have followed colleagues like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs into the White House, but other than wanting to continue to shepherd Obama’s campaign organization, Plouffe needed a break. And as Plouffe recounted in his own campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, Obama called him the day after his daughter was born in early November with one request, to keep that movement, which was eventually called Organizing for America, going.
“I know you’re disappearing for a while to change diapers and play Mr. Dad,” Plouffe says Obama told him, “but just make sure you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters involved. I don’t think we can succeed without them. We need to make sure they’re pushing from the grassroots on Washington and helping to spread what we’re trying to do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn’t feel like a transactional relationship, because that’s not what it was. I want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us deliver on all we talked about in the campaign.”
This was very much in tune with how Obama had talked about his grassroots base during the campaign. “Collectively all of you, most of you whom are, I’m not sure, of drinking age, you’ve created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we’ve seen in the last 30, 40 years. That’s a pretty big deal,” he said in a pep talk to his campaign staff the day after Hillary Clinton had conceded the Democratic nomination to him in June 2008.
Obama made clear then that he knew this organization was going to be critical to winning the battles that would come once he was in office. As he told his staff at that meeting, “We don’t have a choice. Now, if we screw this up, and all those people who really need help, they’re not going to get help. Those of you who care about global warming, I don’t care what John McCain says, he’s not going to push that agenda hard. Those of you who care about Darfur, I guarantee you, they’re not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service, and then more of the same. Those of you who are concerned that there’s a sense of fairness in our economy, it will be less fair. So, now everybody’s counting on you, not just me.”
To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton.
As I’ve written before, however, Plouffe didn’t seem to think of Obama’s base in the same way. The campaign’s 13-million-name email list, for example, was for him a new kind of top-down broadcast system that he understood mainly as a tool for getting around the mainstream media. “We had essentially created our own television network, only better, because we communicated with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win,” Plouffe wrote in his memoir. And once Obama was in the White House, Plouffe didn’t think much of all the people behind those 13 million email addresses, telling Ari Melber in a 2009 interview for The Nation, “In the White House, obviously you’re not really raising money and you’re not really doing organizing. The main focus is to help deliver message.”
All of this matters a lot, because while Plouffe demobilized the massive army that had gotten Obama to the White House, folding it into the Democratic National Committee and using its giant list mainly to ask supporters to buy Obama mugs and send occasional thank-you notes to members of Congress, the right wing was swiftly building up its own grassroots army to help block all of Obama’s initiatives in government, the Tea Party. In the critical months of the fight for health care reform, for example, Organizing for America was only able to muster about 300,000 phone calls to members of Congress. Having won the White House by building a dynamic base of millions of volunteers, Obama went into his policy battles with one arm tied behind his back. When he complains in his memoir about unfair press coverage of his efforts or the Republicans’ ability to get away with legislative murder, he’s writing about an unbalanced political landscape that he, wittingly or unwittingly, helped create.
At the very end of his presidency, in late 2016 and early 2017, Obama gave several interviews where he seemed to acknowledge that his failure to keep organizing after winning the 2008 election was a critical mistake. To George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who asked about the 1,000 seats lost by the Democratic Party at the state level during Obama’s eight years, he said, “I take some responsibility on that,” but he added, “my docket was really full here, so I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”
To NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Obama admitted, “I think that we haven’t done it as well as we need to. For example, we know that the Republicans, funded through organizations like the Koch brothers, have been very systematic at … building from the ground up and communicating to state legislators and financing school board races and public utility commission races. You know, I am a proud Democrat, but I do think that we have a bias towards national issues and international issues, and as a consequence I think we’ve ceded too much territory.”
So as I read A Promised Land, I kept looking for hindsight about cardinal political error. Obama offers none. The words “Organizing for America” don’t appear anywhere in the book. To be sure, he was fully aware of how his campaign had tapped grassroots enthusiasm for his upstart bid and channeled it effectively, pointing, for example, to a “determined band of volunteers called Idahoans for Obama [who] had organized themselves” and helped him pick up crucial primary delegates from that unlikely state.
By the fall of 2008, he writes with praise of Plouffe for having invested in building up his grassroots army, noting that it had “fanned out across the country, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters and launching unprecedented operations in states that allowed early voting.” He adds, “Our online donations continued to flow, allowing us to play in whatever media markets we chose.”
And as Election Day approaches, Obama writes of his awe at the size of the crowds coming to his rallies and worries about having aroused too much hope, knowing that he might not be able to meet the expectations that some of his followers were pressing on him.
After his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story.
But after his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story. The amnesia starts the night of his inauguration, when he attended ten formal balls with first lady Michelle Obama, but only the first one, where he was serenaded by Beyoncé, and later one for members of the armed forces, make it into his memoir. The Obama for America staff ball, which was attended by 10,000 staff and where Obama reportedly spoke for 17 minutes, is gone from his memory. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who managed the White House’s relationships with Democratic advocacy organizations, gets barely a mention for his role in the health care reform fight. The organizers who took him to victory in the Iowa caucus, who he says he “would still do anything for,” are nowhere in the rest of the book, even as one of them, Mitch Stewart, would come to run Organizing for America at the DNC.
I don’t know why Obama forgot his base, though here are some theories. First, he was a captive of the White House bubble, and no one in his intimate circle or among his top advisers spoke for the base. It’s striking to see who Obama refers to by their first names or nicknames in A Promised Land: Joe (Biden), Rahm (Emanuel), Axe (David Axelrod), Valerie (Jarrett), Gibbs (Robert Gibbs, his first press secretary), Favs (Jon Favreau, a top speechwriter), Ben (Rhodes, another key speechwriter), Samantha (Power, a human rights writer who served on Obama’s Senate staff and then went with him to serve as U.N. ambassador), Reggie (Love, one of his body men), Sam (Kass, the first family’s personal cook and Obama’s pool-playing buddy), and a handful of old friends from Chicago. These are the people with the most influence on Obama day to day, it appears. As best as I can tell, none of them other than Power had any experience with or understanding of the power of grassroots organizing, and in her case it was all in the field of international human rights activism.
People who did have organizing DNA didn’t last long in the Obama White House or they kept their profile low. Van Jones, who was a prominent Black activist given a top position on the Council on Environmental Quality to focus on green jobs, lost his job once the Republican right focused on some controversial statements he had made earlier in his career. He resigned in September 2009.
Kate Albright-Hanna, one of the leaders of the new-media team that was the heart of Obama’s online campaign army, lasted just a few months in the Obama White House, growing ever more frustrated as she saw the culture of “yes we can” organizing, which emphasized bottom-up community engagement and the knitting together of a nationwide movement, replaced by a “bloodless” and “technocratic” approach “made of big data.” As she recalled a few years ago with a memorable piece in Civicist, the site I edited when I was at Civic Hall, that new kind of digital-engagement strategy, which became the dominant form of online organizing in Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, “rolled its eyes at narrative, on the ground feedback, and human political instinct. In place of late nights talking to dairy farmers in their kitchens, there were algorithms.”
“They had expected my election to transform our country, to make government work for ordinary people.”
A second reason is how Obama seems to have convinced himself of the limits of his own power. He blames the media for much of his inability to move the public, repeatedly citing how poorly it covered politics and frustrated his efforts to connect. He writes, “Whether out of fear of appearing biased, or because conflict sells, or because their editors demanded it, or because it was the easiest way to meet the deadlines of a twenty-four-hour, internet-driven news cycle, their collective approach to reporting on Washington followed a depressingly predictable script: Report what one side says (quick sound bite included). Report what the other side says (opposing sound bite, the more insulting the better). Leave it to an opinion poll to sort out who’s right.”
And yet, when he goes out on the hustings and has to deal with grassroots protests, from either Tea Party types or left-wing activists, Obama grudgingly admits that organizing matters, and also that the mood in the country had shifted, in part by right-wing organizing against him (as well as left-wing dissatisfaction). Writing of his efforts to shore up Democrats before the 2010 midterms, he admits that “even without looking at the polls, I could sense a change in the atmosphere on the campaign trail: an air of doubt hovering over each rally, a forced, almost desperate quality to the cheers and laughter, as if the crowds and I were a couple at the end of a whirlwind romance, trying to muster up feelings that had started to fade. How could I blame them? They had expected my election to transform our country, to make government work for ordinary people, to restore some sense of civility in Washington. Instead, many of their lives had grown harder, and Washington seemed just as broken, distant, and bitterly partisan as ever.”
Well, actually, they had expected to be brought along, to apply “yes we can” organizing to the changes needed too. But in this passage, as elsewhere in his memoir, Obama reveals more of what I think is finally the main reason the base is not in his book: He believed too much in himself. His superpower is also his kryptonite.
Obama was the kind of gifted political communicator who comes around only once in a generation. Buoyed by a savvy circle of operators who built their careers around his campaign, he never saw how much of his original political success was the product of a unique fusion of political celebrity and community organizing.
It’s no wonder that once Obama entered the White House, he and his team obsessed about how much power the media had to shape the narrative of his presidency. He never understood that when enough people are successfully organized to move en masse, they can actually write history themselves. Instead, he thought he was the author of his story. And apparently, he still does.
