Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House got a lot of attention for its savvy Web organizing, its skill at fundraising and even just for the size of its email list—13 million names.
The backbone of that Internet organization wasn’t the daily emails, though. It was My.BarackObama.com, a social networking site with a purpose. Supporters could create an account, fill out a profile, and join local or national groups on the site. Some of those groups mobilized around a specific issue, while others organized neighborhood parties, canvassing squads, or just passed around news.
“People were using those networks to have many-to-many conversations,” Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out, and activist Jon Pincus said, “It’s as democratic as you can get online.”
Pincus knows firsthand the little-d democratic possibilities of MyBO (as it was nicknamed) organizing. He was one of the early organizers of Get FISA Right, a group on MyBO and other social networking sites like Facebook. The group formed over the summer of 2008, urging then-Senator Obama to vote against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which included immunity for telecommunications companies that had cooperated with then-President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Get FISA Right quickly became the number one group on MyBO, with over 23,000 members.
Obama voted for the FISA compromise bill, after opposing it on the campaign trail, but the Get FISA Right group didn’t dissolve. Instead, Pincus and other members are organizing a group to attend Senator Russ Feingold’s constituent “listening meeting” during the next congressional recess. Domestic surveillance will be part of the debate over renewing the PATRIOT Act, Pincus noted, and so pressure is key.
One of the biggest strengths of the Obama campaign was not its top-down orthodoxy, but its ability to allow people the freedom to do what they were good at. It encouraged small donations and volunteering at any level, allowing people who’d never been involved in a political organization before to have a stake in the campaign. Pincus noted, “It becomes very empowering because you’re giving people the tools and the technique they can use not just that time, but more than once. The barriers to repeated action become a lot lower.”
Not every Obama supporter may care about FISA; not even every member of the Facebook or MyBO group may be constantly active. But the accessibility and simplicity of the tools provided by the campaign has permanently introduced a generation of people to political action, and those people aren’t giving up. The issues that brought them to the Obama campaign are still there, and their original passion combined with the training they received have brought them to a new level of activism.
Pincus is counting on those people to mobilize when it counts on FISA, and other former Obama campaign volunteers have organized around their own issues. Ilya Sheyman, a New Hampshire area volunteer for Obama, started a Facebook group to urge Obama to appoint Dr. Howard Dean as Secretary of Health and Human Services after Tom Daschle withdrew from consideration. Sheyman’s group got 4,000 supporters within 36 hours, has launched its own Web site, and has urged supporters to contact their congresspeople and urge them to endorse Dean for the position.
“While traditional media outlets like television and radio are one-way mechanisms for the President to lay out his message, the internet empowers ordinary Obama supporters and volunteers to communicate back to the President and provide input for his agenda,” Sheyman said. “In the years ahead, those of us pushing for more progressive policies will have to continue using every mechanism at our disposal to get our message back to the President.”
Obama has yet to announce a replacement for Daschle, but several prominent Democrats have endorsed Dean for the position, and though Obama voted for the FISA bill, the Get FISA Right group got media attention from outlets as large as the New York Times and Obama posted a response to the group detailing his decision to support the bill on MyBO.
Bottom-up activism got some high-profile attention recently when Change.gov, the transition Web site, asked supporters to submit questions to be answered by the administration. Activist Bob Fertik asked if Obama planned to appoint a special prosecutor to look into “the gravest crimes of the Bush administration.” The question made it to sixth place on the first round of voting without any real concentrated push, so for the second round, Fertik and other supporters, including Ari Melber, pushed for the question on various media outlets, urging supporters to go to the site and vote for the question. Supporters pushed the question to number one, which should’ve guaranteed an answer from Obama.
Instead, Obama’s press secretary dodged the question. But a combination of high-profile blogs, The Nation’s Web site, and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up on the story, and finally George Stephanopoulos asked Obama the question on ABC. The answer made the front page of the New York Times.
Melber noted, “The combination of preexisting interest in an issue and a coordinated campaign to push it to the next level is optimal.”
The mainstream media may have seized on this particular question because Obama made several promises over the course of his campaign, Melber pointed out, and open government was one of those promises. “My personal opinion is they’ve backed off that promise far too much,” he said.
Holding Obama to these promises will be the real challenge for progressives in the years to come. These supporter campaigns provide a window into the possibilities for continued progressive activism during the Obama presidency. It has been too easy, as I wrote before, to define ourselves in opposition to a president. A combination of the tools the administration provides—change.gov, whitehouse.gov, and now recovery.gov, as well as the transition of MyBO to Organizing for America—with the now-well-known tools of the blogosphere, Twitter and social networking sites makes it increasingly easy for progressives to stay informed and involved. The ongoing communication between the new media and the traditional media, especially with the advent of Rachel Maddow, who regularly has bloggers as guests on her show, and Rick Sanchez, who takes live questions via Twitter on his, has created the perfect atmosphere for citizen voices to be heard.
Melber would like to see this go even further. He noted that people were shocked that Obama took a question from a Huffington Post writer, but he would prefer regular citizens in the press room asking questions. The steps that have been taken so far seem radical after the Bush years, but true open government is something we’ve only begun to contemplate.
In The Politics of Small Things, Jeffrey Goldfarb wrote about the anti-Iraq war movement as a massive collaboration between disparate groups that had little in common but opposition to the war. The Obama coalition was much the same—civil libertarians and anti-war activists joined with college kids inspired for the first time by a politician and old hands who remembered marching against Johnson and Nixon. But the Internet, as Goldfarb noted, provides a way for those connections to be more than just fleeting moments that brought a president to power. It provides a way for those voices to continue to be heard—and to continue to connect with one another. It allows for support to include critique and pressure. It allows for Americans’ relationship with their president to be less binary, more nuanced.
Pincus noted that the fight over FISA was a moment for many people to cross over from blind adulation of Obama into something more complex. “On some level our [Get FISA Right] existence is proof that Obama is different.”
The Obama coalition was much the same—civil libertarians and anti-war activists joined with college kids inspired for the first time by a politician and old hands who remembered marching against Johnson and Nixon. But the Internet, as Goldfarb noted, provides a way for those connections.