David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who was recently tapped for an "expanded role" advising the White House, just cut a video briefing Obama supporters on plans for the coming election year.
Ari MelberDavid Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who was recently tapped for an "expanded role" advising the White House, just cut a video briefing Obama supporters on plans for the coming election year.
While acknowledging that Obama’s organizing operation faced "fits and starts" last year, Plouffe argued that the White House was "still on the doorstep of passing healthcare reform," and he announced some new numbers for the Democrats’ ground game. One million new people joined Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) over the past year, Plouffe said, and supporters have now pledged to volunteer 450,000 hours in the coming year. (Have the Tea Parties registered contact information for a million people?) The results are from an online survey of Obama supporters. The survey found over 70 percent of respondents want to support "education reform" and "job creation" in 2010, while over 80 percent are still fired up for health care. (If at first you don’t succeed…)
Plouffe also touched on a few areas where supporters thought Organizing for America came up short, pledging to provide more detailed information and communication about legislative and political strategy.
Beyond the video, which is below, OFA is also distributing a two-page handout with more stats — like OFA held a whopping 819 local events per week around the country last year — and discussion of "important lessons." "Politically, we know that even our best efforts don’t always result in victory," the handout notes, "but we’ve learned from each hard-fought race and are ready to put those lessons to work in 2010."
That may trigger thoughts of Massachusetts, but as readers here know, OFA’s largest failure last year stemmed from the White House’s flawed legislative strategy for health care. (More on that in my report on OFA’s first year, The Permanent Field Campaign in a Digital Age.)
Beyond Plouffe’s increased visibility — a no-brainer, given his popularity with grassroots Democrats — the President is still spending his most precious resource, time, on OFA.
On Thursday afternoon, Obama is scheduled to do a live video "conversation" with OFA members who RSVP on OFA’s website.
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Plouffe’s new video is below, followed by Melber’s OFA report:
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.