Obama’s Political Operation To Unveil New Mobilizing Tool To Pressure Congress Today
Today at around noon, Organizing for America — the Web site overseen by the DNC that is mobilizing Obama’s grassroots campaign army to drive the White House agenda — will unveil a new software tool designed to help the masses of Obama supporters identify and contact their elected officials and urge them to back President Obama’s budget, a Democratic official tells me.
The move is another sign that Obama advisers, and the DNC, are dead set on their new mission of mobilizing his campaign apparatus to pressure Congress into passing his agenda — a shift from their earlier stance that they wouldn’t be using the apparatus to press elected officials.
“It’s the first ever tool for the Organizing for America community and others on the OFA and DNC sites to find their members and call in support of the President’s legislative agenda,” the Dem official says. “It’s an address enter tool to find your member and call in support of the budget.”
The budget fight is the first major test of whether this new form of organizing, and the huge grassroots army it mobilized — both hugely successful in a campaign context — can be marshaled in support of a White House governing agenda. OFA emailed its massive email list over the weekend to let supporters know that they’d be getting pressed into service soon.
So check Organizing for America’s Web site at around noon today.
The homepage of this blog is here. Its RSS feed is here. And its Twitter feed is here.
I’m not really optimistic that the “grass roots army” will stay motivated and active now that the election is over. It was a lot of time and energy put in, and you can’t expect that throughout the Presidency. I think President Obama is going to find that the vast majority of voters are politically aware only at election time. It’s up to him to get his agenda passed, and they the voters will wake up in four years and judge him on his accomplishments and decide if he has earned another four years.
Didi — I tend to agree. folks need a riveting narrative like a campaign to stay focused. it’s possible, though, that the emotion unleashed by the financial crisis could have a focusing effect …
I haven’t seen what they’re putting up yet, but I feel qualified to predict its usefulness. (Put me on TV!) If it’s not much more than “here’s how to contact your reps in DC,” I wonder if it will have much of an impact on those reps. They see an uptick in their mail and their staff has to send out more copies of position papers/statements in response, but the reps may not feel particularly threatened. IOW, will they see the threat of a withheld vote based on a budget vote as empty? Time will tell.
Trevor J
.
Here is the one thing I think President Obama and his people have been pretty good at and thats intertwining the use of new media. What I suspect will happen is that they will roll out this new app then later when a member of Congress is obstructing they will do an email blast telling everyone to contact that person. Either that or they will coordinate more of those neighbor to neighbor meetings to keep the motivation going. I don’t think that people walking around or at work are thinking about contacting their Congessperson but the emails and or the meetings set up a situation where they can be momentarily motivated. It will be interesting to see if it works but I have a feeling that it will.
.
Oh and I hope its aimed at calls because I think that calls are still more effective at scaring people in Congress straight than emails. 1000s of emails can come in and nobody gets overwhelmed but if you fill up their phone lines they notice. Thats really the strength of the ditto heads that has to be acknowledge. By calling their member of Congress over and over it gives the false impression that their position on the issues is representative of the populous of that Congress person’s constiutency which is usually far from being true.
I tend to agree. folks need a riveting narrative like a campaign to stay focused. it’s possible, though, that the emotion unleashed by the financial crisis could have a focusing effect …
Not only that, but a lot of people got sincerely interested in our government again and I think there are a lot of people out there who are still motivated and looking for ways to act on that motivation.
I agree it won’t ever reach campaign levels of involvement and excitement. But just like I got back into politics (after more or less ignoring the whole thing for years,) as a response to Bush and then
stayed connected, I think a lot of people will try to stay connected. And especially younger voters.
It would be nice if the MSM – say, the WaPo, – wasn’t running stories about Obama’s capital being used up by AIG execs. It might help.
I would imagine the best way for them to get the mailing lists involved is have Zip codes of the users attached to their local congressmen. They could distribute talking points and provide phone numbers and email addresses to contact their local representatives. I’m not sure if everyone here has accounts on Obama’s site but there are fields for issues people are interested in. The messages sent to individuals could be catered to each individual rather effortlessly and prove to be effective.
We’ll see what they do I suppose in the coming weeks.
It’ll be interested…
Still fired up and ready to go?
I’m sure that they won’t be able to mobilize as many people as they did during the election, but do they really need to? They don’t need tens of thousands of people to spend days going door to door, they just need people to make a 10 minute phone call.
I dunno about this particular software ‘tool,’ but I do know that two ‘tools’ phoned my house last night during dinner trying to drum up support for ‘health care for everyone!’ Some of these efforts, I’m sure, will prove to be counter-productive – the campaign is over, time to govern.
it’s possible, though, that the emotion unleashed by the financial crisis could have a focusing effect …
I’m not sure it’s having the effect they want. I won’t go door-to-door for them while everyone I know is angry that the White House is bailing out Wall Street while our friends are being laid off by small businesses. I just don’t want to hear what I know I’ll hear – and I don’t want to be in the position of defending the indefensible. I can’t be the only one.
I’ll share it on Twitter.
Blogs like this are why I use the internet.