(2017-03-08) How The Cool Kids Killed Obamas Grassroots Movement

Kate Albright-Hanna: How The Cool Kids Killed Obama’s Grassroots Movement. Eight years ago, I was trapped inside the Barack Obama Presidential Transition office in Washington, D.C., watching the life and soul drain out of the thing we had birthed and nurtured in Chicago for almost two years.

In that moment—and still, almost a decade later—those of us who originally built Barack Obama’s grassroots machine were confounded: How did it fall apart so suddenly and decisively after Election Day 2008? Civicist editor Micah Sifry’s recent cover story in the March issue of The New Republic unraveled a good part of the mystery by documenting how traditional political operatives in the campaign’s leadership breezily batted down a plan authored by Silicon Valley supporters called “Movement 2.0” to keep the grassroots engaged. ((2017-02-12) Sifry Inside The Fall Of Obamas Grassroots Army)

But there’s another piece to the story that I’ve never shared until now, which is how the old school D.C. politicos who ran the campaign disempowered the movement-minded innovators at the heart of Obama’s grassroots rise.

Back then, we called ourselves the New Media team—and valued our artists, filmmakers, writers and online community builders as highly as our Google-trained data analysts

*The serious, political professional side of the campaign – the finance department that went after big donors, the communications department that went after mainstream media, the TV ad guys – thought we were a joke, a bunch of “virgins.” They didn’t meddle with us because they didn’t think we were doing anything important.

We called them—the khaki-slacked, beer pong-playing, D.C. ladder-climbing professionals in the campaign—the “cool kids.”*

Meanwhile, our New Media video team was primarily concerned with documenting an emerging movement of people who wanted real change. We drove across the country, spending hours and sometimes days interviewing people about their lives. That kind of intimacy and immersion—as well as the physical distance we covered—allowed us to identify common themes and ideas that were bubbling up across different age groups, ethnicities, and lifestyles.

The campaign was telling you that your voices mattered more than those of corporate interests and wealthy donors.

But did we—the campaign virgins—really believe our own propaganda? Were we really that naïve? Walking through downtown Chicago towards Grant Park on Election Night, our New Media email guys passed by people selling “Yes We Did” t-shirts. One of the email guys said, “No we didn’t. The movement is about telling people that now the work begins. That’s what it has to be about.”

Those guys—instead of wrangling for White House jobs that would lead to lucrative corporate jobs—stayed back at campaign headquarters after everyone had left. They wanted to keep going, and build OFA (Obama for America, which turned into Organizing for America) into a movement that remained bottom up, outside of Washington.

Soon after, the cool kids intervened, stashed OFA inside the DNC,

“It was clear almost immediately that OFA was being set up for failure, that its massive potential was going to be squandered

We had defeated Hillary Clinton, and then John McCain. We had done impossible things, and we believed we could do another: We could change the culture of Washington!

We were very wrong.

As head of content for the Transition website that would turn into Whitehouse.gov, I wanted to create a sort of virtual town square that invited filmmakers and photojournalists to authentically document what life was really like in 2009, right after the economic crash. I was told, “We don’t want to tell stories about people with problems. We want to tell stories about the heroes inside the White House solving those problems.”

We were going insane.
I was crying on my way to work and on my way home every day. Others were losing their sense of humor and irony, and the sort of generous spirit that made us a cohesive team during the campaign

“New Media got decimated. The DNA of the campaign didn’t get translated. They killed the bloodline,” says Shant Mesrobian.

But the last eight years, and the Democratic primary especially, have revealed the political and campaign establishment’s profound blind spot for why people engage at a large scale, and why that matters

New Media was dead, but a corpse called “Digital” rose to take its place. It was bloodless, technocratic, and made of big data. It 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. It was a sure-fire, can’t-lose, totally smart approach to crushing the competition.

Instead of using technology to empower people over corporations, the Obama 2012 and Clinton 2016 campaigns were using technology to merge with corporations.

While Google billionaire Eric Schmidt was building a secret Hillary Death Star machine, corporations like Uber, Amazon, and McDonalds were gobbling up former Obama advisers. And even Obama himself was preparing for his “digital-first” post-presidency, inviting venture capitalists and tech millionaires to the White House to brainstorm a billion dollar presidential library “loaded with modern technologies.”

Everything was going well until—plot twist—a mad man using “primitive methods” and guided by no more than the “emotions of crowds” defeated the Digital zombie. Just lopped its head off. (Donald Trump)

The cool kids in the Clinton/Obama inner circles were stunned. How were they going to make money? What was the next career move? While the rest of us scramble to innovate creative new approaches to rescue our fragile democracy, those guys want to stick with the strategies that have personally served them so well. Their fresh ideas? Stay the course at the DNC and resuscitate the corpse of OFA.