One of the talk show and ideological internet website cliche phrases is that President Barack Obama practices “Chicago style politics.” It was always a tired cliche — one that was used as a political defining point but was hardly grounded in reality. Would a real Chicago style politics operation merit a story such as this one from Time magazine?
What happened to Barack Obama’s once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. “There’s no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms,” says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.
Neglect is to blame. After Obama was elected, his political aides ignored the army he had created until it eventually disappeared. No one was in charge; decisions were often deferred but rarely made. By the time they realized they needed more troops, says longtime consultant Joe Trippi, “their supporters had taken a vacation from politics.”
So earlier this year, when the White House gave OFA a whopping $30 million — more than half of the party’s entire budget for 2010 — senior Democrats suspected a hidden agenda. Several tell Time that OFA boss David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, is using the cash to rebuild an army for 2012 under the cover of boosting turnout in 2010. OFA is putting staff into such states as Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona, which have few close statewide races this fall but which are all prime targets in an Obama re-election campaign. “This is totally about 2012,” Cook says.
Plouffe denies the charge. “I couldn’t object more strongly,” he says. Plouffe notes that OFA volunteers knocked on 200,000 doors in late August — an impressive number, but only a tenth of what it could do in 2008.
There’s more to read (go to the link) but the realities this story shows are these:
And no one ever accused a “real” Chicago style political operation of being unable to skillfully multi-task.
If the Democrats perform as poorly as many expect (if they lose both houses or one house of Congress) future political scientists and historians will likely speculate on the “might have beens” — what might have happened if the Obama team had kept its organization going and had it completely read to be used during the 2010 mid-terms.
“Chicago style politics” usually means hard-ball, formidable, push-the-envelope-almost-off-the-desk, somewhat intimidating professional politics. And the most traditional meaning that goes back to the early 20th century and even the 1960 Presidential race: of elections that raise an eyebrow where perhaps the dead even “voted.”
But above all, Chicago style politics and a Chicago style political machine conjures up images of an unrelentingly professional, sustained skillful operation to get and retain power.
And the Obama team….(?)
(You fill in the rest..)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.