Will “Yes We Can” Become “Well, We Tried”?
Tuesday, 06/2/2009 - 1:54 pm by Heather Gerken | 6 Comments
Winning campaigns and running a country are two different things — and Obama is in danger of losing momentum on the latter. Heather Gerken describes how those of us still mobilized can help keep the country on track.
While it is quite exciting to think about the transformative policies a New Deal 2.0 might bring, it is worth noting that at some point the Obama Administration is going to have to get these policies passed. And coming up with a great idea is often easier than making it a reality. Especially in Washington, where killing legislation is an ugly blood sport, if only because it’s so easy to do.
Some naively think that the Obama administration can pass anything it wants because the Obama campaign had so many energized supporters and such an impressive grassroots network. That’s a mistake. Electioneering is different from governing. Note, for instance, how hard it’s been to convert Obama for America into an equally muscular Organizing for America. Elections are the rare moments when voters pay attention; the drama of the race focuses people’s attention on the issues, and candidates provide human stand-ins for abstract policy proposals. Politics is what happens when policy gets personal.
When candidates turn to the workaday project of governing, voters tend to fall away. They stop organizing, they stop volunteering…they even stop paying attention.
The first New Deal got passed because voters stayed engaged even after Roosevelt moved from campaigning to governing. If that were just because of Roosevelt’s personal appeal, then we might think that the charismatic Obama can match his achievements. But the architects of the New Deal had a good deal more than a charismatic president. They had the Great Depression. Depressions involve terrible human costs, which is precisely they have such a powerful ability to concentrate the electorate’s mind.
The jury is still out on whether we are entering into anything like a Great Depression, but surely we think that New Deal 2.0 is worth passing, even if our financial troubles start to lift soon. The question is this: How can we create Democracy 2.0 capable of passing it, in the absence of a Great Depression?
Organizing for America is a step in the right direction. If anyone can make it work, it is the geniuses behind Obama’s ground game. Organizing for America is a new model, redirecting party activists toward governance rather than letting them lay dormant until the next election. The political progeny of Internet 2.0 – MoveOn, Talking Points Memo, DailyKos, and ActBlue – also offers promising new models for keeping voters engaged in the project of governance. Like political parties, they raise issues, frame policy debates and energize supporters. They are capable of sustaining a broad reform platform (in contrast to interest groups, which coalesce around single issues). And they bundle money, votes, and volunteers (again, in contrast to interest groups, which usually serve as vote bundlers, like unions, or as money bundlers, like special interest groups).
But because these institutions work outside of the party structure, they work outside of the election cycle. They thus may be capable of keeping voters sufficiently involved in the project of governance to hold politicians feet to the fire.
Braintruster Heather Gerken is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School.
Yes, let’s get past the triumphalism and web-as-cure-all for democracy’s ills.
For two good discussions on the challenges of turning the energy from electioneering into governing, see Stuart Comstock-Gay and Joe Goldman in the American Prospect: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=more_than_the_vote …
… and the recent report from Peter Swire, who was lawyer for the change.gov and whitehouse.gov sites during the transition: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/web2.0_memo.html
Posted by Horatio | June 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I don’t think Organizing for America will be capable of mobilizing citizens in the way Obama’s campaign was. There is a major difference between the campaign and OfA: the campaign at least pretended to give ownership over decisions to citizens themselves. OfA acts like the decisions are already made. There is no space to comment on something like health care policy; you are simply given the choice to organize for the health care policy the administration chooses. Given that so many who voted for Obama actually disagree with him on certain particulars, not creating space for those differing voices to actually be heard within OfA means that those who would participate out of conviction or passion for a given issue are likely to be driven away. Democracy 2.0 won’t happen unless these organizations move away from an approach that says decision-making about policy is a top-down affair.
Posted by meg | June 6th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
“Democracy 2.0 won’t happen unless these organizations move away from an approach that says decision-making about policy is a top-down affair.”
Can’t do that: A “New Deal” is all about moving decision making in a top-down direction. Bottom up decision making? That’s the free market we’re already a long ways from, and which Obama proposes to move us further from.
Posted by Brett Bellmore | June 7th, 2009 at 8:02 am
The market is not a decision-making tool for democratic government; it uses one’s ability to purchase goods as the main factor in determining political power, effectively disenfranchising those with less access to capital.
It seems to me that a New Deal 2.0 - just like the whole concept of Web 2.0 - would be premised on more grassroots, democratic development of both form and content. Not impossible; just more difficult.
Posted by meg | June 7th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
”Well, We Tried” graphic I made, share it!
http://i32.tinypic.com/fu2lpy.jpg
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