grassroots

I agree with Kevin that Chris Bowers' latest post outlining how he's running his own online advertising campaign using Google Adwords is awesome, and you should all go read it.

I also want to add that it's a super-cheap strategy. Bowers is spending essentially $10 a day for thousands of impressions arguing against McCain/Palin. With only 50 odd days left before the election, that's peanuts for an organization, and at that price point it's even feasible for college students to run ads for a few days or a week.

I think Bower's claims are a little over-blown about this being the equivalent of a decentralized, grassroots 527 (but hey, maybe I'm wrong). TV and Web Video are probably way more effective than Google Adwords, so I don't think this can have nearly the impact of a Swift Boat or Vote Vets ad campaign, no matter how many people participate. But I think this is still significant and incredibly doable.

If you are volunteering as much as you can but want to do more, or if you are frustrated by the Obama media strategy, as Bowers is, this isn't a bad alternative for doing something useful.

I wrote a post on my own blog last night criticizing Obama's latest ad called "Hands," that was made especially for the Olympics. I was getting frustrated because every ad I see finishes with a policy promotion. It's reminding me of what happened in 2000 and 2004 with Gore and Kerry -- the Democratic candidate gets a lead and then plays it safe by campaigning exclusively to minds instead of guts. While I still think Obama's campaign needs to be more aggressive at playing offense, I took a break to look at the big picture this morning.

McCain had most of us debating and thinking at the lowest levels in recent campaign history, as we focused on Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and the purpose of their inclusion in McCain's "Celebrity" ad. The McCain campaign was determined to tie Obama's strength in rhetoric, his charisma, and therefore his "celebrity," to a class-based criticism. They labeled him as elitist and too inexperienced to be president. But when we zoom out of the celebrity debate and look at the state of the campaign today, we can see that we have another month to go before the last stretch and that we have been locked in a media-driven phase -- more to John McCain's advantage -- since early June, when Sen. Obama became the presumptive nominee.

The post I wrote last night argued Obama's strengths using McCain's frame. I unintentionally bowed to the idea that Obama's only strength was his rhetoric. But the truth is that his strength is not merely in his rhetoric -- that's just the only place we're able to see it now. His advantage was planted in the summer of 2007 in Iowa, and it has now bloomed into the grassroots efforts of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, across the country. Obama has put his experience as a community organizer to use.

A post this morning on Al Giordano's blog, titled "The Movement Comes After Labor Day," helped me remember this. I think Al meant movement in a polling sense, but I took it another way. This fall's harvest will not only refer to the yield of crops, but the fruits of the most extensive presidential campaign in memory. Only after Labor Day can we begin to see the ramifications of this one-of-a-kind grassroots operation.

It's no wonder, then, that this election has seen the pundits offer less-than-stellar political commentary. In past elections we might have a fairly good idea of what might happen come November, due to coalitions that solidified over the last few decades, and major party candidates that looked alike and had generally similar stories. But 2008 is an election unlike any we've ever had in this country. The race and age dynamics are there, in addition to signs that point toward a rearrangement of the political map and a realignment of the electorate. Because political junkies like ourselves have never had this experience, we have even less of a chance of correctly predicting what happens on November 4th. The Gallup poll I wrote about previously, the likely voter screen that only calculated young voters as a 10% share of the entire sample (when they actually formed 16-18% in 2004), is an example of this uncertainty.

What we do know, again, is that Barack Obama has put together an operation that the Democratic Party and the United States has never seen before. And I believe that the size of this movement -- one that encompasses the youth vote -- is what's truly going to determine what happens on Election Day. In the meantime, the Obama campaign still needs to be more aggressive with emotion in their ads, and they need to be on the offensive far more than they have been over the past few weeks. But come October, the ads of this summer will be relics of the past. What will be much more important is the Obama campaign's mobilization. That organization is the true strength of Obama's campaign, and it's a strength we can only evaluate in October and November.

It has been more than six months since I last wrote about this subject. Recent events warrant an epilogue of sorts.

The Fund for Public Interest Research (FFPIR, or 'the Fund,' as it is commonly known) deploys thousands of canvassers each year onto streets and at doors to raise money for dozens of liberal non-profit organizations. Its 'sister' company, Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), has major contracts with the DNC, the ACLU, MoveOn, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Fund is also being sued by a class of its former employees for systemic labor infractions.

Now before we really dive in here, it's important to establish two more facts.

1. FFPIR has already been found in violation of labor law by the California State Labor Commission. You can find the Commission's ruling here (in PDF).

2. Soon after the canvasser class action suit was filed, the Fund changed its labor policies. Reportedly, the policies now ensure that all canvassers get paid at least minimum wage, plus overtime for all hours of work over 40 a week. The policies now ensure its employees have a half hour lunch break, and short breaks during the day. All additional "campaign work" is now made explicitly clear to be volunteer. (Maggie Mead broke this news yesterday, but as they say, she buried the lede.)

It is good to know that the largest direct fundraising apparatus on the Left now adheres to fundamental labor laws. Of course, the sudden and explicit establishment of these policies is also a tacit admission that for many years--up to two decades or more--the largest employer on the Left has been breaking these laws.

How could this have happened for so long?

What does it mean for the future of these organizations?

In this piece, I am going to posit some answers to those questions. If you want to learn more about the Fund's operation, about the story of the canvassers who demanded change to it and ultimately filed suit, or about the for-profit sister Grassroots Campaigns Inc, please look to the reporting I did last year on MyDD and DailyKos.

Hi! Once again, I'm here to push my Campus Progress typing. Please check out the story there, and then check out the exclusive FM-only bonus typing below!
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For Lucas Schaefer, like thousands of others who poured themselves into grueling Get Out the Vote campaigns, the drive out of Florida in November 2004 was long and awful. Lucas--who had not-quite-made-it through Grassroots Campaigns Inc's MoveOn Leave No Voter Behind fiasco--was apparently feeling particularly masochistic; so Lucas, who is a curious sort, forced himself to ride out the trip home with talk radio on. He baked for hours in the heat of right-wing victory tirades.

"It was the moral values moment," he recalled to me with disgust, referring to the polling question to which the majority of voters supposedly answered that they 'voted their values.' "All these pundits and various anti-gay groups were using that polling question to make it seem as if the majority of Americans were unsupportive of gay rights. These right-wing activists would spin the election of George Bush to empower themselves by further disempowering the homosexuals in the country. And I'm becoming angrier and angrier -- that's not true in my experience. That wasn't the America that I had just experienced in Florida."

In the time since the election, compelled forward by this experience, Lucas has been traveling across the country many times over with the Gay? Fine By Me T-shirt project, like a Johnny Appleseed sowing fields of fruity tolerance. This week in Campus Progress, I'm fortunate to have had the chance to write about this simple-yet-remarkably-ambitious idea that Lucas has helped grow into a true grassroots movement:

Today, Fine By Me campaigns have run in over 200 communities. Last month alone, at least 50 college campuses were treated to the coordinated display of 12,000 students, faculty, and staff who are openly tolerant of a diverse spectrum of sexual orientation.

Schaefer regularly travels to new campuses to give presentations about what the program is all about. From there, the effect is viral—the T-shirts have a way of moving themselves around—and every week a new group or two decides to launch their own campaign.

[S]ays Schaefer of his organization’s relationship with the groups that run Fine By Me campaigns: "Our experience is that this program can work in any community, and we’ll tell you what worked for us and what worked for other groups, but how you want to implement it is pretty much up to you."

At its heart, this is the essence of activism: taking a moral cause that a great number of people believe to be just, and making the essence of that justice inescapably visible.

And what I love best about this story is that Lucas--like the creators of this site, in fact--has been propelled forward by the experience of crushing defeat in 2004. Sort of (kind of) like how the Sex Pistols launched a thousand bands by slaughtering rock and roll -- perhaps we could say the same about George Bush and democracy. (Or maybe that's a stretch... Anyways, read up!)