For one of the more thoughtful takes on the topic yet written, check out ProgressiveSouth’s Daily Kos post “The REAL story about the South and the 2008 elections,” and the dozens of comments that follow.
Michael Scherer’s Time magazine article “Inside Obama’s Idea Factory in Washington” explains why the Center for American Progress is now “the most influential independent organization in Obama’s nascent Washington” and is called Podesta’s “think tank on sterioids.”
Jay Walljasper’s Alternet post “Good Thing Minnesota Has Someone in Charge Who Cares About Counting Every Vote” provides an interesting profile of MN’s Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie as he navigates the vote count for the closest — and one of the most important — state-wide races in MN history.
The Politico‘s Ben Smith reports on organized labor’s disappointment at not being included thus far in President-elect Obama’s economic policy team, after having provided so much money and manpower to elect Obama. Smith also names and discusses some of the presumptive front-runners for the DOL (Gephart, Sebelius, Maxwell, Hindery and Brainard).
Also at Alternet, David Sirota has a critical wrap-up on Obama’s appointments thus far, “Watch out for Obama’s Team Selling Conservative Policies as Progressive Politics,” while Salon‘s Joan Walsh makes the case for “trusting Obama” in her link-rich post “Who’s afraid of Obama’s overreaching?”
Atlanta Journal Constitution ‘Political Insider’ Jim Galloway quotes Jim Martin consultant Donna Brazile on whether the Prez-elect should come to GA to help Martin win his Senate race against Saxby Chambliss: “While I know and understand and appreciate the desire to see President-elect Obama down in Georgia, I think strategically, he should focus on the transition.” A vigorous debate follows in the more than 80 comments.

Laura Olsen’s L.A.Times article “Keeping Obama’s young army engaged” opens up an important dialogue about how the millions of young people who energized Obama’s campaign can help advance the President-elect’s agenda. Thus far, Olsen reports,

The Obama transition team already has moved to capitalize on this enormous youth base: Web-casting the president-elect’s weekly addresses on YouTube; communicating its transition steps on a post-election website, Change.gov; and reaching out by e-mail to many of the campaign’s 3 million donors amassed during a nearly two-year campaign…The team also has taken advantage of booming social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, in reaching out to younger voters in their own element.

Democrats have been presented with a formidable asset, as a result of Obama campaign’s youth outreach. (See, for example Peter Dreier’s pre-election survey of some of the more innovative Obama youth groups at the HuffPo). As Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, notes in Olsen’s article “In terms of a separate force created from the grass-roots, the machinery for that is in place in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”
One of the more interesting ideas is to convert a substantial part of Obama’s youth army into an energetic, well-trained lobbying force of unprecedented scale. Electing great candidates like Obama is only half the battle. Making it possible for him to win reforms is also essential, if Obama is going to fufill his enormous potential. The same tools that youth used to effectively in the campaign, Youtube, Myspace, text messaging etc. can be equally effective in building coalitions for educating people about reform legislation and mobilizing them to put pressure on legislators to support needed reforms.
Kristina Rizga, executive editor of WireTap, a political youth magazine, explores some of the other possibilities, including community organizing, community service and running for office in her article “You Voted, Now What?” in The Nation. Rizga reports that there are now more than 600 community based youth organizations working on activist projects and directs her readers to future5000.com, a data base directory of progressive youth organizations across the US., “the virtual spinal cord of today’s youth movement.” Rizga concludes,

Young people helped elect our country’s first African-American president. Record numbers of volunteers chose working for their ideals over high-paying jobs. But the work isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Barack Obama may be able to seize the moment and push a new kind of politics, but not unless he is pushed to do so. He can only realize what he was elected to achieve with the continued energy of a new generation intent on real change. Here’s to anticipation for what a new generation of first-time voters can do to change their communities and the world.

It’s always a mistake to assume that elected officials will do their best work without constant encouragement and support. Mobilizing young voters to support a charismatic candidate like Obama was relatively easy, compared to enlisting them to work for his legislative agenda. But it is a challenge that must be met, if Obama is to have any chance of success.

Now that all of the pundits have had their say about the pros and cons of appointing Senator Clinton Secretary of State, the public weighs in with overwhelming support for the idea, according to a new Gallup poll. The poll, conducted last Tuesday, indicates that 57 percent of respondents favor Clinton’s appointment, with 30 percent opposed and 12 percent with no opinion. That should shrink the political downside considerably, especially among Democrats, 79 percent of whom favored the idea, with only 12 percent opposed. Among self-identified Independents, 57 percent supported HRC’s appointment, with 27 percent opposed. Only 26 percent of Republicans liked the idea, however, with 61 percent opposed. Interestingly men supported the idea as much as women (56 to 58 percent respectively).

WASHINGTON — Bringing “Jurassic Park” one step closer to reality, scientists have deciphered much of the genetic code of the woolly mammoth, a feat they say could allow them to recreate the shaggy, prehistoric beast in as little as a decade or two.

Dan Ancona, whose article on “Power to the Edge” we excerpted almost in toto yesterday, has another interesting post he brought to our attention in response to TDS’s request for strategic analysis. Ancona’s “Echoes of the Future” at Calitics emphasizes the importance of reaching out to diverse constituencies, running a vigorous field campaign and being bold about “dimension three,” — “shifting worldviews, ideologies, values, common sense and assumptions.” (More on ‘dimension three’ at Mark Schmitt’s American Prospect Post on “Big Picture Power.”)
Ancona then reveals what he calls “Obama’s Secret Sauce,” and describes the ingredients this way:

The first ingredient is to get the overall strategy right. OFA built a highly distributed, social network-oriented operation built on trust. The best phrase I’ve seen to describe this is “Empowered Accountability.” The one social network we all have is our neighborhood, and that’s where it starts, but they were also very savvy about getting people to tap whatever networks they had. This part has to come from the top, from the campaign leadership and the candidate. As a complex system, a good field campaign is very sensitive to initial conditions. The reason Barack’s campaign was so good had a lot to do with Barack. We have to figure out how to build this kind of leadership at the state and local level, but my guess is we’ve already started.
The second ingredient is training. The way the Camp Obamas were set up was key in getting folks not just to do useful work, but to feel like they were a real part of the campaign. This sense of ownership then drove people to make bigger and bigger commitments in both time and in small donations. Whether it was a 2 hour, all day or two-day training, the format was built around three main components: Cesar Chavez/Marshall Ganz-style storytelling, a campaign update, and then training on tools and techniques. All of these components were designed to be scaled up or scaled down to fit the available amount of time; this flexibility made it possible for the California primary campaign to hook and train hundreds of people at a time the few weekends before February 5th.
The third ingredient is having the right tools. (the usual full disclosure here: I’m going to say nice things about the VAN, which my organization, CA VoterConnect, offers to campaigns of all sizes on a sliding scale.) Coming out of our experience in the 2004 primary, we knew that the main web-based toolset a campaign would need included first, a social networking system of some kind to enable meetups and self-organization, and second, an easy-enough to use voter file to turn that self-organization into a usable electoral force. The tools are important, because if they’re designed and deployed right, they help give activists an upward path towards becoming ever more effective and more involved. [Update: I forgot better targeting, somehow. Better targeting tools, including reiterative targeting that could be used as a force multiplier for a field campaign, are absolutely crucial. Improvement in this area probably would have won us the three close races we’re losing by under 1% handily.]

Ancona names some of the specific tools that can add proficiency to 21st century campaigns:

On the social networking side, a local organization can use a mishmash of the DNC’s PartyBuilder or the Courage Campaign‘s social network, as well as tools like Google Groups & Google Docs, and to some degree Facebook (although sometimes it seems like Facebook has gone out of their way to make it impossible to use it to organize). On the voter file side, while of course I’m a big proponent of the VAN (the Voter Activation Network, a web-based voter file tool), as long as the system has fresh, high-quality baseline data, supports local control, local ownership and ongoing storage of the contact data, and can be used for social-network and neighborhood organizing, it will do. This may be the direction that Political Data, Inc. OnlineCampaignCenter and MOE tools that the CDP uses are going. My feeling is that the VAN is still superior and will become more so over the next few cycles, but all that’s required of a tool is for it to meet those basic requirements. There will also likely be new tools and new innovations in this area that campaigns and organizations can and should experiment with as they’re developed and released.

But the secret sauce is not all wonk and no heart. Ancona conveys an infectious spirit of inclusiveness that sets a tone all campaigns should emulate:

People want to get involved, and if we can create satisfying roles for them and walk them along a path of deepening commitment, they will get involved and stay involved… If we can show people how their efforts are effective, how they are helping to build the functional and participatory next version of our democracy, they’ll build it. It gets easier to imagine that future every year: for the first time, we have a big, national campaign (and a glorious victory) to point to as an example.

It’s the TLC in the secret sauce that brings it all together.

Dan Ancona’s article “Power to the Edge: Obama’s California Field Operation from the Future” at Personal Democracy Forum‘s ‘techPresident’ tab contains valuable insights about the strategy and tactics that empowered Obama’s quest for the Democratic nomination. Although Obama did not get a majority of CA delegates, the tactics his campaign deployed there proved critical in his other primary victories, winning the Democratic nomination and building the coalition that elected him.
Ancona, Project Director of California VoterConnect, likens the Obama primary campaign to the British victory in the Battle of Trafalgar and Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasions, both of which involved unconventional techniques of precision targeting to overcome “a largley centralized and monolithic force.” The strategic and tactical implications for politics are far-reaching. As Ancona writes:

The Obama campaign is distributed and bottom-up in a way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like. The evolution in campaign tactics happening right now closely parallels what’s happening in the military, corporations, government and other large organizations. The dropping costs and increasing reliability and flexibility of information technology is having profound effects on how these organizations make things happen.
This transformation was dubbed “Power to the Edge” in 2003 by David Alberts and Richard Hayes, two Department of Defense researchers with the Command and Control Research Program. Their book is surprisingly readable and engaging, and available in its entirety on-line at that link. It may be the best written government document of the 21st century so far. The authors are unabashedly aware of their book’s broader ramifications, stating in the preface that “[T]his book explores a leap now in progress, one that will transform not only the U.S. military but all human interactions and collaborative endeavors.”
A good political analog to Alberts & Hayes is Joe Trippi’s too-often overlooked post-2004 tell-all, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, where he laid out the broad contours of the transformation from the transactional, broadcast, TV-based political era to the relational, participatory, distributed, internet-based one. Trippi’s a terrific storyteller and it’s packed with exactly the kind of inside dirt that both serious and armchair politics junkies love. But it goes beyond that, becoming something of a handy guidebook and roadmap grassroots activists working to align their local efforts into something larger. (Dean campaign veteran and TechPresident contributor Zephyr Teachout’s widely recommended new Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope looks like it takes up the similar line of argument.)

Read more…

So how did women candidates do on November 4? According to Linda Feldmann’s Christian Science Monitor report “Women make modest gains in Election 2008,” women candidates netted 1 US Senate seat, 3 House of Reps seats, and a .50 percent pick up in all the state legislatures combined. The NH Senate became the first state legislature in U.S. history to become majority female with 13 of 24 seats. According a report by to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, the net gains in state legislatures are “entirely due to an increase in Democratic women.” CAWP reports a net gain of one woman governor and 6 female secretaries of state — all Dems. No data yet on women mayors, who were 16.2 percent of all mayors of cities with more than 30K residents before the election.

Most of us have had our fill of red state/blue state electoral vote maps during the last couple of weeks. But there is just one more that merits a gander, Princeton Election Consortium‘s size-distorted EV map of the U.S. It looks a little dada, but it nonetheless provides a more realistic view of political muscle in presidential races.
Charles Franklin’s “White Vote for Obama in the States, Part II” at Pollster.com concludes his statistical wrap-up on the topic (Part I is here). It will undoubtedly be studied avidly by students of racial attitudes.
Bob Moser, one of the more optimistic analysts of southern politics, writes on “A New, Blue Dixie” in The Nation. Says Moser:

Conventional wisdom advised Democratic presidential candidates to bend over backward to look like “regular” Southern guys–tote a gun, adopt an accent, pretend to be a NASCAR freak, run around with a Holy Bible tucked under each arm and, if all else failed, campaign atop a hay bale (as Michael Dukakis once did in North Carolina). Obama, precisely the kind of Democrat who was supposed to be an impossible sell in the South, eschewed such fakery. He looked South and saw not stereotypes but — wonder of wonders — Americans.

In a related report, Tim Murphy notes at Daily Yonder, via Facing South‘s Chris Kromm, that 32 of the 111 urban counties that shifted Democrat in the presidential vote were based in the South. In another post, Kromm also shows what a powerful force young white voters were in Obama’s NC win.
Poll analyst Nate Silver inks a two book deal with Penguin worth a reported $700K.
David G. Savage’s article, “Who Would Obama Pick for the Supreme Court?” in today’s L.A. Times centers on the probability of a woman appointee and discusses some candidates for Obama’s short list. The article also notes that Obama, more of a legal scholar than perhaps all other U.S, Presidents, has made remarks indicating he may favor moderates over judicial activists.
For a 3-point race that has national implications, the reporting on the GA Senate run-off is embarrassingly weak in today’s daily rags across the state. But The Media Consortium has a “Georgia Run-Off Newsladder” that serves as a good gateway to recent reporting on the race, thanks to the research of Spencer Kent and Robert Harding. See also the Daily Kos postings on ‘GA-Sen’, especially RUKind’s article, “Saxby ‘Sugar’ Shameless” for an informative update on Chambliss’s role in the Imperial Sugar Case. And MyDD‘s demoinesdem has a list of five things you can do to help elect Jim Martin, followed by insightful comments from readers.
Peter Hart and David Gergen have some perceptive comments on “How Obama Won” in their dialogue at Rolling Stone.
Just in case you thought that impressive Democratic victories in ’06 and ’08 would lead to more equitable coverage on the telly, ‘Political Animal’ Steve Benen has a Washington Monthly post showing that the Sunday political yak shows still have a strong conservative bias in their guest lists.

if you haven’t had your fill of Obama-as-the-next-FDR articles, try George Packer’s freebie at The New Yorker “The New Liberalism: How the economic crisis can help Obama redefine the Democrats.”
Sure, Obama did well in the big cities, as expected. But he also had chops in the ‘burbs, explain Brookings Fellows William Frey and TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira in their article at Brookings web pages,”A Demographic Breakthrough for Democrats.”
Peter Kauffman has an article at The Politico on Dems’ inroads into military veterans as a constituency, noting Obama’s impressive 44 percent share and the thin ranks of GOP poltiical leaders coming up who are vets, in contrast to the Dems bumper crop.
Digby has a sobering reminder that, no matter how much reaching out across the aisle Obama does, bipartisan kumbaya isn’t necessarily a high priority among some Republican leaders.
Not to rain on the parade, but elections also show Dems where we are weak and need some focus. In that regard, do check out this map (click on no.s 2 and 3 ) the graphic wizards at The Grey Lady have put together. It shows a strikingly red band of counties in which McCain actually did better than Bush did in ’04. Note that TN, AR and OK counties are much worse than in other red states.
Conversely, Domenico Montenaro has a MSNBC First Read report on battleground state counties that flipped from red to blue. See also this well-illustrated post by Andrew at Red State, Blue State…, revelaing the Dems’ edge in larger counties.
In his WaPo column today, E.J. Dionne, Jr. urges Obama to emulate Reagan not by turning right, but by acting boldly from the get-go.

On October 12th, our TDS commentator James Vega made three predictions about how Conservatives would respond to an Obama victory. He predicted that they would argue:

1. “the American people don’t really support Barack Obama (they were tricked)…”
2 “true conservatism was not really rejected by the American people (just the overly timid and bumbling John McCain)…”
3. “The Obama administration will be described as basically “illegitimate” and conservatives will assert that they therefore have no obligation to support it”

Now here are some quotes from conservative leader Brent Bozell, interviewed by Fox News after he emerged from a major meeting of top conservatives today in Virginia:

1. “The American people are fiscally conservative, and the fascinating thing, Bill, is that Barack Obama ran as a Reaganite and won over the public as a fiscal conservative.”
2. “Conservatives didn’t play a role in this campaign. This was a moderate Republican against a liberal — a left-wing Democrat, and the left-wing Democrat beat the moderate Republican.”
3. “Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the left-wing agenda he wants to enact…”
Interviewer: what if some of these Senate races that still hang in the balance go the Democratic way? …Would you consider that a mandate?
BOZELL: — There’s no question of the power that they now have in Washington. The point is that the American people are still on our side.

Geez, maybe we oughta see about getting some royalties here.