Between the economic meltdown and the uplifting election, Americans have had something of a respite for a few months from dispiriting headlines concerning wars and terrorism. But now the horrific atrocities in Mumbai bring a sobering reminder that the Obama administration will face a continuing, if not growing, threat of global terror, much of it directed against Americans.
As a presidential candidate, Senator Obama had to talk tough about confronting terrorists with military force. He wasn’t just overcompensating because of his opponent’s impressive military record. The cold, hard reality is that we do need enhanced military and intelligence capabilities to deal with the threat of terrorism. But our policy must be a lot smarter, with more precision in targeting military action when it’s really necessary and much stronger on-the-ground intelligence. It will require a major reformulation of our strategic goals at DOD, State, and intelligence agencies.
But the greatest challenge facing the Obama administration in confronting the threat of global terror is creating a more effective strategy for winning the struggle for hearts and minds.

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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.

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.

Whenever there is a change of party control of the executive branch of the federal government, lots of jobs come open, and lots of ambitious and/or dedicated folk start scheming for ways to join the new administration. There’s even a handy-dandy publication–known as the “Plum Book”–put out by the House Committee on Government Reform that lays out available positions.
But in this particular transition, it’s becoming clear that job aspirants, and their family members, better be exceptionally tidy record-keepers, whether or not they’ve got potential conflicts-of-interest or the odd drunk-driving charge in their background. According to a Jackie Calmes article in The New York Times today, the basic questionnaire being distributed by the Obama transition team to those seeking “high-ranking positions” is a 63-point monster of a request for disclosure that goes beyond the usual have-you-been-a-lobbyist-or-felon stuff. Ever sent a potentially embarassing email? (Who hasn’t!). Cough it up. Ever done a blog post or set up a Facebook page? Send that along, please. Some questions clearly relate to issues that came up during the last Democratic transition in 1992. There’s one on “domestic help” that asks about the immigration status and witholding tax arrangements of nannies, housekeepers, and yard workers–a stumbling block, you may recall, for at least two potential Clinton administration Attorneys General. Notes Calmes:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

It’s not clear from the article exactly how far down the food chain this questionnaire is being applied. But those who face it must understand that after they past this test, there’s additional vetting by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.
As one of the worst record-keepers you’ll ever meet, I’m sure glad I’m not interested in a high-ranking job with the feds. But for those with that aspiration, perhaps the Obama vetting process will keep the crowds down.

Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to publish this constructive critique of field strategies for the unsuccessful effort to defeat the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 initiative in California. Its author is Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project (TPP). During the 2008 election season, TPP worked in six cities across the nation to engage communities in actions to elect Barack Obama and to defeat Proposition 8 on the California ballot. This article is based upon her work on the No on 8 campaign, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures.
On November 4, Proposition 8 passed in California, enshrining in the state constitution a ban on same sex marriage. Similar amendments also passed in Florida and Arizona. We have now lost campaigns like this in 29 states; we have won only once – in Arizona in 2006. On a human level, these defeats are a blow to people across the nation who care about civil rights and equality. On a strategic level, they are explicable; after all, we continue to rely on the same strategies despite mounting evidence that they do not work.
What is required as the LGBT movement goes forward is a commitment to permanent political engagement and a national grassroots strategy and infrastructure that complement our national legal strategy. We must also finally do what our opponents have long been doing: treating each statewide ballot measure as a national campaign.
The loss in California is a particularly apt case study because it took place in our nation’s largest state and because the opposition made it a national campaign from the start. A full analysis of this loss falls into three overlapping categories:
–An aerial view of the infrastructure, strategies and mindset of the national LGBT movement;
–A “zoom-in” view of the specific field, messaging, and funding strategies used by the No on 8 campaign; and
–a similar “zoom-in” view of the strategies used by two concurrent, successful national campaigns: “Yes on 8” and the Obama campaign.
In this article, I will focus on an analysis of the field strategies used by the “No on 8” campaign
Proposition 8 passed by 510,591 votes. We don’t know if that gap could have been closed. But we do know that the “No on 8” campaign could have run a more visionary, nimble and aggressive field strategy. Ultimately the field strategy came up short in two critical, related areas:
First, the “No on 8” campaign did not become national until October, limiting both the volunteers and donors it could engage.
Second, the campaign’s field strategy failed to effectively reach enough swing voters enough times to turn them out as “no” voters.

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I have no idea what most of America thought about Sarah Palin’s speech last night. But I’m positive that it fired up the base of both parties.
Anyone who has spent any time at all reading/watching/listening to commentators over the last 10 hours knows that the Republicans loved that speech. Within minutes of each other, both Slate’s John Dickerson and The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder Twittered comments about how happy McCain’s aides were with Palin. On MSNBC this morning, Joe Scarborough just said that he watched the speech and realized he was watching the first female president of the United States. The posters on The Corner were ecstatic, each trying to outdo the other in their praise of the Alaska governor. You get the gist.
The reaction from the Democratic base hasn’t gotten as much airtime (it is the GOP convention, after all), but I’m going to wager it is just as strong. Midway through Palin’s speech, I pulled up the Obama website, clicked on the contribute button, and gave another contribution. I know at least three friends who did the same (and one who gave twice). On Facebook and on Twitter, my little corner of the political universe was fired up — folks were rubbing their hands in anticipation of Joe Biden taking on this hockey mom in the vice presidential debate. That holds just as true for the blogs I read. Certainly Sean’s friends and commentators on FiveThirtyEight.com had a similar reaction. My guess is that the Obama campaign saw the groundswell they were getting, and at 3:30 this morning, an email from David Plouffe landed in my inbox — I’d bet that the campaign gets a lot of $25 donations this morning.

If you log into Facebook and search for the name “Hussein,” you might be in for a surprise. For instance, the very first person to pop up in my results is a former co-worker — Dan Hussein O’Maley.
If I didn’t know him by that full name when we worked together, it’s because the Hussein is a fairly recent change.
Dan is part of a spirited group of Obama supporters who are changing their names to show solidarity with their candidate in response to conservative attacks. The New York Times covers the phenomenon this weekend:

The movement is hardly a mass one, and it has taken place mostly online, the digital equivalent of wearing a button with a clever, attention-getting message. A search revealed hundreds of participants across the country, along with a YouTube video and bumper stickers promoting the idea. Legally changing names is too much hassle, participants say, so they use “Hussein” on Facebook and in blog posts and comments on sites like nytimes.com, dailykos.com and mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s networking site.
New Husseins began to crop up online as far back as last fall. But more joined up in February after a conservative radio host, Bill Cunningham, used Mr. Obama’s middle name three times and disparaged him while introducing Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at a campaign rally. (Mr. McCain repudiated Mr. Cunningham’s comments).

The Internet makes a movement like this possible. These Obama supporters aren’t legally changing their name (for the most part) because that requires far too much bureaucratic hassle. But with email, instant messenger, Facebook, and blogs, they don’t need to go through those hurdles to make a striking impact. And of course, online, these folks have the ability to find each other.
But the Internet itself doesn’t inspire a movement like this. Instead, it speaks to something very unique about Obama’s candidacy. It’s one thing to build an army of volunteers and raise money from millions of people. It’s another altogether to motivate hundreds of individuals to take the step of adopting Obama’s middle name.
It’s not as though the President of the United States has convinced his supporters to adopt the middle initial “W.”

One way or another, this Democratic primary will be done very soon, and barring an unthinkable tragedy or scandal, Hillary Clinton will be making a decision about how to end her campaign for president.
She’ll give a speech where she’ll reflect on the victories she won and the barriers she broke. She’ll thank her campaign staff, her activists, and her donors. She’ll try to pay her debts, conduct an audit for the FEC, and then return to the Senate to think about what might have been and what might one day still be.
And that’s it, right?
Not exactly.
No matter what the office, every campaign is about building a network of support. The end result might be a collections of names written on index cards and bound with a rubber band or it might be data for a million supporters in a voter vault.
But for the presidential campaigns, it also includes the sometimes small but actively engaged networks they’ve built on sites across the Web.
Hillary Clinton has 198,664 friends on MySpace, 155,486 supporters on Facebook, 13,851 subscribers on YouTube, and 3,793 followers on Twitter.
Each of them represents a person who made a conscious decision to connect with Clinton and her campaign. They deserve the dignity of an appropriate goodbye and thank you.
Unless, that is, Clinton has an idea about what she wants to do next.
She began her bid for the presidency with a YouTube video where she called for a national conversation about the challenges facing the country. That doesn’t have to end just because her campaign does. Particularly online.
The Web offers Clinton (and every other politician) the opportunity to connect with people directly, without the filters of the mainstream news or the impersonality of a campaign rally. That’s a valuable resource no matter what Clinton’s future holds. She would be smart to continue developing it.
But if she does choose to close up shop, she should take a careful look at what John Edwards did and learn a lesson.
As he ran for president, Edwards carefully built a presence on more than twenty social networking and media sites. He updated them regularly right up until the day he suspended his campaign. And then all of a sudden, there was nothing. His last update on Twitter still reads:

On my way to Finley hospital in Dubuque, Iowa to talk with nurses and local SEIU members. Then I’m off to a community meeting in Montice

That’s a big mistake and one that’s undone some of the good will he’d managed to build online.
A loss is always hard, but a politician who wants to campaign online can’t just walk away when the race is done.

People who have been watching this primary campaign have spent so much time talking about how Barack Obama is using the Internet that it almost seems like a waste of breath to mention something else.
But these numbers for February (compiled by WebGuild) are so striking that I’ve got to bring them up.
Obama spent $1 million on Google ads, Clinton just $67,000.
Obama spent $99,341 on Yahoo Web Ads, Clinton $9,186.
Obama spent $58,000 on Yahoo search ads, Clinton nothing.
Obama spent $4,900 on Facebook advertising, Clinton nothing.
But the strongest contrast between the two campaigns is what each paid outside firms. Obama paid web consultants $93,162 in February, while Clinton didn’t make any payments to firms that specialize in the Internet. She did, however, pay her ad consultants $997,000 and her media consultants $2,540,000.
You get what you pay for.

At the start of school last year, a black freshman at Jena High School in Louisiana asked his principal if he could sit beneath a tree, which was reserved by tradition for white students only. The administrator told the student he could sit where he pleased, and the freshman and his friends ate their lunch in the shade. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree, and ever since, the small town in LaSalle Parish has been ripped apart.
Things came to a head when six black teenagers were arrested and charged with assault and then attempted murder after a fight with a white student. Last week in Jena, more than 10,000 people, some of whom drove throughout the night, showed up to protest the arrests.
You’ve probably heard about Jena by now. But when the story first broke, there was little or no mention of it in the major precincts of the progressive blogosphere (including, just to be clear about it, this one). At Facing South (the blog for the Institute for Southern Studies), Chris Kromm did a post last Thursday, the day of the Jena march, that notes the lack of comment. His quick survey looked like this:

* DailyKos features a handful of posts about injustice in Iraq today — but not a single entry on its main page, or even its user-generated “diaries,” about this important case.
* TalkingPointsMemo, a favorite of the DC wonk set, is similarly incensed about foreign policy, but apparently not about racial justice in the South — nothing there either.
* Long-time progressive blogger Atrios doesn’t have a lot of posts up, but found time to touch on Paul Krugman, Iraq and the state of the Euro — but not this major issue.
* Surely TalkLeft — which has positioned itself as the leading progressive blog about criminal justice issues — would have something? Think again — not a single mention, not even in the quick news briefs!
* What about another progressive favorite, FireDogLake? A rant about Republicans being “little bitches,” but nothing on the Jena 6.
When the Jena 6 does make an appearance on progressive blogs today, it’s little more than a passing nod. Huffington Post has a blog post buried below the fold; ThinkProgress gives it a two-sentence news brief.

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