The post Your wish for Barack Obama may become his thought appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, I was quite disappointed that he had virtually no substantive written material about his campaign to provide to voters. The policy positions that he made available on his campaign web site were extremely general and minimally informative. It was a campaign that in many ways was based primarily on slogans, and it worked quite well that way. At the very least it worked well enough for him to win the election, and that’s a big part of what he wanted to accomplish.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks about the two types of followers that a politician has: (a) political hacks who are primarily concerned about winning elections, and (b) policy wonks who want to see implemented the policies that they support. During a campaign, the wonks and near-wonks are looking for whatever information they can get in order to provide some clarity and certainty as to what candidate stands for.
In 2008 I found very little information from the Obama campaign that helped me determine what his views were on certain issues and what his style of governance would be. However, I had enough confidence in him to try to engage in some “educated speculation,” or at least “hopeful wishing” as to who he really was. I chose to put my contribution to his campaign into a special account that I established. It was not legally connected with the “Obama for America” campaign organization. It was essentially a one-person PAC.
I created a flyer that spelled out the key wishes that I had; had over 6,000 of them printed; and had them mailed to households in swing districts in St. Louis County, MO. You can see a somewhat unclear copy of the flyer by clicking here for Side A and here for Side B (unfortunately I did not keep track of the digital copy from which the prints were made).
Five years later, we can look back on my “wonky wishes” and examine how well Barack Obama satisfied this particular progressive. Here is a list of the stated wishes in the flyer and an assessment of how well the President has fulfilled them:
Overall I am quite satisfied with the job that President Barack Obama has done. Most of what I wanted that he has not accomplished is because of the recalcitrance of the Republicans and the ugly influence of money in politics. But he’s doing about as well as can be expected. I’ll give him a B+. This is not the average of the grades above, but I have to give him extra credit because he has had to deal with the political realities and I need to modify some of my wishes because of those same realities.
I have already taken the liberty to express my advance wishes for what President Obama writes in his memoirs to truly clarify his progressive ideas. You can read them here.
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]]>The post Why I’m not organizing for America appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>As a former Obama campaign staffer, I’ve been asked repeatedly to get on board with Organizing for America [OFA], the successor to the original—and amazingly effective–OFA [Obama for America] that helped get the President elected and issued my campaign paycheck. I have yet to participate.
A recent article in Rolling Stone reveals the back story of what happened to OFA, on the national level, and it’s very disheartening. But even before reading that piece, I had already backed away from OFA. Here’s why:
I know I’m taking a risk in saying these things. I hope my campaign buddies will understand. I still have hope. But I suspect that I’m not the only Obama-phile who is annoyed by the direction that OFA has taken. I’d like to hear from others. Are you out there?
The post Why I’m not organizing for America appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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