{"id":311947,"date":"2010-02-12T12:30:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T17:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=66744"},"modified":"2010-02-12T12:30:53","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T17:30:53","slug":"ofa%e2%80%99s-magical-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/311947","title":{"rendered":"OFA\u2019s Magical Activism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The new western White House? (photo: Express Monorail)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Last week, we launched our 2010 FDL Fire Dogs contest<\/a> to determine which members of Congress the FDL community would support with both fundraising and volunteer hours. Yesterday, OFA launched a similar effort to get volunteers to support members of Congress — but the criteria was somewhat less than clear. This email arrived this morning from Lynda Tran of the DNC Press:<\/p>\n

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Just 24 hours after launching the initiative, OFA supporters have already committed more than 3 million hours of their time to help candidates who fight for health reform — and that number is continuing to grow.<\/p>\n

In fact, OFA supporters met our goal of pledging 1,000,000 hours to supporting Congressional leaders who stand up for health insurance reform just hours after OFA Director Mitch Stewart’s e-mail announcing the effort yesterday. Today those commitments are continuing to roll in.<\/p>\n

This display of enthusiasm shows just how determined OFA activists are about passing meaningful health insurance reform — and how hard they’re willing to fight to support President Obama’s vision for America.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, does that mean the Senate bill is now “President Obama’s vision for America?” I’ll assume Raul Grijalva, and anyone in the House who continues to support the bill they passed instead<\/a>, is still a “monster” and unqualified to participate.<\/p>\n

Did they happen to mention that the members who don’t want to vote for health care reform now are the ones in the most conservative districts? Are these OFA members so enthralled with “President Obama’s vision for America” that they’re gonna hump to Alabama and swarm the district for the anti-immigrant, anti-gay rights Rep. Bobby Bright, who has voted against everything from Lilly Ledbetter to SCHIP? Perhaps they can all buy hand guns<\/a> and wave ‘em around Montgomery in a symbolic gesture of support.<\/p>\n

Or, maybe they just opened the email and said, yeah, I’ll select the most hours allowed in the dropdown. 20 hours? Sure!<\/p>\n

OFA could have provided enormous support to Democratic members of Congress, which they critically needed in 2009. With 13 million enthusiastic members, they could have launched a fundraising drive right after the election that swelled the coffers of every Democrat in Congress and freed them from their ties to lobbyists.<\/p>\n

But those were the ties that Rahm Emanuel was trying to forge, not break<\/a>, so that didn’t happen. And, as Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone recently reported<\/a>, when OFA finally awakened to the need to support Martha Coalkley, “OFA discovered that most of its 13 million supporters had tuned out. Only 45,000 members responded to the last-minute call to arms.”<\/p>\n

OFA is always a day late and a dollar short. Last year, when it became clear that tea party activists had plans to disrupt Democratic town halls in August, FDL crowd-sourced all of the events, put them up in a searchable widget<\/a> and organized progressives to show up and support these Democrats. We also had an event reporting tool<\/a> to keep track of what was happening. Weeks later, OFA did the same thing.<\/p>\n

Their consistent inability to do something meaningful with the most powerful email list ever assembled is probably the biggest FAIL in the age of online activism. Their most consistent presence on the internet seems to be the overlap between their members and Cass Sunstein’s creepy “cognitive infiltrators.<\/a>” If they truly wanted to support Democratic infrastructure, they’d launch a fundraiser and let the list choose the members they wanted to support.<\/p>\n

I’m gonna bet it wouldn’t be Bobby Bright.<\/p>\n

When we announced that the winners of the Fire Dogs contest were Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner, I wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

After coming up for air from the health care battle, I can honestly say that there\u2019s nothing more important than breaking the link between lobbyist money and campaigns \u2014 but campaign finance reform alone isn\u2019t enough. Developing an alternative progressive financing apparatus is a must.<\/p>\n

In a year when even safe Democrats are facing serious challenges to their seats, the online community can provide support by virtue of our numbers that lobbyists can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Now that the President is inviting the Republicans to the White House and trying to jam their ideas into the Senate bill in order to pass it, “the President’s vision” has devolved into “whatever ends up passing.”<\/p>\n

As Eli said, “if Paul Ryan’s plan passes, then *that* will be “the President’s vision.”<\/p>\n

We’ve been speaking with the Kucinich, Grayson and Weiner campaigns about how we can provide the most help to them. Each of these members is a consistent leader on different progressive issues, and our community is showing tangible support in a tough election year for those who have a proven track record and consistently stand up for what they believe in. That’s substantially different from “magical activism” pledged out of personal devotion to the President and a nebulous health care vision.<\/p>\n

You can donate to the 2010 Fire Dog campaigns<\/a> or sign up to phone bank<\/a> now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Share <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new western White House? (photo: Express Monorail) Last week, we launched our 2010 FDL Fire Dogs contest to determine which members of Congress the FDL community would support with both fundraising and volunteer hours. Yesterday, OFA launched a similar effort to get volunteers to support members of Congress — but the criteria was somewhat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}