An army marches on its stomach
Jul 29th, 2008 at 8:18 am by Alex UA
Last year I decided that I was no longer going to work in politics– a tough decision, given that I’d quit my job as a SysAdmin and taken on quite a bit of debt to try and “fight the good fight.” But, after skipping from campaign to campaign and job to job I decided that I just couldn’t do it, at least not if I also wanted to have a wife/family. When I entered the political arena during the 2004 Presidential race, there seemed to be tons of money being raised and spent on liberal advocacy groups, and I believed that the wealthy folks who were funding the activities of that election would be in it for the long haul and help to close the massive infrastructure gap between the well-funded Right and the perpetually starved Left.
Needless to say, the Progressive Movement is still on a starvation diet. Last week, my friend and colleague Mike Connery wrote about Youth Groups Doing More with Less:
As I’ve written many times before, 2004 was a boom year for youth organizing as the progressive movement built many new institutions (and strengthened others) to reach out to young voters. There were two driving forces behind this boom: entrepreneurial activism on the part of young people, and a willingness among donors to take risks and support that work. The results were impressive and verified by independent research.
This year, the “surging” youth vote is one of the most important stories of the election cycle, and one would think that moving as many young voters to the polls as possible would be a high priority. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Many of the organizations responsible for engaging young voters in 2004 and 2006, and many new organizations working to fill holes in the youth engagement sphere, are struggling to raise funds and scale up their operations for the fall.
“As far as I’m aware, all the youth voting groups put together haven’t secured more than $10 million toward their budgets in 2008,” said Billy Wimsatt, founder and former executive director of the League of Young Voters. “If the $40 million figure from 2004 is correct, this means we are seeing only one quarter of of the funding for youth voting as in 2004. This is a staggering decrease.”
And yesterday Mike followed up on this by pointing to a post on OpenLeft noting that it isn’t just youth organizations that are starving - it seems as though all progressive groups are hurting in this cycle.
Now, I know that Obama is doing a lot of heavy lifting for this cycle, especially in the area of youth outreach and organizing, and honestly his youth outreach is already better organized and more widespread then any of the progressive outreach groups could have hoped to become.
But overall, I find this extremely depressing. We have an opportunity to build a progressive majority that will last for many years, and yet we are leaving that opportunity up to fate and, much worse, a politician running for president.
Thanks for the link Alex. I agree that Obama has accomplished more than all the progressive youth groups combined could have this year. In that sense, Obama is a blessing.
Yet, Obama will not always be on the ticket. No, I’m not talking about 2016, I’m talking 2010 midterms. We’re starving groups that we’ll need to motivate young voters in those midterm elections. There are other gaps as well. Obama’s outreach is solely focused on colleges - less than half of the youth population. There’s also mixed evidence as to how supportive his field operation will be of down ballot candidates. This is why it’s just bad politics to let Obama be the only game in town.
Moving on to a post-Obama administration playing field, if we starve these groups now, we’ll need to start again from scratch in 2016. That is depressing indeed.
Does this have anything to do with Obama telling donors to give only to him?
I wrote about this a few weeks back in comments at BMT, so pardon the redundancy, as my comment is still relevant.
One major reason that these groups are on a starvation budget is that “the left” is a bunch of cheapskates.
At The Nation (or perhaps Booman Tribune) there was a long piece on the difference between the right and the left. The right is always setting up think tanks and actually, ya know, PAYING people to work there, write papers, appear on TV, etc etc. Scaife and Vigurie pony up the cash in a big way.
The left expects you to knock on doors and volunteer for free. If you want to have a wife and family, or you already have one, it’s impossible to get by on those kind of crumbs. The attitude the Democrats seems to be “why buy the cow, when you can milk a progressive for free?”
You’ll also notice that of the two or three think tanks that progressives have, one of the most successful (Media Matters) was established by David Brock, a disgruntled right-winger. Food for thought…
Another reason for this is that the Democrats actually seem embarrassed by their base in a way the GOP never seems to be (although I am sure they see their base as easily manipulated slack-jawed yokels). When the slack-jaws freaked out about Terri Schiavo, the GOP was there to throw them some red meat. When progressives flipped out about FISA, the Democrats flipped us the bird and voted with the Republicans, including those who promised to uphold progressive values, like Patrick Murphy, Jerry McInerny, Chris “The Liar” Carney.
As I said at BMT, with the Democrats “It’s always “we must move to the right, let’s ’stand up to the left’”, which is kind of like choosing to beat up on Milhouse rather than face down Nelson Muntz.
That’s why the Democratic congress is actually more popular with the GOP’s base than their own! What we need is accountability now.
Hey Alex! Long time, no see. You know “BlueForce” is still up? We need to shutter that experiment, man. As for this:
“yet we are leaving that opportunity up to fate and, much worse, a politician running for president.”
Better a politician like Obama than a former governor with no foreign policy experience, a former alcohol dependency, and a tendancy to abuse the English language.
@Jason - yeah man- been way too long! I would shut BF down, but there’s too much good content left there for me to abandon it.
I also agree about the Obama thing- and I know this isn’t a perfect world- but progressives could be doing so much of a better job building the infrastructure we need to compete for the long haul…
@Brendan- a lying politician, you say? Never heard of those. I agree with your anger, though I’m not as absolute about my response. Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils, and, well, you get the idea…