There’s been a lot of discussion over the last couple of days regarding the role of the grassroots in the Obama campaign. So, I thought some might be interested in reading the comments of Zephyr Teachout, who, as you may know, was the Director of Internet Organizing during the Dean campaign. In the comments section of an article on this week’s MySpace controversy at Tech President, she does a great job of providing a thorough account of the trials and tribulations of running a people-powered campaign.

In the interest of disclosure, I should probably mention that I did volunteer work with Zephyr during the Dean campaign and she was instrumental in helping to get Vermonters for Obama off the ground. And she’s a friend of mine.

Here’s what she had to say…

Some reflections

This issue reminds me of questions that we had to deal with all the time on the Dean campaign. We called people like Joe A’s "centers of gravity"– people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

At first, it was very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options, but we ran into an odd clarifier–the law. Because of legal concerns of coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all. In February and March, Dean Nation was blogging, and New York for Dean and others were creating posters and strategies of their own–some of them were clamoring for direction.

The question answered itself. We simply couldn’t have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy, so we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do. As part of this, we had to train the press–when Georgia for Dean sends out a press release, it is not a Howard Dean press release, it is a Georgia for Dean press release. The training of the press took awhile, but they learned. Teaching people who’d worked in politics for a while that "no, we will not vet that flier you are going to pass out to 1,000 people" also took awhile, but led to what I think is the most important thing in a democracy: people taking responsibility. Local groups, centers of gravity like Joe Anthony, took responsibility because they knew we wouldn’t. Some got exhausted after a few months of intense work, others did not–and not all relationships were handled well, as we fumbled for solutions for the hardworking volunteers. The issues got more difficult when paid staffers, on the ground, would be working with unpaid supporters who had done far more extraordinary, creative, and difficult work for months–we found that grassroots growth often slowed in states once we put in a paid staffer (I have alot of theories about this, but not for this comment).

There were hundreds of mistakes. Here are two. In March 2003, we signaled that we were going to give a group an "official" status and then changed our position. Our first impulse was to provide the group what they wanted, but after realizing that the "official" group was far more bottlenecked than the unofficial ones, we reneged. We admitted we made a mistake, but people were understandably angry. The second was much later–the fall of 2003. A group started in order to help Dean develop policy positions, or at least do collective research. We effectively shut the door on them–I think we weren’t ready to open up that much, and didn’t know how to do collective policy, and the founders were annoyed, because I (and others) had initially been very excited. Of course they continued on their own, but without the active enthusiasm of our group.

But we also had some real successes. The most obvious is that Trippi–rage as he would over a few things Aziz might mischievously post–did not try to control the Dean Nation blog. The Friendster pages set up for Dean (yes, there were a handful) were one of our top referrers, and we had rare, but nice, interactions with the founders. The vast majority of our centers of gravity we communicated with, but did not try to control.

There were a few big exceptions. Students for Dean, an amazing group with 20,000 members by the time we started working with them, was created by three college students. It was clear it couldn’t keep up their site (which had many features ours didn’t) without some financial support–two of the founders were getting hired away by field staff (poached by our own campaign!) and the other couldn’t afford not to work for the summer. So we offered him jobs and brought them in, giving them more autonomy than most staffers because that is what they needed to be persuaded to work for the campaign. Of course nothing is that simple–as the campaign stiffened towards the end, Students for Dean lost the staff and autonomy they’d been promised–but the general approach really worked, and the on-site blending of Students for Dean and Dean Students (into Generation Dean, a name created by two South Carolina students–who we asked for permission to use). If Students for Dean had turned us down (which they almost did), then we would have continued to link to them, and gone forward.

I think a similar approach could have worked with the Obama campaign’s approach to Joe A.–figure out if they could give Joe what he wanted–and it sounds like they started down that path and then, inexplicably, stopped. If it is true that they asked him for an offer (and Joe Rospars’ blog post doesn’t contradict this), then why didn’t they counter offer?

If they did, I don’t care how much Joe A. asked for–the new media team probably didn’t have $40,000, but they should have counter-offered what they could. If he’d asked for $200,000 and they had $500 they should have returned with the $500 offer. Its difficult to figure out an amount in any bargaining circumstances, and money in politics is downright bizarre–whether or not the figure was too high, it should be generous with people trying to figure out how to interact with the campaign. I was happy to see that Rospars did not accuse Joe A. of over-asking. Relatedly an itemized list is presumably an effort to appear professional–an effort to show the campaign that you are not bilking them. My heart goes out to someone staying up all night, asking friends’ advice, trying to work out the key to the vague promised thing. How much should I ask for?

The mistake of the campaign, may be, perversely, a result of too much success–the brilliant social networking site and tools created a dependency on keeping a loose leash on the conversations, or on "having the conversation on our ship" as Matt Gross might say, so that it lulled the campaign into a habit of being able to make decisions about what could and couldn’t be said, and made them think it was possible to have mass support and and vetted statements about Obama. Its not. Rospars post about the success of the Obama web tools suggests that there is a desire (so understandable, if impossible!) for the web strategy of the campaign to live and breathe on the site, on the grounds, in the gardens built by the web team.

Joe Rospars is a friend of mine, and, as Micah said, a straight shooter, and I’m generally sympathetic with the open fumbling of campaigns towards making hard decisions. I wish his post was a little more open, but I know how hard that can be on a campaign with many vetters.

One thing his post reveals is that the Obama campaign had chosen a different general strategic approach than the Dean campaign did–one that would have our lawyers, among others, quaking in their boots. They had decided to create management/agent relationships with this particular center of gravity–the campaign had login access and control over content (at least for a while) and it basically, if gently, perceived itself as the agent finally responsible for the content.

Our lawyers advice was based on fear of FEC problems, but it turned out to be generally sound for grassroots relationships in general: for each relationship, choose whether it is one of absolute control, or no control. THAT won’t confuse the press and people writing–at first, perhaps, but they will learn. When in doubt, no control is better, just as it is in friendships–your friends will do everything they can to represent you well and be your supporter, until you start telling them what to say about you.

I hope this episode is a lesson for the Obama campaign, but also others - a reminder that having grassroots support means autonomous individuals who do not just work, but speak.

By Zephyr Teachout at Thu, 05/03/2007 - 3:16am