The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  One of the best new tools for Field was dubbed “Airwolf,” in homage to the 1980s TV series about daring missions. After volunteers entered voter information into the system and the Cave updated support scores, Airwolf would send voters a personalized email or letter under the name of a local Obama organizer, reminding these supporters to turn in their ballot application, sign up to volunteer, make sure everyone in the household voted, or whatever other message applied. The result allowed Chicago to assist field organizers from hundreds of miles away. Airwolf created the illusion of political intimacy. “I know you from your emails!” a voter would exclaim to an Obama field organizer who had never written to or even heard of the voter before. The Obama staffer would then nod sagely and pretend they knew each other, a small taste of the life of a politician.

  By the middle of the summer, Field was firing on all cylinders. Mitch Stewart felt that in 2008, OFA’s young organizers had come in and pushed the locals around. Then in 2010 the Obama people on the ground got punched in the face. It matured them. Now the twenty-four-year-old organizers of 2008 were twenty-eight and less arrogant. They were more respectful and more willing to empower the people on the ground. Jeremy Bird’s original organizing mentor, Marshall Ganz of Harvard, said that organizers who lacked the passion they felt in 2008 had to replace with their heads what was missing from their hearts. Ganz didn’t account for all the volunteers whose hearts still belonged to Obama.

  E the twentieth century, hevveryonevous moments. For Stewart it was in June, when Wisconsin, a central section of the Obama firewall, started to look shaky. OFA’s normal advantage on the ground was challenged there by Governor Scott Walker, who had built a strong field organization to fight off a recall effort. But it turned out that a large number of Wisconsin voters who opposed recalling Walker supported Obama.

  Field had a small target for persuasion. About 30 percent of the electorate could be deemed independent swing voters, but this was misleading because about three-quarters of these voters leaned strongly to one party, usually the Republicans. The GOP’s brand had been so tarnished that millions of longtime Republicans were now calling themselves independents or Tea Party members, a fact that would confuse pollsters and reporters for the rest of the season. Only about 7 percent of voters nationally were up for grabs, with many fewer undecideds in the battleground states that were getting all the attention. The upshot was that around a million voters in a handful of states—much less than 1 percent of the electorate—were truly persuadable. That’s why the country seemed heading toward what the political scientists called a mobilization election rather than a persuasion election.

  Field worried most about young voters. Many had drifted into other pursuits since 2008. So the campaign made a special effort to find the younger brothers and sisters of the old core. The last time, the campaign had one or two full-time organizers at Ohio State University; now they had nine or ten, plus scores of volunteers, scavenging around the clock for votes at the huge Columbus campus.

  NARWHAL FAILED—“a huge disaster,” as one senior staffer put it. A unified data platform, instant access to highly detailed information (beyond support scores) on millions of American voters, would have to wait. It was not yet possible to, say, link a veteran supporting Obama in Ohio to a persuadable veteran from his same army unit in Virginia. Harper Reed’s insistence that Narwhal was a success depended on defining it more narrowly as a “data store” for all of the campaign’s applications. In truth, Narwhal was always more of a concept than a product. By 2016, maybe even by the 2014 midterms, Democratic geeks might be closer to catching the great toothed whale.

  Facebook-targeted sharing, by contrast, was a monster success, especially with the youth vote. OFA started from strength: One way or another, Obama connected to 98 percent of Facebook users in the United States, which exceeded the total number of American voters. In an era in which half of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds were unreachable by phone, Facebook was essential for a candidate like Obama. Here the Cave, working with Digital, came through in a big way. They matched Facebook friends against their modeling to determine who was a registration target, persuasion target, or turnout target. By the end of the campaign 600,000 Obama supporters had each used Facebook to contact around half a dozen specific friends identified by Chicago: 3.5 million potential Obama voters in battleground states. Nearly one-third of them, one million people, took some action in response, such as registering. This was a staggering response rate and the debut of a digital persuasion and get-out-the-vote tool that would inevitably be adopted by every campaign at every level. As Messina had predicted, friend-to-friend was the highest form of voter contact, though it was hardly perfect. A Romney staffer, Matt Lira, was encouraged through targeted sharing to contact always said the same thing: 20h2 his Facebook friend, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor, and urge him to vote for Obama.

  All year executives at Facebook bent over backward to show no favoritism to Obama. Even so, Boston conceded that the social media explosion helped the president. On Election Day 2008 Obama had 118,000 followers on Twitter (which was then only six months old) and 2.4 million likes on his Facebook page. By Election Day 2012 he had 24 million Twitter followers—more than ten times Romney’s following—and 34 million Facebook likes, which was more than three times Romney’s. Ann Romney also came late to social media and ended up with only about a tenth as many Twitter followers as Michelle Obama.

  Social networking was helpful, but the key to vic had their ner

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  Demography as Destiny

  The numbers told the story of a changing America. In his losing 2008 campaign, John McCain won the same proportion of the white vote as Ronald Reagan did in his 1980 landslide. In 1992 the electorate was 88 percent white. Twenty years later, it was expected by Chicago (although not by Boston) to be 71 percent white.

  But that was still nearly three-quarters of the country. Obama’s problem was that polls showed his support among white working-class men plummeting, from 39 percent in 2008 into the 20s. If that didn’t change, the president would have to improve his 2008 performance among youth, minorities, and women to win. This was the job of Operation Vote, Obama’s outreach and base mobilization program, which was run by Katherine Archuleta and Buffy Wicks in Chicago. They couldn’t use what Archuleta called a “cookie cutter” approach to constituency groups because the variations were endless. Young people had particular tastes in popular culture that had to be part of volunteer recruitment. Blacks were five times more likely to be on Twitter than any other group. Latinos were heavy users of smartphones because it allowed their children to go online without expensive computers. Women responded especially well to messages defending Planned Parenthood.

  Obama’s biggest demographic advantage was that old Republicans were dying and young Democrats were turning eighteen and eligible to vote. Chicago planned to make as many as five million kids who had been between fourteen and seventeen in 2008 now welcome the chance to do what their older siblings had done, even if it wasn’t as cool this time. Beyond the hip new videos to stream and gear to buy at the Obama store, Chicago used social media to spread the idea of just doing something for Obama, if not skipping class to spend the day knocking on doors then at least sharing an enticing recruitment video with a great sound track on Facebook or Tumblr. Obama’s record helped, as word filtered out that he was responsible for expanded college loans and being able to stay on your parents’ health insurance until age twenty-six. And it didn’t hurt that young people thought Romney was culturally clueless and in the grip of right-wingers. But none of that would be enough to get them to register and vote (preferably early) in the numbers Obama needed. That required relentless organization down to the “dorm captains” assigned to almost every dormitory at every college in every battleground state.

  Beyond youth, OFA would have to register African Americans, Latinos, and women detached from the system and lure back to the polls those who voted for Obama in 2008 but stayed home
in 2010. The only thing these potential Obama voters had in common was that on balance they suffered more in the recession than Republicans did. Now they would be asked to vote their class interests and their future but not their present-day pocketbooks. The unemployed tended to support Obama; the ones who had seen their portfolios zoom back up in the past four years more often went for Romney. The irony didn’t escape Obama World.

  IN 2008 OBAMA received 96 percent of the black vote. By early 2012 he was polling in the high 80s, with black registration down 7 percent in four years. It seemed that nothing could re partner, Russ Schriefer, NVh2vive the fervor of 2008. Many black clergymen despised the idea of same-sex marriage and felt reluctant to urge their congregants to work hard for a president who had endorsed it. Stubbornly high black unemployment made it difficult to argue that a black man in the Oval Office had fundamentally changed the lives of black people. Even so, almost all African American commentators still backed Obama, and he had no patience for those who didn’t.

  Among the dissenters was Professor Cornel West, who had campaigned for Obama in 2008 but grew upset when Obama stopped returning his phone calls. After the election, West learned that Obama’s top economic adviser would be Larry Summers, who as president of Harvard had pushed West out of the university in 2002 in a dispute over whether a professor should record hip-hop songs.I West gave speeches around the country saying that Obama wasn’t a true progressive and that he couldn’t “in good conscience” tell people to vote for him, though he admitted that his failure to secure special inauguration tickets for his mother and brother contributed to his hard feelings.

  In July 2010 the president spotted West in the front row of the audience for his speech to the National Urban League. Afterward he came down to West’s seat and grew angry. “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?” the president hissed, his face contorted. West said later that a brassy African American woman standing behind him told the president to his face, “How dare you speak to Dr. West like that!” and argued after Obama left that the obscenity would have justified removal by the Secret Service had it come from anyone else. In the months following the confrontation West stepped up his attacks, calling Obama a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” He added, “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin.”

  As he was recoiling from West, the president drew closer to Reverend Al Sharpton, who had simultaneously shed one hundred pounds and his incendiary approach to public life. (Even former New York mayor Ed Koch had become a friend of Sharpton’s.) He had never apologized for his conduct in the Tawana Brawley case, but seemed to be trying to make amends.II In 2008 Obama appreciated that Sharpton defended him from blacks who criticized him for distancing himself from his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Sharpton understood that pushing his way into pictures beside Obama wouldn’t be helpful with white voters. He didn’t care that Obama was using him for street cred with disappointed blacks.

  When Obama learned in 2009 that Sharpton had become a strong supporter of education reform, he invited him and Newt Gingrich to the White House for a private bipartisan discussion on the subject. While Gingrich later swung right to run for president, Obama and Sharpton set to work building a new pro-reform coalition in the Democratic Party. They and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, were fed up with teachers union traditionalists telling parents that more accountability was somehow harmful. The reformers pulled together around the simple but powerful idea of viewing every education initiative through the lens of what was good for children, not adult constituency groups.

  Over time always said the same thing: kh2 the president made Sharpton feel included, and Sharpton returned the favor by becoming one of Obama’s biggest defenders. His refusal to criticize the president in any way before the 2012 election signaled to many African Americans that they should follow suit.

  But tensions within the black community continued. Sharpton and West got into a shouting match on Ed Shultz’s show on MSNBC, when West accused Sharpton of being a stooge for the White House. When defending himself in private, Sharpton liked to point out how black civil rights leaders of the past such as Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. had handled their relationships with progressive American presidents: Each was respectful. Sharpton noted that King’s famous 1963 March on Washington was not directed against Kennedy personally; in fact he met with JFK both before and after the march, as he did on several occasions with Lyndon Johnson. Sharpton’s point was that black leaders of the past didn’t insult the president, Cornel West–style. “And those presidents weren’t black!” he shouted.

  After the blowup with West, the president welcomed Sharpton and a half-dozen other black hosts and commentators to the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The subject turned to Tavis Smiley, a PBS host (and cohost of a radio show with West) who was also severely critical of Obama.III Tom Joyner, a strong Obama supporter and host of the top-rated black talk radio show, thought that West and Smiley (neither of whom was invited) were causing other blacks to denigrate the president. He began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black needs. Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy. What upset him was critics who “question my blackness and my commitment to blacks.” He felt the community needed to be a little more sophisticated politically. “If I go out there saying ‘black, black,’ do you think that will help black people?” he asked, arguing that Congress would never support legislation explicitly intended for African Americans. His legislative program was aimed at helping all Americans but would disproportionately help blacks: “Pell grants? Black people. Health care? Black people.”

  The president’s record showed that he had delivered for African Americans far beyond college loans and Obamacare. The stimulus saved hundreds of thousands of jobs of state and local workers, a large percentage of them black, and provided $850 million for historically black colleges as part of its aid to higher education. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 ended the discrepancy in punishment for crimes that involve the same amounts of crack and powdered cocaine. The extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit kept millions of the working poor, disproportionately black, from slipping back into poverty, and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps helped millions of African Americans. But with black unemployment at 14 percent and four out of ten young black males still caught up in the criminal justice system, Obama had hardly transformed the community he had sought to join when he was a young man.

  By mid-2012 Obama’s hold on the black vote was almost complete. His credibility was such that support for gay marriage within the black community went up almost 20 points overnight after the president endorsed it, no matter what the attitude of black clergy. And that was before the political system felt the full force of a backlash against voter suppression that would spur memories partner, Russ Schriefer, would ,Pa of the civil rights movement.

  IN THE LATE 1980s, after Reagan signed the bipartisan Simpson-Mazzoli Act reforming immigration policy, the Latino vote seemed up for grabs. Democrats considered Latino voters part of their base, but Republicans thought they could make headway with a rapidly growing Catholic constituency that responded well to pro-family, pro-entrepreneurship messages. Then, in 1994, Republican Governor Pete Wilson of California backed Proposition 187, a punitive law later overturned by the courts that deprived illegal aliens of all public services. Prop 187, still seared in the minds of Latinos nearly two decades later, turned California into a solid blue state and forced the GOP to play catch-up with Latinos nationwide.

  George W. Bush, who had been a pro-immigration governor of Texas, emphasized bringing Latinos back into the GOP fold.I
V He received more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in both 2000 and 2004. But in 2006 nativism, a fever that goes back to the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, surged within the GOP base, which split with Bush and turned illegal immigration into a top-tier campaign issue. Bush dropped comprehensive immigration reform, and his administration tripled the fees charged to process citizenship applications, a seemingly small change that alienated Latinos and other immigrants. By 2008 the presence of Representative Tom Tancredo, a vitriolic anti-immigrant activist, in the GOP primaries pushed the other candidates to the right, which sent even more Latinos into the Democratic Party. Soon the nominee, John McCain, distanced himself from his own immigration bill. (He would renounce it entirely in order to get reelected to the Senate in 2010.) Obama hadn’t been particularly popular with Latinos in 2008—he lost them to Hillary Clinton by a wide margin in every primary—but in the general election he won the Latino vote by 34 points.

  That bought Latinos nothing. About 1.5 million illegal aliens were deported under Obama, far more than under Bush. And the president reneged on his promise to make comprehensive immigration reform a priority. Even a lesser goal, enactment of the DREAM Act, failed at the end of 2010 thanks to Republican obstruction. Many Latinos charged that the president didn’t put the same muscle behind the DREAM Act that he applied to repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

  In an April 2011 meeting in the Roosevelt Room with Latino journalists and activists, Obama said Republicans should “pay a price” for their obstructionist positions on immigration. Maria Teresa Kumar of Voto Latino replied that both parties should pay a price. When José Díaz-Balart, a Telemundo anchorman from a Republican political family, told the president that “people say” he wasn’t sympathetic to Latinos, Obama shot back, “No, you say.” He vehemently rejected that charge and said the failure of the DREAM Act was the biggest disappointment of his presidency so far.