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There is a tendency in the online political world to look at the online political world as the object. However, in the Obama campaign, the organizing success has less to do with the blogosphere and more to do with other organizing strategies. The online world was mainly a tool to empower the offline world. To my knowledge the best description of those organizing strategies is from a March Rolling Stone article. One of the key insights was this one:

Figueroa’s goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves. …

The result was a network of trained organizers who became what Figueroa calls the campaign’s "secret weapon." Early on, the volunteers essentially served as Obama’s staff in key states where he didn’t have employees. "It quadrupled the size of our operation in states that were going to be voting not only on February 5th, but February 9th, February 12th and here on March 4th," Figueroa says. "We had an anchor in those states for a long, long, long time."

The key insight here is that a volunteer organization isn’t made up of volunteers but of volunteer organizers and recruiters. The people who are in touch with and motivate the volunteers. This is a shift in thinking from both traditional Democratic and Republican organizing strategies. Some people will look at this as nothing new because it is somewhat based in community organizing principles, but it is quite similar to organizational innovations in other spheres. For example, in megachuches, small group leaders are the pointy end of the spear in member recruitment and retention. We will look at more examples in a second.

Read on.

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These recruiters are not just trained. They are given tools and organizing authority:

Using the social-networking tools of MyBo, the volunteers began to create city- and statewide networks with names like IdahObama, groups that could be tapped later by the professional staff to organize down to the precinct level. In Maryland, the campaign was able to mobilize 3,000 volunteers in only three weeks, thanks to the months of groundwork by groups like Baltimore for Barack Obama.

In other words, recruiters were not just identified, but they were provided tools to allow them to connect their recruits to the rest of the campaign. They knew what their task was: word of mouth spread of excitement about Obama by getting them to sign up to the campaign.

Again, compare to other organizations. These guys are just at the cutting edge of organizational strategies. In recent years, the Marines have placed increasingly emphasis on the Strategic Corporal, recognizing that problems are solved at the point of contact near the bottom of the chain of command, rather than at the top of the chain of command. Or Toyota’s moving the power to innovate into line workers, captured in the term with "autonomation," defined as a "type of automation [that] implements some supervisory functions rather than production functions." (anyone who has done the 72 hour program can relate to the "production function" problem) In each case, authority and innovation are pushed down into the hands of people on the front lines.

I want to extract two kinds of recommendations from this.

One recommendation is that, long term, the RNC (or the new institutions of a conservative movement) needs to focus more on training and empowering recruiters, and they need to provide them tools to build and deploy their organizations. In addition, this could help address some of the pressures that field office staff suffer from and help alleviate volunteer burnout, which were real problems in 2006 and are likely to be worse in 2008.

The other recommendation is about deploying more community-style blogs on the right. We don’t have a structure where good information and good bloggers can conveniently trickle up. We hope that The Next Right itself is a step in the right direction.

I am going to follow up on these in future posts.

Fidel Castro writes on Barack Obama:

What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency?

Meanwhile Castro attacks John McCain personally:

Cuban leader Fidel Castro blasted Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday for his criticism of the Cuban government this week, saying McCain had shown why he finished near the bottom of his class at West Point.

[Note by Jeff: The fact that McCain went to the Naval Academy (at Annapolis, MD), not the U.S. Military Academy (at West Point) appears to be lost on either Mr. Castro or on the writer of the Reuters article. If the former, that shows why Mr. Castro “finished near the bottom of his class at” the Petty Dictators Academy, and the lack of a correction in-text shows that the Reuters writer is either too ignorant to know the difference, too lazy to care, or too biased to correct Castro in favor of McCain. Of course, if it was just a mistake by the Reuters writer (and editor), then that simply demonstrates why they “finished near the bottom of [their] class at” Wannabe Journalist School. Either way, poor job by the news bureau all-stars.]

One candidate is attacked by Castro. The other is praised by Castro. And Hamas. Sometimes you know a man by his friends and enemies.

Just saying.

Barack Obama has wanted to be President for seemingly his entire life. But he thinks that people serve and protect our country only because of coercion. For real. Chatting with a bunch of liberal reporters, he said:

I didn’t serve as many people my age because Vietnam was over by the time I was of draft age and we had then moved to an all volunteer army.

He could talk about being called to serve the country in some other way. But he doesn’t. He could talk about what else he has done. But he doesn’t. Instead he says that he didn’t serve because he wasn’t forced to do so.

This raises real questions about whether Obama actually has experience or understanding to command our military. He claims he does:

Obama later said he will “cede to no one the ability to talk about veterans issues.” He said his grandfather was a veteran and vowed to “advocate fiercely” on their behalf.

How can he advocate on anyone’s behalf when he doesn’t even understand why they serve their country? That’s an astonishing level of naive arrogance.

Today Cindy McCain released part of her tax returns from 2006 and has promised to release more later once the 2007 returns are completed. The press is already attacking her and the McCain campaign for not sharing more. But it is worth reviewing history. In late October, just 3 weeks before the election, Teresa Heinz Kerry released 2 pages of tax returns from 2003. Just like Mrs. McCain. Except that it was only one year, while McCain promises an additional year. And it was wildly incomplete. As the New York Times noticed at the time:

One line in the Form 1040 that was released indicated she had a job for which $2,230 in taxes were withheld from her paycheck, but gave no details. A spokesman for the Kerry campaign said this income was related to an investment she had with a limited liability corporation, although he would not provide any more information. …

No information was provided about how much income was earned by trusts of which she is the beneficiary. If the trusts are as large as reported – and the Kerry campaign has not challenged the billion dollar estimate – then even a modest 5 percent return would have generated $50 million of income, 10 times what was on the two pages released by Ms. Heinz Kerry. A statement released by the Kerry campaign noted that income taxes are paid directly by the Heinz family trust, in addition to taxes that Ms. Heinz Kerry pays.

In other words, Mrs. Kerry did not disclose an extra $50m in income… But what’s $50m between friends?

There is also a relevance issue. John Kerry mortgaged a jointly held house to pay for the campaign, while John McCain has not touched jointly held assets. In other words, the McCain campaign has gone far, far beyond anything the Kerry campaign ever did in both transparency and keeping assets firewalled. But the left and the press isn’t going to be honest about that.

Barack Obama’s Iran policy is getting questioned … by our center-left European allies. From the London Times:

David Miliband has raised questions over Barack Obama’s policy on Iran, which officials in Washington and Europe fear threatens to undermine the tough stance adopted by the West towards Tehran over recent years. …

British intelligence chiefs are understood to have identified Iranian nuclear proliferation as the second greatest security threat, behind Islamic terrorism but ahead of renewed aggression from Russia.

Let’s be clear. Our policy on Iran was developed with our European allies, especially the UK, France, and Germany. In abandoning it, Obama is advocating abandoning commitments we have made to our allies.

This is not the first time that our allies have expressed alarm at Obama’s ignorant, inexperienced proposals that break commitments we have made to our allies. Read on.

Miliband also noted:

They also discussed trade — with Mr Obama advisers saying that they still intended to renegotiate deals such as Nafta — and how much European support there would be for a US military surge in Afghanistan.

This should remind you of recent statements by the EU’s trade commissioner that were critical of Obama’s protectionism:

Peter Mandelson, European trade commissioner, has said the protectionist stances taken by the US presidential candidates risk taking the world trading system back by decades.

I would note that Mandelson is also a man of the center-left and a strong ally of Tony Blair. This is important. The European center-left is rejecting Barack Obama and the Democrats for abandoning our allies on security and trade issues.

And these guys are claiming to restore our global standing? Are they kidding?

Barack Obama says that John McCain has a lobbyist problem. But that’s only because Obama isn’t being honest about himself.

Barack Obama has lobbyist-bundlers. He doesn’t really admit it but … he does. Here at Redstate, we are going to introduce you to these people. The press doesn’t want you to know that these people exist, but we have ways of getting around the press.

The first one that we will introduce you to is Jim Johnson. Mr. Johnson was a lobbyist, US representative of a former African prime minister, former CEO of Fannie Mae, business partner with former Clinton UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and other things. Read on.

Mr. Johnson was a former CEO of Fannie Mae, who has promised to raise Obama between $100k and $200k. Johnson left in 1998. That wasn’t a good year for Fannie Mae, according to the Post:

An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight report in September accused the company of improperly deferring $200 million of estimated expenses in 1998, which allowed management to receive full annual bonuses. Had the expenses been recorded that year, no bonuses would have been paid, the report said.

In other words, he stole money from shareholders and put it in his own pocket.

In 2006 and 2007, he was a foreign agent for a former Prime Minister of Senegal.

Now, Mr. Johnson isn’t exactly a practitioner of new politics. From his own biography:

From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Johnson was Executive Assistant to Vice President Walter F. Mondale, where he advised the Vice President on domestic and foreign policy and political matters. Earlier, he was employed by the Dayton Hudson Corporation, worked as a staff member in the U.S. Senate, and was on the faculty of Princeton University.

So one of Barack Obama’s bundlers cheated shareholders out of money, represented foreign leaders, and was a Carter(!) administration official.

Just what America needs more of close to a President.