The Obama campaign used the Blue State Digital (BSD) Online Tools to generate more than $500 million from well over three million online donors. I'm personally apalled at their decision to turn off all Credit Card authorization tools normally in place for online transactions, but "validity" is a small price to pay for CASH. Who cares if the transactions were legal, right? I'm not suggesting illegal, unethical or treasonous practices...but I am suggesting we WAKE up and get organized.
Senator Barack Obama retained BSD to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign. To date, the campaign has used the BSD Online Tools to mobilize well over a million donors to contribute over $500 million online, to motivate over 2 million social networking participants, and to create and promote more than 200,000 events across the country.
Surely opponents need to learn from this. I'm not sure where the "say one thing and do another" comes from....but it is a bit Alinsky-ish, don't you think? If you keep insisting that you are bi-partisan and keep holding meetings with the other side, maybe no one will notice that you NEVER listen or change anything. Maybe if you keep saying transparent, while your stuff is under lock and key, no one will notice that we've seen NOTHING. It's half amusing, like watching a magician in training. you can see the sleight of hand, but folks still applaud the outcome.
The whole of the campaign comes from ideas presented in Rules for Radicals. Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing in the prologue,
"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default."[4]
Maybe honorable folks can't follow alinsky in good conscience...but it seems to me, we certainly need to pay attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment