Barack Obama’s top legislative goal hangs in the balance and his popularity is suffering as critics co-opt his tech-savvy organizing methods, tag him as a bogeyman and disrupt local gatherings on his proposed health care overhaul.
Is the groundbreaking campaigner, whose White House political arm is aptly called Organizing for America, being outmaneuvered?
“That’s a fair summary of where things are at the moment,” said Sanford Horwitt, a biographer of Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing.
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“The other side has the anger and the intensity, and Obama’s side doesn’t,” Horwitt said. Harking back to the presidential campaign’s tactics and success, Horwitt said, “This really first-rate community organizing has not revealed itself in the first months he’s been in office, particularly when it comes to the health care issue.”
Judging by the jeers and rants at Democratic lawmakers’ public forums this August, Obama appears to be facing a populist backlash from Americans who want no part of the wholesale change he promised as a candidate. The fierce opposition is threatening to further erode wider public support for his sweeping transformation of the nation’s medical system.
Opposition to Obama’s health care overhaul is both organic and organized, not unlike the very effort he stitched together during his campaign for the presidency. Back then, he seized on the passion Americans had for change from Republican rule, using new Internet organizing tools to harness grass-roots energy and empower people who had never been active in politics to vote for him.
Since he’s been in office, he’s turned that campaign apparatus into a political organization whose top priority now is to drum up support for health care overhaul and encourage supporters to attend events on the issue.
But now critics, many of them conservatives, are turning the tables on him.
Frustrated by what they view as excessive spending and the growing reach of government during a recession, they are connecting over the Internet through social networking sites and protesting at health care events across the country. They are furious and have found a way to let it be known.
Conservative talk radio and television programs are fueling the fire. And, there’s an element of organized opposition: Lobbying groups like America’s Health Insurance Plans, Americans for Prosperity, and Conservatives for Patients’ Rights are encouraging people to get involved.
Much as Obama saw opportunity with the “change” catchword a year ago, the conservative movement, whose organizing roots date to the 1960s and Barry Goldwater, saw an opening in the Democrats’ community gatherings and are using them aggressively.
“What we saw in the presidential campaign was really a social movement to elect Barack Obama, with energy and urgency,” said Marshall Ganz, a community organizing expert at Harvard University. “The right wing recognized that as a powerful threat to them. They saw how much appetite there was from people to engage. So around health care they’ve found a way to countermobilize.”
