A grassroots lobby?

Barack Obama sent me an e-mail on 31 December, at midnight. It was the first of 2010 to make my iPhone ring. It asked for help on his health reform. To me? In Milan? To someone who can’t vote for him, doesn’t pay taxes to him, can’t even raise his popularity rating in polls and has never given him a single euro? And all of this on New Year’s Eve?

The truth is, this has been happening since 20 January 2008, when he entered the White House and sent me with an e-mail literally saying: “I ask you to believe. No longer in my ability to make change, but in yours.”

Change, it seems, on four issues in particular, which are the cornerstones of his political agenda: economy, health care, environment, education. I have been receiving e-mails from him for the last 12 months. He has done the same with another 13 million members of a database that David Plouffe, director of the electoral campaign “Obama for America”, collected on the social networking site BarackObama.com during the preceding frantic 21 month-long electoral campaign.

The night of the Election Day, Plouffe politely turned down an offer to enter Obama’s administration so as not to dissipate the desire of change, the energy, the know how, the power of fundraising. This movement of 13 million people excited by the election who could be guided towards something bigger: Organizing for America.

Organizing for America – a movement that has put all it eggs into the citizens’ power to realize Obama’s political agenda of change basket. The same movement based on the same pillars which allowed Plouffe to beat Clinton first, and then McCain. What we are talking about is technology at the service of communities: voluntary work, citizen fundraising, real contact on the ground.

Take me: what can I do to support the health care reform from Italy? Log myself onto my.barackobama.com – my very own personal activism platform which carries his name – and choose whether I prefer to sign a letter of thanks to the Republican senators who support the reform, forward the faq which best explains it to all my mailing list, send a donation, create a support group in my area and so on.

If I wanted to, I could also try something more creative, such as writing a glossary of Obama’s reform to send to all Italian media outlets or organizing a party with the mothers from my children’s nursery school and co-write an encouragement letter to first lady Michelle Obama.

I don’t have to ask anyone for permission. E-mail after e-mail, Plouffe has educated me on the principle of the “green light”. For him, Organizing for America is far from being a top-down organisation but rather a grassroots movement – your own.

Efficient. If Obama managed get into the White House, by taking a chance on civil society and its ability to make change, it is not just because he motivated every single member of the BarackObama.com community day after day, but also because Plouffe provided him with tools to make things his dreams happen.

A strategy that continues with Organizing for America, today directed by Mitch Stewart, even if it is now the Democratic party which encourages activism and not a group of outsiders, and even if the objective of each suggested mobilization is 100% political: to pass Obama’s agenda.

The same is true for online micro donations from which, during the Democratic primary elections, the Afro-American senator raised more than 200 million dollars.

Today funds keep on coming in from the web and from every corner of the world, but they end in an organization connected to the Democratic Party.

But as I wrote this article almost a year after his being sworn in – I wondered: where have all of these Obama volunteers who were knocking on people’s doors to give them a lift to the caucuses gone?

It seems they are still working in a very powerful movement which on paper sounds like a contradiction in terms: it’s a grassroots lobby.

Translation by Cristina Barbetta