Matt Y has an unrelated but nevertheless perfect follow-up for my previous point on the importance of considering political feasibility as we debate policy.
But before I get to Matt's thoughts, some context. Christopher Maag has an interesting piece for Time Magazine comparing and contrasting the organizational styles of the Obama and Clinton campaigns. Whereas Obama's is a bottom-up, grass-roots organization built entirely from scratch, Clinton's is much more of a top-down, old school political machine that relies almost entirely on cobbling together pre-existing political networks built by local politicians. Maag's point is to demonstrate the impact these differences have had on the campaign, but Matt takes it a step further to imagine how this might impact governance:
Clearly, I think, either approach could work. But what I think is interesting is the different implications for governing. If a President Clinton wants to pressure some Ohio members of congress into casting a tough vote they don't really want to cast, she has a lot of tools at her disposal for bringing them to heel. One thing she can't do, however, is generate pressure based on her local political organization in Ohio. After all, it's not her organization, it belongs to the state and local elected officials and she just borrows it from them. Obama, by contrast, may have that option. And what's more, it's a technique that can work "behind enemies lines" as it were, against Republican members of congress whose districts don't include any entrenched incumbent Democrats with their own organizations.
Will Obama in fact find a way to extend his campaign tools to the art of governing and political pressure? There's no way to tell. But he might. And much like his approach to campaign, it'd be a huge game-changer.
This gets to one of the primary reasons why I think Obama's campaign has the potential to drive a long-term realignment of our political system. Unlike most campaigns, his is predicated on getting millions of people directly involved and engaged not just once or twice over the course of the year, but on an ongoing basis. That's something we often saw back in the early days of this nation, and most people thought the country had grown so large that it would never, ever come back. But networking technology changes everything, doesn't it? Thirty years ago a campaign like this would have been impossible. Today, it's not impossible but inevitable.
But as historic as this campaign has been, it won't actually be the hard part. Compared to getting people engaged with governance, getting them involved with a campaign is easy. But if this works - if we really can make this new form of engagement long-lasting, it has the potential to change everything about the way our system of self-government works.
Self-government only works if the people are engaged. For far, far too long, we've been anything but. Maybe, just maybe, that's about to change.
UPDATE: Here's one more example of how things are changing. It may seem small, but combined with thousands of other initiatives like this, it adds up to something huge.
UPDATE II: And if you want a clear, concise example of why these changes favor the emergence of a new Democratic majority, look no further than this. Newt Gingrich is moving to Silicon Valley. Why? He wants to "gain firsthand knowledge of the latest technological developments... that will help us communicate and organize more effectively -- before it becomes a trend."
Before?
Maybe if Newt hadn't been so busy trying to impeach a president, maybe then he would have seen this one coming. Oh wel...
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