How Obama Wins In 2012
Despite sagging poll numbers, the president has bottomed out, and Republicans still lack the leaders and the ideas to beat him, argues former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon.
All of my Republican friends are acting as giddy as kids at Christmas. They are delighting in the misfortunes of the Democrats. They believe, accurately, in my opinion, that the health-care bill is political suicide—at least in the short term. So, if the health-care bill passes, Republicans take the House in the fall. And if the health-care bill doesn’t pass, the Democrats look feckless and incapable of getting anything done, and they still lose the House in the fall.
The political environment is as toxic as we’ve ever seen. President Obama entered office during one of the most troubled and challenging times in our history. He got dealt a bad hand, but many argue that he and his party have played a bad hand badly.
But something very interesting and counterintuitive is happening with Obama. The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll published Tuesday has two findings that are at odds with one another. First, only 17 percent of the American public approve of Congress. That’s the lowest sounding ever recorded for Capitol Hill. And it’s hard to imagine just who makes up that 17 percent, beyond friends and family.
Obama’s approval ratings, on the other hand, hover well above his colleagues'—at a healthy 48 percent.
Let’s drill down on that a bit. It’s hard to imagine that things will get any worse for Obama during his presidency. The economy may not be roaring by 2012, but it’s likely to be better. Whatever happens with the health-care bill, assuming it does ultimately pass, it will have had time to take effect and will probably be less onerous than feared. Most soldiers will be out of Iraq and perhaps progress will be apparent in Afghanistan.
No president has been reelected with an approval rating below 47. And, so Obama, at what is probably the lowest point in his presidency, still has a strong enough approval rating to win a second White House term. And that’s before a reelection campaign in which he and his team will probably spend $1 billion.
Let’s also assume for the sake of argument that the Republicans do take the House this fall. If they do, it’s a blessing for Obama—because then there will be shared responsibility and he can blame-shift accountability for all the failures of Congress. He will replay Bill Clinton’s playbook from 1994.
Besides, you have to beat the other team by putting players on the field who have better talent and skills. If the players on the stage are Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner, whose unnatural-looking spray tan and gleaming teeth make him look like the host for The Price Is Right, or Mitch McConnell, who comes across like a funeral director, Obama’s going to look like Babe Ruth. And to win, you have to have better ideas. At this point, with a respectful nod to Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republicans look more like a glue factory than an idea factory.
So to all my Republican friends, I say, don’t start poppin’ the Champagne yet. Obama has taken the worst possible political pounding and he’s still on his feet and looking pretty strong.
The New Idealist Social Network
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes talks to Dana Goldstein about his new venture for connecting volunteers to non-profits, Jumo, which goes up today, and why Obama’s Organizing for America fell short.
Among Facebook’s tight-knit group of co-founders, Chris Hughes has always been the idealistic one.
When the social networking site first took off in 2004 and his roommates Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to make a killing, Hughes—a middle class kid from North Carolina—returned to college and graduated, writing a thesis about Algiers. When candidate Barack Obama intrigued Hughes, he shocked Facebook CEO Zuckerberg by quitting the company to work in the unprofitable world of campaign organizing, where Hughes helped to build and run MyBarackObama.com, the candidate’s groundbreaking online organizing tool.
When the presidential race ended and Hughes needed to chart his next move, he tried venture capital, doing a stint as “entrepreneur-in-residence” at General Capital Partners in Cambridge. But he kept asking himself what he could do to contribute to the greater good.
So Hughes traveled to Africa, India, and Latin America. He spoke to development gurus like Jacqueline Novogratz of the non-profit Acumen Fund and Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist famous for his proposals on how to eradicate global poverty by 2025.
“I was constantly thinking, ‘What do I know and how can I use what I know to help these people?’” Hughes said of the social welfare thinkers and activists he met during his travels. “I took some serious time trying to think through that question.”
Where he ended up was Jumo.com—a new networking site to connect non-profits to the public and to one another, which soft launches Thursday morning. By fall, members will be able to use Jumo to learn more about social justice causes, donate money, and find out about opportunities to volunteer time and skills. The name means “together in concert” in Yoruba, a language spoken in Eastern Senegal, which Hughes visited last April and fell in love with.
On Jumo, Hughes says, a college student looking to volunteer during spring break will be able to type in the dates of her vacation, the regions to which she’d like to travel, and see a comprehensive list of volunteer opportunities. A lawyer fluent in Spanish might be able to help Latin American governments rewrite building codes to better protect against earthquake damage.
A Washington, D.C. woman who gives regularly to Planned Parenthood could learn about related, smaller organizations that need support, such as Hughes favorite One by One, which funds the $420 surgery that repairs obstetric fistulas, a preventable condition caused during childbirth that can lead to a lifetime of stigma for affected women, who often leak urine and feces out of their vaginas.
Hughes recently relocated from Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood to the Village to be closer to friends, he says, yet—perhaps a sign of his desire for do-gooder, bohemian cred—“I felt sort of bad about leaving Brooklyn.” Jumo, a non-profit, is now his full-time job, and since he decided to move forward with the idea in January, he has been able to raise about $500,000 from individual donors, hire two full-time staffers, and rent office-space in SoHo.
Whether the non-profit sector is ready to embrace a new social networking platform remains to be seen, especially given these organizations’ often-limited staff time and lack of familiarity with cutting edge technology. And there’s competition—Ning, for instance, allows non-profits to build their own branded social networking websites using pre-fabricated tools.
But the most formidable rivals are Hughes’ old friends at Facebook, which already offers the application Causes, on which users can donate money and promote non-profits to friends. Hundreds of thousands of non-profits are members of Causes, and in the application’s first two years, 25 million Facebook users “joined” at least one of the causes. But according to a Washington Post report, the majority of Causes non-profits have never received a single donation through the application.
Hughes says what sets Jumo apart is that there will be fewer distractions—activism is the only reason to be there—and that when there’s a single website people can visit to learn about how to do good, they will start to engage philanthropically more often. “We have a real problem when it comes to giving,” Hughes said. “People tend to give around moments of crisis, at the end of the year, maybe when they see a really dramatic photo or video, the quote-unquote starving child in Africa.
“The old way of doing this would be to put together a consulting firm and go to each non-profit one by one and offer to build a website, Facebook page, and email program for them,” he said. “But the model we’re embracing is where we create a platform.”
Hughes knows from personal experience that not every launch is as successful as Facebook. He worked on the transition team that turned MyBarackObama.com into Organizing for America, now a division of the Democratic National Committee. OFA has been criticized for failing to mobilize its 13 million-person email list in support of health-care reform.
“It didn’t remain an independent organization, which I think it should have,” Hughes said, adding that OFA has been under-staffed. “In the language of the campaign, we saw a movement of people who were hungry for change. They were much less concerned with the Democratic Party.”
For now, Hughes is looking for ways to make change outside of government. He is gay and has criticized gay rights organizations for not being web-savvy. Similarly, he says online tools like Twitter don’t make it easy enough for like-minded people to meet and organize in the real world.
“The basic premise” behind Jumo, Hughes said, “is that people have a genuine desire to be more involved in the world around them. But the Internet and opportunities online haven’t yet caught up with that desire for people to meet and engage.”
Sources: The Daily Beast
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment