The New Republic Disses Organizing for America

But the biggest problem was built into OFA’s very structure–the structure that Plouffe had wanted and Hildebrand had warned against. Obama’s people had created something both entirely new and entirely old: an Internet version of the top-down political machines built by Richard Daley in Chicago or Boss Tweed in New York. The difference (other than technology) was that this new machine would rely on ideological loyalty, not patronage. And that was a big difference. The old machines survived as top-down organizations because they gave people on the bottom something tangible in return for their participation. By contrast, successful organizations built mainly on shared philosophy tend to be driven by their memberships. Marshall Ganz, the legendary United Farm Workers organizer-turned-Harvard-professor and godfather of the Obama field strategy–he helped orchestrate Camp Obama, a grassroots training program for staff and volunteers–sees the command-and-control nature of OFA as a crucial flaw. “It’s much more an instrument of mobilizing the bottom to serve the top than organizing the bottom to participate in shaping the direction of the top,” he told me.

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