Klein: We Asked Obama for Change, Got Lousy T-Shirt
Guess who tweeted this: “This Black Friday, take 10% off all purchases ... with code 10%TURKEYDAY.”
Wal-Mart? Best Buy? A hedge fund trying to unload Greek bonds?
Nope. That was the official Twitter account of President Barack Obama -- excuse me, President @BarackObama. And it’s not the first time that Obama’s 2012 campaign has sounded like a commercial for Al’s Used Car Lot.
Last month, “Barack Obama” e-mailed me with the subject line “Last chance at dinner.” “Because you and I don’t have a lot of chances to have dinner together,” Obama -- or, more accurately, a campaign worker claiming to be him -- wrote, “I hope you’ll take advantage of the one that’s coming up this fall.” Then he asked me to donate some money so I could be entered into a raffle to have dinner with him.
Another e-mail from “Obama” carried the subject line, “If I don’t call you.” Again, the lure was that you could donate money to be entered into a dinner raffle. As Garance Franke-Ruta noted in the Atlantic, the e-mail writers at the Obama campaign had taken one of the most distinctive voices in American politics and reduced it to the whine of a plaintive boyfriend.
This is, of course, a fundraising effort. And it’s working. The Obama campaign has received donations from more than 1 million individuals, 98 percent of whom contributed $250 or less. At this point in the 2008 race, the Obama campaign had fewer than 400,000 donors. “This is what a grassroots campaign looks like,” the campaign brags in a graphic celebrating the million-donor mark.
Token of Thanks
Some of those donations purchased Obama swag. When you buy a hat or a shirt, you’re technically donating to the campaign, and the campaign is sending you a token of its thanks. There’s something tawdry about it. This isn’t transformational politics. This is, almost by definition, transactional politics. You give me money for my campaign, I give you a beer can holder with Vice President Joe Biden’s face on it.
I asked the Obama campaign about that seeming disconnect, but didn’t get much of a reply. “We don’t talk specifics about merchandise because we don’t talk specifics about fundraising in general,” Katie Hogan, the campaign’s deputy press secretary, told me.
In a sense, these e-mails and tweets -- and the exasperated reactions many supporters have had to them -- perfectly encapsulate one of the biggest challenges Obama faces going into 2012: resolving the yawning chasm between the sort of politics America wanted from the Obama campaign and the sort of politics the Obama administration has found to work in Washington.
Obama’s 2008 campaign wasn’t really about health-care reform or stimulus bills or financial regulation or killing Osama bin Laden. It was about something at once much bigger and more general, and perhaps because of that, much more appealing: change.
At the 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, Obama delivered a speech that proved decisive in his campaign’s victory there, and thus his national victory. But its core wasn’t a policy agenda. It was, in a way, a philosophical agenda. It was a promise about how Obama would do business more than about what business he would do.
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