Democratic State Party Leaders: Obama’s Organizing For America ‘GRADE A Bulls***’

Behind closed doors, Democratic state party leaders don’t have a very high opinion of Barack Obama’s group Organizing for America (OFA). We now know this because of emails that were leaked, illuminating the contempt the party leaders had for Obama’s wrecking of their party.

As The Daily Beast documents in a lengthy report, “The organization has drawn the intense ire, both public and private, of grassroots organizers and state parties that are convinced that OFA inadvertently helped decimate Democrats at the state and local level.”

Last week, OFA “relaunched” itself to defend Obamacare, increase turnout at congressional townhalls, and train grassroots organizers. NBC News reported, “OFA has hired 14 field organizers in states home to key senators as part of its campaign to defend Obama’s signature healthcare law . . . OFA is looking to expand into other issue areas as well, like climate change and gun control.”

But Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, wrote in a private Democratic-listserv email, “This is some GRADE A Bulls*** right here . . . It also to me seems TONE DEAF—we have lost over 1,000 seats in the past 8 years… all because of this crap. Let’s get through the next two weeks—but then we gotta figure this out and keep the pressure on. WOW.”

Oh, but there was so much more:

Katie Mae Simpson, executive director for the Maine Democratic Party, answered, “Yes, it sure is. OFA showed up in Maine, organized a press conference on saving [Obamacare], with one of our Dem legislative leaders speaking, all without ever mentioning that they were in state and organizing. They hired someone I know, which is somewhat helpful, but my god, they don’t have a very good alliance-building process.”

Before all that, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb told Politico, “[With] all due respect to President Obama, OFA was created as a shadow party because Obama operatives had no faith in state parties.”

South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jaime Harrison said at a recent DNC “future forum,” “I love and adore everything about President Obama except for OFA.”

Marcel Groen, chairman for Pennsylvania Democrats: “I was never a fan of OFA.”

A red-state Democratic operative:

We’ve seen over the last eight-plus years a deterioration of permanent state infrastructure. And OFA built an alternative infrastructure that was very top-down. OFA’s actions were wasteful, duplicative, and it made no sense… There were these tensions on the ground that we saw that all over the country. Local officials felt tossed aside. A lot of these red states were abandoned. The OFA model was never a 50-state strategy—it was about the president’s agenda.

Handwerk concluded, “If we were having a conversation about state parties, I would say OFA hurt state parties badly. It certainly had an undercutting effort. And there is a lot of work state parties do that isn’t very sexy… and that becomes incredibly difficult when budgets are cut in half because people are trying to curry favor with the president and his allies.”