Obama's astroturf roots are withering

By Lona Manning

Organizing for America, the supposedly grassroots movement that morphed out of the Obama campaign, is the subject of a piece in The New Republic. Another Obama astroturf operation falters under scrutiny.

"OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network," writes Lydia DePillis But so far, she notes, the pro-Obama armies have lost ground to the Tea Partiers and a nation-wide conservative backlash.

DePillis considers various explanations for this sad state of affairs: a slow start after the election, no ability to deliver specific patronage goodies to its individual members, and a top down autocratic structure, (as I noted back in March, OFA is a huge organization with millions of members but no board of directors, no elections and no bylaws.)

Commenting on the New Republic article, blogger D.K. Jamaal writes that the entire notion that Obama was swept to power on a wave of unprecedented grass-roots support is "fairy tale mirage created by the media to jibe with their false characterization of Obama as an outsider, voice-of-the-people, populist."

Or maybe ordinary people, like me, thought OFA was creepy and incompatible with the principles of a democratic government.