“It’s hard to get everyone to rally back around him this time. We see mild victories here and there, but it’s not the complete overhaul we were expecting.”
The event at Hope Lounge was organized by a young artist who goes by the name Gadi. Early in 2008, he met up with 30 or so other creative types at a bar in Alphabet City and had the idea of do-it-yourself stencil T-shirts for the campaign.
After the Hope Lounge show, he was doing some Obama-inspired stenciling in the East Village one evening for another revuelike fund-raiser when a young filmmaker named Annie Woods came up to him and said, “Those are super rad. Can I buy some off of you?”
Ms. Woods and her sister had covered their Volvo station wagon from bumper to bumper with Obama bumper stickers, and the two ended up driving something they called “The Bama Bus,” a Vanagon likewise covered in Obama stickers, across the country, setting up stenciling stations along the way.
Gadi would like to get involved again but said it will be hard-going to get other artistically inclined members of his generation to sign on.
“It’s going to be impossible to recreate that moment,” he said. “People’s memories are very short.”
He recited for The Observer a song he had written for 2012 effort.
“The system is broke and they all promised to fix it/I’m tired of that joke, wish I still believed it/If we are the ones we’ve been waiting for/Then why are we waiting for something more?”
A number of new political organizations arose in the wake of the ’08 effort, trying to keep the spirit of the season alive for the next round of local elections and hopefully, they thought, beyond.
The New Kings Democrats formed in North Brooklyn with the task of electing Obamalike reformers to local offices. In 2010, they propelled one of their own to a post with the Brooklyn Democratic Party. The Barack Obama Democratic Club still stands in Washington Heights, and its founder, Mark Levine, said that it remains active heading into the 2012 season. But most of the organizing groups are a shell of what they were three years ago.
Brooklyn for Barack, a clearing house of all things Obama-related, tried to keep the energy up with community service fairs and the like, but has mostly withered away. Its founder, Jordan Thomas, a 40-year-old filmmaker, declined repeated requests for an interview, saying he was in preproduction. Others, like New Yorkers for Change, are little more than un-updated websites.
“You had people not from the political chattering class, and they all had different sorts of contacts, different social networks and professional networks and that is what was utilized,” said one former campaign official. “And people going out and getting activities together created buzz, and one thing spawned another.”
Those inside and outside the Obama youth movement say that the conditions of 2008 are not replicable this time around, regardless of how the first three years of the Obama administration have gone. Then you had a generation of people weaned on the Bush years, war and the Patriot Act. When a thoughtful and cool biracial candidate came along, it was hard not to get swept up in it. A dash of naïveté, of the kind that believed “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” could be an actual policy platform, helped too.
“We were coming of age in middle school and high school in era of fear and war,” said Gadi, the artist behind the Hope Lounge benefit. “Some of us had come of age and were still dealing with it, and there weren’t many of us who knew what politics was like or what government was like or certainly what governing was. Everybody thought everything would be fixed the next day.”
The skill of the Obama team was a factor as well, using social media to turn the campaign into political mixer for the postcollegiate set. They built on a lot of what the Howard Dean campaign had done in 2004. But whereas the Dean effort was mostly online, the Obama team used online organizing tools to get people to meet off-line.
“We didn’t have YouTube,” said Joe Trippi, Mr. Dean’s online organizing guru in 2004. “By the time Barack Obama started there were a hundred million people watching stuff on YouTube.”
Mr. Trippi doesn’t anticipate a fall-off in excitement for the president among the younger set this time around.
“The newness and the excitement is gone, and it would be hard to rekindle just because of the historic nature of the election,” he said. “But it’s definitely still there. Talk to me if Michelle Bachmann is the Republican nominee; then you’ll see how fired up everyone will be.”
Still, as Mr. Trippi acknowledges, an incumbent is never as much fun. Plus, this time around, those who jumped on the bandwagon early say that they expect “the pros” to take over in 2012. The local elected officials who backed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries have come to toe the party line, and those who passed out homemade cookies at polling sites in early 2008 say they expect to be shunted to the side. Life interferes too. One-time round-the-clock volunteers have to take full-time jobs. Children are born and parents become ill. Galleries get audited.
“The real power [of 2008] was giving people the tools to organize themselves, and then you had all of these self-forming groups,” said Mr. Fife. “It’s very different [now.] Now you have the power of being in the White House. It is going to take longer.”
Obama 2012 operatives say that they think that the lightning of 2008 can be bottled again. To those who say Mr. Obama hasn’t done much, they point to the health care overhaul, the stimulus, the ending of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. They point to a summer organizing program that has 12,000 applicants for 1,700 slots. Wait until the Republicans settle on a nominee. See how you like the thought of Mitt Romney in the Oval Office, and see, young gallerist, if you aren’t organizing another auction in spite of yourself.
“In 2008 we had unprecedented grass-roots support from young people across the country,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman. “On college campuses and cities across the country they mobilized to elect President Obama and we are seeing the same enthusiasm for 2012 evidenced by the thousands of young people who recently applied for our Summer Organizing program.”
Some are already gearing up again.
Matt Walters started volunteering for the campaign in April 2007, soon after Mr. Obama announced that he was running. By the fall, he was selling “Obamulkes,” Obama-inspired yarmulkes. He met his wife in New York headquarters. He is ready to go back out on the trail again.
“I get the sense that people of this generation are still excited about the president,” he said. “He’s just not new any more. He’s no longer a blank slate. He is going to have to run on his record, and he hasn’t even been campaigning. He’s been running the country and killing Osama bin Laden.”
dfreedlander@observer.com
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[...] Brooklyn's pretentious 20-somethings are finding Obama less cool every day. [...]
mugged by reality
It was a special time, we can agree on that.
[...] America — the president’s re-election team — is looking for digital help as they try reigniting the passions they stoked in [...]
First rule of lazy journalism: Begin with thesis, interview people until you get a few random quotes that kindasorta agree with it. No one here said he was NOT voting for Obama in 2012.
“there weren’t many of us who knew what politics was like or what government was like or certainly what governing was.”
Kind of like Obama
a stubborn 9% unemployment rate and anemic growth rates will do that to a president, any president. i hope next time my fellow X-ers and millenials will consider their vote as more than a political version of american idol. hipness and coolness works out well for fashion models, rock stars and nfl quarterbacks. it’s not a particularly helpful, nor wise trait among presidential candidates, whatever their skin color happens to be.