This post, written by John R. Bohrer, originally appeared on The Huffington Post
From Jerome Armstrong's diary, 'Hillary's race to lose':
In Obama latest, he sent me an email titled, "What a movement looks like?" His campaign probably didn't notice the slip, but it's an obvious truth--that adding that "?" in the title. Maybe, he thinks, he's in one... maybe not... who can tell?
Except it didn't say "What a movement looks like?"
If a different e-mail went out, I didn't get it. But it leads me to believe that Armstrong's anecdote of the Obama camp's foul-up is imagined. Reading the e-mail itself refutes the main point of his post: "completely [dismissing] the notion that there's a movement behind Obama."
In the e-mail, Obama relays some information on a recent day of action in which his field campaign organized more than 1,000 events in all fifty states, got more than 10,000 volunteers to go door to door in their neighborhoods to contact more than 500,000 people. Armstrong says Obama's campaign has hyped a movement that doesn't exist. But given some recent reports of volunteer intiative and enthusiasm in my state of New Jersey and elsewhere, I'd say that if they're not a movement, they're doing OK.
Even in a campaign of hype, it's hard to fake this kind of excitement. Armstrong admits that maybe Obama does have a movement, albeit on that has "nothing to do with the fighting partisan netroots; so there's no way I would grasp it, much less feel a part of it..." I don't have a horse in this race either, and I agree that it is, in fact, Hillary's race to lose. But I am continually impressed with the intensity of Obama's door-to-door volunteers. His netroots campaign could be another story. Still, there's no denying Obama's campaign has tapped something that is pumping people up and getting them to hit pavement for him. Call it a movement, call it whatever you want, but it's something we're not seeing from the other campaigns.
Tagged as: election08, obama
John R. Bohrer, a recent graduate of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, wrote his senior thesis on Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez in 1968. He is a contributor to Blue Jersey.
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