What we still have to learn from Obama’s campaign – and policy – successes

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

A year ago today, I awoke early after a night flight from Las Vegas to Chicago. That morning, the windy city was unseasonally warm, and the excitement was palpable.

I’d spent the previous 6 weeks driving across America, campaigning on the streets and the phones for the man who would be President. In the months before that, I’d spoken to people across Brooklyn throughout the primary season, on cold winter subway platforms and outside makeshift polling stations in the Super Tuesday rain. And on that November 4th, my friend and I spent the day calling voters in Illinois’ neighbouring Indiana.

The night before, I was worried, I was tired and I was ratty. All I could think about were the what ifs: What if the right somehow won another term? What would that do for the world at a time of impending recession? What if McCain, who had glibly sung about “bomb-bomb-bombing Iran”, was given a mandate to do so?

But the next morning, enthusiasm and expectation were so high that the Obama HQ in downtown Chicago was overflowing – literally overflowing with people who wanted to claim history in their own hands and be a part of it. My friend and I were taken by friends of the Obamas to a second campaign headquarters that had been hastily arranged to cope with the demand for volunteer space.

So it’s difficult for me to let this day pass without commenting on LabourList on the anniversary of that day, and on the lessons we in the Labour party can still learn from Obama’s campaign and his Presidency in that first year since his election.

Because although we may not have the same charismatic leader in our party – and we may not be able to claim the same mantle of change that Obama did after Labour’s twelve years in power – we do have a lot to be proud of and a great deal to learn, still, from the way he conducted his campaign and the way he brought policy initiatives together to build an unbeatable coalition.

As I wrote for I wrote for Compass this morning:

“The Obama campaign was plural, it was grassroots and it was locally autonomous. Conversely, it was also a very traditional campaign, top-down and micro-managed from Chicago.

But that seeming contradiction was not a weakness; it was the campaign’s greatest strength. Only as a coalition built of liberals and socialists, federalists and democrats, north and south, east and west, was Obama able to build such a powerful, election-winning movement, unparalleled in modern political history. Success was the result of a combination of innovative thinking, pragmatic solutions and genuinely joined-up campaigning.

Only that togetherness meant that when the chips were down, and when the right-wing attacks were plentiful, the broad left was able to come together like never before, on blogs, at rallies and in local campaigns.”

Organisationally, we across the broad Labour movement – in unions, think tanks and campaign groups – can do more to pool our knowledge and resources and to share our campaigning techniques.

If we can do that, we – like the Democrats – will be able to fulfil a strong progressive agenda, just as Obama has done from the White House. In another article today for Progress, I wrote:

“President Obama has made remarkable strides in what is still a very short amount of time and under impossible circumstances of expectation and economy. Moreover, he is spending his political capital on the issues he campaigned on and the issues that matter to America. Some of these problems were seemingly intractable a year ago. Today, they are being confronted head-on.

He has wielded his progressive mandate with great timing and alacrity: 40% of the 9bn Recovery Act went directly into the pockets of working class families in tax cuts and 30,000 loans for small businesses; unemployment benefits were both increased and expanded to reach the 12 million people worst hit by the recession; 250,000 jobs were saved in the public sector; subsidised health insurance was made 65% cheaper to ensure it would continue to cover low-earners; new jobs were created with the biggest investment in infrastructure since the building of the inter-state highways in the 1950s; and there was the largest investment in education in American history.”

To me, those successes – and not the relative disappointments in other areas – are what we should concentrate on as we try to hone our own campaign and policy machine over the coming months. The lessons are there for us to learn: we have to be joined-up, lay our differences aside, and not be timid in using our remaining time in this parliament to enact bold reforms.

Tonight, we’ll be discussing some of those lessons and how we can apply them in our local branch meeting. Because if we are to win next spring – and we can still win – we need to get started now.