Barack Obama may lose support in Philadelphia over 'street money'

Barack Obama may lose support in Philadelphia over 'street money'


CULTURE CLASH: Barack Obama campaigns in Philadelphia last week. His people are telling Democratic leaders there that he won’t pay “street money” to those who help the campaign.

By Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 11, 2008

Fourteen months into a campaign that has the feel of a movement, Sen. Barack Obama has collided with the gritty political traditions of Philadelphia, where ward bosses love their candidates, but also expect them to pay up.
The dispute centers on the dispensing of "street money," a long-standing Philadelphia ritual in which candidates deliver cash to the city's Democratic operatives in return for getting out the vote.

Flush with payments from well-funded campaigns, the ward leaders and Democratic Party bosses typically spread out the cash in the days before the election, handing $10, $20 and $50 bills to the foot soldiers and loyalists who make up the party's workforce.
It is all legal -- but Obama's people are telling the local bosses he won't pay.
That sets up a culture clash, pitting a candidate who promises to transform American politics against the realities of a local political system important to his presidential hopes. Pennsylvania holds its primary April 22.

Obama's posture confounds neighborhood political leaders sympathetic to his cause. They caution that if the senator from Illinois withholds money that gubernatorial, mayoral and presidential candidates have willingly paid out for decades, there could be defections to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. And the Clinton campaign, in contrast, will oblige in forking over the money, these ward leaders predict.

"We've heard directly from the Obama organizer who organizes our ward, and he told us it's an entirely volunteer organization and that I should not expect to see anything from the Obama campaign other than ads on TV and the support that volunteers are giving us," said Greg Paulmier, a ward leader in the northwest part of the city.
Neither the Clinton nor the Obama campaign would say publicly whether it would comply with Philadelphia's street money customs. But an Obama aide said Thursday that it had never been the campaign's practice to make such payments. Rather, the campaign's focus is to recruit new people drawn to Obama's message, the aide said.
The field operation "hasn't been about tapping long-standing political machinery," the aide said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-streetmoney11apr11,0,6553901.story

Refusing to narrowcast

My colleague Carrie Budoff Brown has a good story on the gay press's dissatisfaction with Obama's refusal to grant them interviews, and he responded to the controversy in an interview in the Advocate in which he made explicit a central aspect of his candidacy:



Obama goes on to say that the Spanish-language and African-American press have the same gripe, and makes this central point:



...
But Obama's disinclination to narrowcast, and to target small groups, is an area where his campaign matches his message, and it extends beyond specialty press. He got very few labor endorsements in the first stage of the campaign, for instance, because he didn't pander or focus on narrow issues when he talked to labor groups. Hillary would talk to labor groups about their specific contract conditions, or on a battle over tips, and get roaring applause. Obama would give his stump speech, and receive a tepid response. They came to him, in the end, giving them less leverage over him.

He's also lagged on the fundraising organized by ethnicity: Clinton has been successful in raising millions from specific Asian communities -- Fujianese, Indians; Obama (with the exception of the surge in big African-American money) less so. This applies to electioneering as well: Hillary occasionally sends out press releases to please the Polish, say, or Greek communities, honoring holidays or anniversaries; Obama does much less frequently.

The result, in this case, is that the communities have had to come to him. I spoke with a prominent gay leader about this recently, and he expressed mixed feelings: He likes Obama's message and his promises; but he feels that the organized community -- and the leader himself -- can't call Obama on the phone, remind him of past favors, and demand allegiance, if he wavers once in the White House.

Still, on balance, Obama's promises to be a different White House when it comes to the relationship to the traditional power brokers. He's made fewer promises, and owes less, to labor, and to the organized civil rights communities. And he owes much less, of course -- and most important of all -- to the people who give many of those communities their clout: large donors.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0408/Refusing_to_narrowcast.html

The Los Angeles Times reports from Philadelphia that Obama isn't going along with an urban political practice of distributing cash to election day get-out-the-vote workers.

This reminds of of the Obama campaign's refusal in South Carolina to hire up that state's African-American political machine: Clinton had community leaders on payroll as consultants. But given the share of the black vote Obama won there, and since, any voters they brought to the polls probably voted for her rival. IN Philadelphia:



The trap, though, is that if Clinton activates the machine, she's probably pulling out Obama voters. The risk to Obama isn't so much that Clinton invests -- as her backing from local leaders may oblige her to do -- but that nobody does.

South Carolina political veterans said Obama's ground organization was one of the best they had seen, consisting of 9,000 volunteers and nearly 150 voting-day staging areas. His operation overlooked no potential source of votes.

Most significantly, Obama virtually swept the African American vote despite rejecting typical tactics deployed in the South; aides said they hadn't paid "street money" to local leaders and community organizers to get people to the polls. Obama campaign officials had bragged about bucking this long-entrenched system, but they weren't certain until Saturday whether it would work.