BFIA: The word “grassroots” gets thrown around constantly and I believe it has lost meaning. How do you define a “grassroots” political movement and why is it important?
Ari Berman: As far as I know, Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana coined the term at the Progressive Party convention of 1912. “This party has come from the grassroots,” he said. “It has grown from the soil of the people’s hard necessities.” That quote is actually the epigraph for my book. To me, “grassroots” refers to the organizers and activists, at the local level, who operate outside of the traditional modes of power.
BFIA: What is the impact of Washington, DC Non Governmental Organizatons, with their Washington based funding, setting up “grassroots” organizations. I am thinking of Heritage Action, Food and Water Watch, Repower America, Friends Committee on National Legislation and Physicians for Social Responsibility in particular, but I suppose there are many.
AB: It seems to me like an attempt to have more of a footprint outside of Washington, which is increasingly important today.
BFIA: The news media increasingly influences the political issues that are discussed. In many cases if the media is not discussing an issue, it has not come up at political candidate town hall meetings. How do issues percolate up to attention in a grassroots environment? How should they come up?
AB: The Internet and social media is now the best way for a grassroots message to circulate into the mainstream conversation. The Internet has lowered the barriers of entry for popular communication and citizen journalism, which makes it a lot easier to get diffuse messages out to a broader audience. People can hear your voice without turning on NBC.
BFIA: In the 2010 Iowa midterms, the Iowa Democratic Party lost some of the Obama mantra of “Respect, Empower & Include” and became more top down in approach. What is your reaction to this? How do political parties renew bottom up participation without getting formulaic?
AB: I think this whole notion of de-centralizing the Democratic Party and empowering local organizers, which was such a big part of the Democratic comeback in ’06 and ’08, got lost in 2010. So much of the party’s message and priorities were dictated from Washington and thus the individual state parties had much less room to creatively maneuver and organize.
I’m not as familiar with what occurred in Iowa, but the lesson here is that you can’t just turn grassroots politics on and off like a light switch. You have to really commit to it, even after you finish campaigning. The Obama campaign brilliantly fused a top-down inner circle with a bottom-up base of supporters and successfully blended both worlds. But after he got elected, everything became very top down. The organizers with Organizing for America took their cues from the White House while those who worked for the party under Dean and operated with some local autonomy were not retained after the ’08 election. I think that was a mistake.
BFIA:
Blog for Iowa has its roots in the Howard Dean for President campaign, and is probably Democracy for 
going forward?
AB: I spend a lot of time in the book tracing the evolution of Dean’s campaign and the rise of the broader progressive movement. I think it’s had a very big impact and Democracy for America continues to do great work. I also think that progressives will want to study the success of the Tea Party in 2010, in terms of how they organized through primaries, recruited candidates and forced establishment Republicans to pay attention to their agenda, and learn from how they did insurgent politics more effectively than Democrats and progressives in the past election. The Dean activists did some of that very effectively in previous elections, but they’d probably be smart to adopt some of the Tea Party playbook and band together around a common progressive agenda, so that establishment Democrats can no longer take them for granted. If that means becoming more confrontational toward elected Democrats and running primary challengers against them, then so be it.
BFIA: If we consider political fund raising, the old Howard Dean “bat” concept has been constantly present in the 2010 midterms. Is grassroots fund raising systemic now, and just one more piece of the puzzle? Is there anything unique about the prospects of grassroots fund raising in 2010 and beyond?
AB: It is now much more widely used, though still only a small percentage of candidates raise much of their money from small donations. Politicians have to be able to distinguish themselves and inspire people to tap into that grassroots enthusiasm online. That’s why people like Alan Grayson on the left or Christine O’Donnell on the right were able to fund raise successfully over the web. You almost need to become a lightning rod, or a uniquely magnetic figure like Obama, to be able to do it. Most members of Congress still find it a lot easier to raise money from wealthy contributors and corporations. The incentives for candidates to concentrate on small donations don’t exist yet.
BFIA: Since we don’t have Dick Armey and Freedomworks starting progressives off with a lot of money, how do we adjust for that?
AB: There are plenty of organized groups on the progressive side and plenty of donors with deep pockets. It’s just a question of whether they can sharpen their focus and will commit to doing insurgent politics.
BFIA: It seems that the cycle of campaign reform is coming around again to the 1968 time. Do you foresee a return to campaign reform as it took place after the 1968 Democratic convention? If not, will big money continue to dominate political campaigns? What should activists do about this?
AB: This is a huge emerging issue. We’re reaching a crisis in terms of how we finance political campaigns, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Large majorities of Americans strongly oppose the idea that corporations and wealthy individuals should be able to spend as much money as they want, in secret, to influence an election. But it will likely take a major scandal before that anger coalesces into an agreed upon solution. In the meantime, I think that Democrats should adopt and push for a major reform agenda, highlighted by the Fair Elections Act, which is the only bill that will level the playing field. The conversation about how to fix the system needs to begin now.
~Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. He has written extensively about American politics, foreign policy and the intersection of money and politics. His stories have also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Editor & Publisher and The Guardian, and he is a frequent guest and political commentator on MSNBC, C-Span and NPR. He graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and political science.
Blog For Iowa 