Hillary supporters are hard to find.

As part of our "Souper Tuesday" food drive, I attended the Buncombe County Democratic Party's volunteer luncheon last Wednesday. (And collected heaps of food - thanks BCDP!)

Out of all the things that got discussed at the luncheon - including short stump speeches by four candidates for county commission, and an impromptu forum on the state's mental health crisis - one thing struck me in particular, because it jibes with my experience.

Kate Swafford of WNC for Change, the local Obama group, introduced herself at that meeting, and encouraged anyone there who supported Obama to come to their weekly meeting (Thursdays at 6:30 at Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville). County chair Kathy Sinclair thanked Kate for coming, and mentioned that she didn't know if there was any similar group of Hillary supporters, but that she'd love to hear from them. A silence fell as a roomful of Buncombe County's most experienced and connected grassroots Democrats looked around at each other shrugging. Nobody else there knew of any local Hillary group. And as you might expect, nobody stood up to express support for Hillary and invite others there to form a local group.

That struck me because twice in the past year DFA-Asheville has organized forums for local supporters of Democratic presidential contenders. Last spring I found it very easy to get in touch with people backing Obama, Edwards, and Kucinich, and once the meeting was announced a Gore supporter contacted me on his own initiative. Obama and Edwards even had tools on their websites to facilitate exactly this kind of grassroots networking. At the time, however, Hillary did not, and appeals to our DFA list didn't bring anyone forward. I found a volunteer website dedicated to Hillary's campaign, and for a while the person running that site toyed with traveling to Asheville from Florida to represent his candidate. That didn't pan out, however, and by the time the meeting came around, he hadn't managed to recruit any local supporters to show up.

Fast forward to February '08, when we wanted to do another Presidential candidate forum. Again, Obama supporters were easy to find - after having signed up through the Obama grassroots tools in the spring, I had gotten onto a local Obama mailing list, and I just replied to one of those e-mails to recruit someone to appear for the senator from Illinois. I visited Hillary's site and was pleasantly surprised to see that she now had a place where volunteers could network; I signed onto the local list, sent several e-mails, and waited. No response. I tried the local contact the fellow from Florida had finally provided last spring. No response.

Not to labor the point any further, but I'm frankly shocked at Clinton's neglect of the grassroots - and equally shocked at her supporters' apparent antipathy to the sort of grassroots initiative that we've seen with Obama's campaign this year, and saw with Dean's campaign in 2004. I'm not saying that it should have been a top priority for anyone to send a rep to a small DFA meeting in western North Carolina, but the almost complete lack of response is jarring - especially compared with the enthusiastic response I met with from the Obama people.

I don't want to read too much into it, but I think this just highlights something a lot of other observers have noticed - the culture of the Clinton campaign seems unable to grasp the importance of grassroots organizing. But I suspect there's something deeper at play here as well - that Clinton's supporters just aren't themselves all that interested in grassroots politics. That's fine - I'd like to give it less time, too - but I'm not alone in thinking that for us on the left, our disengagement from electoral politics is part of what caused the disasters of 1994 and 2000. And to the extent that the Democratic Party has revived, it's been largely the result of people becoming engaged again - and especially people learning to use the new tools that the Internet offers anyone who wants to organize people locally or nationally. These tools are amazing, but you don't become proficient with them overnight.

More to the point, though, the tools have been used by people who were motivated to make a difference, and who felt the responsibility to act. I don't know for sure - after all, it's been hard to meet Clinton supporters face-to-face - but I suspect that even at the grassroots the people driving her campaign want to put the right set of professionals back in charge, and then go back to doing other things. Up until quite recently, that's all Democratic campaigns have ever been about. And given that mindset, why spend much time or energy on the grassroots - even if you're a grassroots supporter? On Obama's side, however, one gets the sense that his volunteers are aiming to put together a movement - and that after our experience with this Congress, a few even see as one of the aims of that movement holding Obama and his party accountable if he wins. At the very least, his campaign will have created a new group of experienced, motivated, and networked people capable of doing so.