Oct 17 2008

Let’s see how this baby runs…

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

The MSM would have us all believe that this election is about “Hockey Moms,” “Joe Sixpack” or “Joe the Plumber.” But as they obsess about all of this, there are stories going on under the radar that haven’t seen the light of day. Thankfully, this time around, we have the breadth and depth of the blogs to get these stories out there. Its where I’m finding my inspiration these days.

Perhaps the most untold story of this election is the ground game that the Obama campaign has developed. I first learned about all of this from our own Populista back in February from an essay titled Obama for Organizer-In-Chief. In it, Populista explained how, during the primaries, Obama was using his community organizing background to build a campaign ground game around the principles of “Respect. Empower. Include.”

This really caught my attention, so over the last few months, I have been trying to read the few stories that are out there about what is going on and how its working. Even the blogs are not paying this story much attention. The ones who are include Zack Exley at The Huffington Post, Al Giordano at The Field, and Sean Quinn at FiveThirtyEight.  

 

From The Field today, we get a couple of interesting stories. First of all, we learn about some work that Micah Sifry of TechPresident did with meta-data. Here’s a sample:

   -# of upcoming McCain events happening within a 25 mile radius of Orlando, Florida: 8

   -# of upcoming Obama events happening within a 25-mile radius of Orlando: 84

   -# of upcoming McCain events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton, Ohio: 8

   -# of upcoming Obama events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton: 57

And here’s a visual:

But there’s a back-story to all of this.

See, the story of the 2008 campaign is not some media creation and caricature like “Joe the Plumber,” but those Americans that have done more than “win” the media lottery by having a chance encounter with a presidential candidate…No, the story of 2008 is authentically about “Debrah the Neighborhood Team Leader” and “Glenna the Neighborhood Team Leader,” and “Joe the Organizer,” and “Jane the Change Crew Chief,” and “Jose the Phone Banker” and “Jasmine the Canvasser.” The story is that of so many Americans that didn’t wait for the media to show up at their doorsteps but stepped out onto the battlefield and did the heavy lifting.

If you’d like to hear more about Debrah, Glenna, Joe, Jane, Jose, and Jasmine…I’d suggest you read the series on FiveThirtyEight by Sean Quinn titled On The Road. Back in September, Quinn set off to travel the battleground states to tell this story from the ground up. Here’s just a taste from the entry last Saturday from Troy, Ohio.

The first thing that stands out about the Troy, Ohio Obama field office is its placement. It’s right in the heart of town. It catches everyone’s attention — you can’t miss it.

The next thing that caught our attention was that, since the office had first opened, 800 different people from Miami County had come through the office’s doors to volunteer. There were only 51,760 voters in the entire county in 2004, and a mere 17,606 were Kerry voters.

4.5% of the entire Miami County Kerry vote has already walked in the doors to volunteer.

This is a brand new development. Ed White, a first-time volunteer who spoke to us in the Troy office, said he’d lived here 24 years and had long “felt the stultifying effect of speaking up in a community so Republican.”…

This year, Ed is volunteering along with everyone else.

How did he get started? I asked. A friend named Margaret Begg had talked to him a handful of times, and soon enough Ed was in the office…

For her part, Begg has helped ignite a Democratic grassroots awakening in Miami County. Jake Schlachter, a Troy native who returned to Ohio to help out in this year’s election and who was there for that first meeting, told us he’s been amazed to observe his hometown’s transformation. Starting from the spring with a group of five around Begg’s kitchen table, the grassroots effort grew to 16, then 41, then 85, then over 200.

Last Friday, the Washington Post reported on a “pep talk” that Obama gave to about 750 volunteers in Columbus, Ohio.

“We’re coming around the turn,” he said. “America recognizes that at this time in history, with so much at stake, with the economy nose-diving, with two wars and the threat of terrorism, the threat of climate change, we need to do something fundamentally different. And all of you are the shock troops.”

Obama acknowledged that his campaign is trying a new model of organizing volunteers and turning out the vote, and said it is now time “to really make this thing work.”

“We’ve been designing and we’ve been engineering and we’ve been at the drawing board and we’ve been tinkering, and we’ve been — now it’s time to just take it for a drive,” he said. “Let’s see how this baby runs.”

What will be even more exciting than seeing how this baby runs on election day, will be to see how this kind of engagement by so many people in “community organizing” changes things afterwards.

10 comments

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  2. I read kos’ “Crashing the Gate.”  He spoke there about how the Repubs built their own “machine” from the 70’s on — the billions of dollars to fund think tanks and astroturf groups – I remember kos moaning because the Repubs paid their young organizers and he thought the Dems should, too, heh.

    This is a very different kettle of fish, imo.

    I think what happened under Howard Dean was part of the beginning of what we’re seeing now, from the grassroots to the netroots and everything in between.

    It’ll be damned interesting to see “how this baby runs,” to put it mildly.

    Great essay, NL.  You should cross-post it at kos, too — folks should read this.

    And for your musical delectation:

    LaVerne Baker, Jim Dandy, courtesy of YouTube’s tranquilatus:


  3. …all the GOP, led by Sarah the Sure at the RNC convention, ridiculing Obama’s background as a community organizer.

    during the primaries, Obama was using his community organizing background to build a campaign ground game around the principles of “Respect. Empower. Include.”

    Of course there was more to his community organizing than just learning the techniques.  Yet it is great to see the chickens of their ridicule coming home to roost.

    Beware what you ridicule!  

  4. to develop this intersection of community organizing and campaign ground game is Marshall Ganz.

    Here’s a link to an article by him at TPM Cafe.

    And finally, at some level, we may finally be coming to understand what De Tocqueville saw – the promise of democratic politics is in people’s ability to enter into relationships with one another to articulate common purposes and act on them. Organizing to bring people back into politics is not a cost, but an investment in rebuilding the democratic infrastructure of our public life under assault for far too many years.

  5. From BooMan Tribune today.

    Barack Obama is on course to win this election, and to win it by a big margin. But he isn’t winning because he framed his arguments better than Al Gore and John Kerry. He’s working in a favorable environment, yes, but the real change is his ground game. He has built an organization that is able to take all the spontaneous energy of the left and put it to directed use. Some people, like Zach Exley and Sean Quinn, have been documenting Obama’s unprecedented use of self-organizing community team-leaders. But the media and most of the blogosphere is missing the story. It is Barack Obama himself, not his advisers like David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who deserves the credit for his ground game. Obama learned how to do community organizing first-hand, and he has applied those lessons to his campaign. Coupling the age-old lessons of community organizing with the latest in technological innovation (including lessons learned from Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign and his 50-state strategy) has led to a ground game more fearsome than anything this country has ever seen.

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