I drove home from Reading PA on Wednesday after spending over a month as a “fellow” in the Obama campaign.\u00a0 “Fellow” is a made up title for people who come to a battleground state to volunteer full-time for the campaign.\u00a0 It’s kind of like being an intern, but with more exploitation.<\/p>\n
My main assignment was to canvass.\u00a0 I was a foot soldier in the infantry.\u00a0 Whatever I might have done or been before was unimportant and no one was interested.\u00a0 More relevant were my Spanish language skills as Reading is majority Latino.\u00a0 But even if I couldn’t decir ni una palabra<\/em>, they would have had me knocking on doors. \u00a0The fact that I was willing to go out canvassing, all day every day, in any neighborhood, and engage in many conversations, made me useful.\u00a0 While there might have been more I could have done, by the time I arrived all the field organizers were interested in were numbers and reaching the goal of “knocking on every door in Reading — twice.”\u00a0 I did my part in reaching that milestone and also managed in the conversations I had at those doors to make sure the unregistered got registered, and everyone knew his or her polling place, how to get there and when to vote.\u00a0 I may have helped make up a few minds, and encouraged a couple of folks to join us in getting out the vote.<\/p>\n Four weeks of pounding the broken pavement and going up and down rickety front steps left me exhausted.\u00a0 Reading, by the way, isn’t wasting any money on street-lighting either. I was lucky not to have twisted an ankle or worse.\u00a0 When it was all over, despite the fantastic election results, I felt a huge sense of emptiness, and I felt used.<\/p>\n Having worked for organizations that relied on volunteers, I knew something about their care and feeding — both emotional and actual, and had felt frustrated at times. I left grateful to have played a small part in a big victory, but I also felt less important than a speck of dust.<\/p>\n Everybody knows that the ground game was brilliantly played.\u00a0 The campaign staff and volunteers worked incredibly hard.\u00a0 While I generally worked 10-12 hours a day, unlike the field organizers (campaign staff), I managed to come home a couple of times.\u00a0 As a volunteer, I could take a day off.\u00a0 The not-very-well-paid staff never got that luxury, and as far I can see never stopped working.\u00a0 Some of them had been doing what they were doing a long time.\u00a0 Others had only started a few weeks before I did.\u00a0 They were laser focused on reaching daily voter contact goals.\u00a0\u00a0 I respected how important that work was, but there were times I wanted to bust into the Regional Field Director’s office and explain to him that “chain of command” didn’t mean he shouldn’t be walking the floor every so often and patting volunteers as well as his supervisees on the back.\u00a0 They wouldn’t work any less hard if he did.\u00a0 He wouldn’t be viewed as inefficient if he maybe checked in \u00a0with the fellow from Hoboken after Superstorm Sandy and asked her how things were at home. He was after all our local leader.\u00a0 And while “caring” might not be part of campaign strategy, it is part of leadership.<\/p>\n For that matter, when we left the office Sunday night before the storm, we left with call lists because the office would be closed the next day.\u00a0 There was no acknowledgement that maybe people with no electricity would not want to waste their cell batteries talking to campaign workers.\u00a0 We started canvassing again on Tuesday afternoon.\u00a0 While Sandy hadn’t hit Reading very hard, there were power outages and this meant no heat as well as no light for some. Many folks had family in\u00a0 New Jersey whom they still hadn’t heard from. There were a couple of objections that maybe canvassing might be counter-productive and that saying we are checking on our supporters was rather empty if we couldn’t get their lights back on.<\/p>\n The campaign was famously “metric-driven” to the point where\u00a0 it sometimes felt like voters were only numbers and volunteers simply bodies in motion. While out-of-state volunteers and staff stayed with generous host families, sometimes for several months, no one from the campaign ever called the host families to check in and make sure the guests weren’t stealing the china.\u00a0 I doubt anyone other than their guests ever gave them a thank you.<\/p>\n Nor do I think the neighborhood folks who opened up their homes for phone banking or as staging areas during the Get-Out-The-Vote drive were thanked in any official way.\u00a0 Imagine having strangers in your home day after day, all day, and we’re not talking about huge homes either.\u00a0\u00a0 The staging area I worked out of belonged to an older woman in need of knee surgery whose husband was recovering from a stroke.\u00a0 And this was the second time she’d done it.\u00a0 A letter from the President might be nice — even if he does use an autopen.<\/p>\n Why is any of this important? <\/em> Didn’t we all have the satisfaction of seeing Obama get re-elected? Sure we did.\u00a0 And I got that thanked every day by ordinary people in Reading.\u00a0 But the point is, for those of us not doing this to pad our resumes or build a career — acknowledgement, respect and validation was something we needed, something that would have made us do even better.<\/p>\n I saw a neighborhood volunteer who was in the office every day almost walk away in frustration.\u00a0 A newly arrived fellow who had\u00a0 been promoted to Deputy Field Organizer (unpaid) told her to make some calls. The volunteer was upset by the call list.\u00a0 She was supposed to recruit volunteers from a list that included people we hadn’t talked to before.\u00a0 Some were even Republicans. This was a woman who knew her community well and had worked the polls for years.\u00a0 She knew more about local election laws than anyone working in that office, and she was great at talking to people — in person as well as on the phone.\u00a0 After trying to use the list, she gave up. She started to shout, “I’m wasting my time.\u00a0 I’m done.\u00a0 I’m not coming back.”<\/p>\n I took her out and we went to lunch. I let her vent.\u00a0 I didn’t defend anyone’s behavior.\u00a0 I just listened — a professionally acquired skill, which no one seemed to know I had.\u00a0 I\u00a0 reminded her how important she was to the campaign.\u00a0 It was rewarding to me to see her and that same Deputy Field Organizer weeks later on election night.\u00a0 They had bonded and gotten past that moment.<\/p>\n A couple of days after I arrived, I went to a training offered by the Regional Director.\u00a0 The training module he was using talked about stories and how important personal narratives were in the campaign.\u00a0 He demonstrated this by telling us his.<\/p>\n Then he asked us to think about our own personal narrative — why re-electing Obama was important to us based on our own experiences. Narrative is something I know a little bit about.\u00a0 But he skipped the part in the module where we would actually share our own stories and learn to listen to others.\u00a0 He didn’t think that was important.<\/p>\n In retrospect, I wish I had tried to talk to him afterward and given him feedback on the need for more process, less talk.\u00a0 I could have offered to put together a brief narrative training based on the module, as a team builder for volunteers and staff, but I’m reasonably certain I would have been rebuffed. It wasn’t in the game plan.\u00a0 I was there to serve in the infantry.<\/p>\n Election night, no one had thought to get a projector for the office so that staff and volunteers could watch the returns together. \u00a0Instead we spontaneously gathered around a\u00a0 laptops by the front desk.\u00a0 A few of us were watching when one of the field organizers grabbed the laptop, presumably to report results (he was talking through his bluetooth) to someone else from the campaign.\u00a0 He seemed oblivious to the people in front of him who were watching,\u00a0 including a woman in a wheelchair. \u00a0 No one seemed mad at him. It was his moment too.\u00a0 But what was the message?<\/p>\n The victory party was held at a bar a few miles from the office.\u00a0 There were familiar faces from our office as well as from an unsuccessful local congressional campaign.\u00a0 But we were all on our own for food and drink.\u00a0 There were lots of big screen televisions, but no speeches from anyone in the campaign office.\u00a0 Nor was any campaign official there to thank the volunteers and lower level staff.\u00a0 The Regional Director was apparently elsewhere at some other party for the big shots.\u00a0 Maybe one that had an open bar and free chips.<\/p>\n Just a little bit of closure would have been nice.\u00a0 A handshake from someone in charge. \u00a0A very short speech, you know a narrative<\/em>, from the Regional Director or maybe even the State Director even via Skype, thanking all of us for our time. Yes, I did get hugs from some of the other grunts including local people who were there before the campaign moved in and will be there long after, but how can they see the campaign and the people who ran it, as appreciative or respectful of their efforts if they don’t get thanked?<\/p>\n I get that a campaign is not a service organization like the ones I worked for that treated volunteers like gold.\u00a0 I get this wasn’t a community organizing project to help people learn self-advocacy so they could run their own tenant council or voice concerns to their children’s teachers.\u00a0 I get that this wasn’t about the personal growth and empowerment of volunteers, but it could have been and should have been about something\u00a0 bigger than just winning one election.<\/p>\n My cousin, the political professional, tells me this is how it is with campaigns.\u00a0 Fair enough.\u00a0 But the ground game as it now has to be played<\/em> requires more.\u00a0 It requires people power, and empowering people is the fuel needed to run it.\u00a0 It worked this time\u00a0 because of a popular President, who many viewed as being unfairly under attack by an extremist right wing.\u00a0 It worked because voter suppression efforts in states like Pennsylvania backfired and fired people up.\u00a0 It worked because as Mike Huckabee put it, Romney looks like the guy who fires people.\u00a0 But it may not work four years from now when people are complacent.\u00a0 It may not work four years from now if it doesn’t work to change Congress in two years — a Herculean task thanks to gerrymandering.<\/p>\n When I got to Pennsylvania, I discovered the call scripts and walk scripts referred not to “Obama for America” but to “Organizing for America.”\u00a0\u00a0 I was told it meant, “We will be here after the election and help people run for local office and be empowered in the political process.”\u00a0 My understanding is this is what was happening in Ohio, and maybe some of the other battleground states.\u00a0 I saw no evidence of this in Reading.<\/p>\n I heard no discussions about OFA or its future.\u00a0 Nor do I have any idea whether the office is still open or staffed. Maybe it’s another of the many things they didn’t think the infantry needed to know about.\u00a0 Maybe it got discussed in a meeting on Wednesday, which I missed trying to get home before the Nor’easter.<\/p>\n Here’s what it says about OFA in Wikipedia:<\/p>\n “Organizing for America<\/strong> is a community organizing<\/a> project of the Democratic National Committee<\/a>.[1]<\/a>[2]<\/a>[3]<\/a><\/sup> Founded after the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama<\/a>, the group seeks to mobilize supporters in favor of Obama’s legislative priorities.”<\/p>\n Now, that’s an organization I could support.\u00a0 The reason why so many brilliant, earnest young people want to work for the President in the first place is because they were inspired by his community organizing experiences as recounted in Dreams from My Father<\/em>.\u00a0 Obama has stated his desire to be a transformational leader.\u00a0 He is achieving that goal in his efforts to enfranchise the actual silent majority of Americans — the have-nots, historically alienated from the political process.<\/p>\n Community organizing has been used to empower people to work on particular issues within their communities.\u00a0 Harnessing its power and using it in electoral politics to promote a progressive political platform, that’s something else.\u00a0 That’s not how politics is usually done, but it’s something a movement inspired by Barrack Obama can<\/em> do.\u00a0 That work should have started back in 2009 when it was supposed to. And if it has started in Ohio or other places where OFA is stronger, than it should have been more well known.\u00a0 They should have sent that memo out along with all the chances to win dinner with Barack and George.<\/p>\n Many people have lamented the lack of a\u00a0 progressive equivalent to the Tea Party. <\/em> While the Tea Party is a faux-grassroots organization propped up with Koch brother dollars, there is an opportunity to apply campaign discipline and community organizing skill to create a real<\/em> movement, aligned with the Democratic Party.\u00a0 Occupy<\/em> is a mess that doesn’t speak to the mainstream, and doesn’t seem to want much to do with electoral politics or the President.\u00a0 Move-on<\/em> doesn’t have a clear “off line” presence.<\/p>\n OFA already has staff and tens of thousands of volunteers.\u00a0 They have offices.\u00a0 They have an infrastructure. Actually fulfilling their mission is not impossible, but even if the DNC decides to give them more financial support, they will not be successful if they continue to run things in ground-game election mode.\u00a0 They are going to have to take off their campaign field organizing caps and start thinking like community organizers.\u00a0 Here’s how they might start:<\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n The chattering classes are already saying that pulling off the ground game in 2016 will be harder than it was in 2012.\u00a0 They’re saying it was all about Obama.\u00a0 But from what I saw on the ground, the campaign ended when Ohio was called, and “we have his back” really was just a slogan.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of the \u00a0neighborhood leaders were around four years ago and continued to be active in their\u00a0 communities. Others were dormant between Presidential campaigns.\u00a0 Tens of thousands of people were registered in Reading alone.\u00a0 Hundreds were energized and helped out. \u00a0It’s time to build a movement that will outlast this election cycle, one that will support the democratic agenda by empowering people to lead in their communities — including by running for local office, one that will spearhead voter education, making voting part of the culture and holding elected leaders accountable. This is the best way to have the President\u2019s back over the next four years and to ensure that in 2016 we will continue to move forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I drove home from Reading PA on Wednesday after spending over a month as a “fellow” in the Obama campaign.\u00a0 “Fellow” is a made up title for people who come to a battleground state to volunteer full-time for the campaign.\u00a0 It’s kind of like being an intern, but with more exploitation. My main assignment was … Continue reading Brilliant Campaign, But Now What?<\/span> \n
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