Community Organizer: It’s Like Being a Small-Town Mayor, but With Actual Competence
by KTKOctober 14th, 2008
Good article here on Obama’s amazingly organized “ground game” - the hierarchy of precinct workers and volunteers that are the lifeblood of a political campaign. Many observers have remarked on how unusually well-organized Obama’s campaign is, and on how many workers and volunteers they have out in the field - even in “battleground” states, they are swamping the McCain organization with many times as many workers in the same areas.
Obama’s campaign, like all, has a top-down structure of smaller and smaller teams extending down to the local-neighborhood level, but his goes far beyond ordinary name-taking. They have specific coordinators for canvassing, phone-calling, recruiting volunteers, collecting data, and even religious outreach - for every block of every neighborhood of every targeted state. Each is overseen by a team leader, who was selected by having proven themselves on a set of specific organizing tasks the higher-level workers assigned to them - those who passed the test had shown they could get people to turn out, and were then sent on for further training at “boot camps”, where they were given further organizing skills and insights into the campaign. Obama’s field workers are apparently given more initiative and information than in most campaigns, and they are focused at the local level as much as possible.
All of this comes straight out of classic organizing work in community groups, unions, and political movements. Most campaigns just run a “ask for volunteers and shout orders at them” organization - Obama has built a movement (one that, I suspect, will be invited to participate in other projects after the election; his campaign has also been noted for its development of an ongoing, permanent voter data base, which the Kerry campaign failed to do). Suddenly his background looks more relevant than ever - and it’s paying off with a ground organization that is killing McCain. And as that organization reaches out, others see it and want to join in. (There are repeated stories of McCain offices in hot-spot areas being totally empty even on weekdays, and closed on weekends. One couple in the story above were Bush volunteers in 2004, and were so demoralized by the lousy McCain organization, and energized by Obama, that they became district coordinators in the Obama organization this time around.)
Organizing works! And during this campaign, that standard, tired old lefty political tactic is taking back our country for us.
UPDATE: [tgirsch] Fixed broken link
Categories: Culture, General, News & Current Events, Politics |
