OFA: Harnessing Obama’s grassroots network in Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago (on May 16), Organizing for America [OFA], the grassroots network that was called Obama for America, had an organizing meeting in Massachusetts that drew over 400 attendees.  [I've written earlier about the challenge and promise of OFA, the 13 million person network from the campaign, that is unprecedented and the question of whether they will be field troops for the Obama agenda or enabled to have their own input into policy.]

Marshall Ganz provided a historical context for OFA.  He noted that social change in our history is not a constant, it is episodic: “”Change is slow except when it’s fast. We’re in a fast movement now so let’s not lose it.”  This is the first time, Ganz noted, that a social movement gave birth during a political campaign.  Successful social movements have to act national but be locally rooted, and to translate national action into local change. Ganz believes that more civic capital has been created through this campaign than ever created through our nation’s history; we have to be creative about using this civic capital.  We need to make sure that it is not a one-way arrangement.

The theme of OFA members wanting input on policy came up at the OFA-MA event, both in questioning of Mitch Stewart (national director of OFA) and in informal discussions throughout the day. Mitch Stewart noted that OFA’s prime agenda was “to support the President’s agenda.”  During Q&A a woman  shouted out “We want input in that agenda!” to large applause.  Stewart tried to siphon the OFA interest in policy by encouraging people to express their input on  whitehouse.gov or by communicating with their members of Congress.  He noted that he was not a policy expert and OFA was not a policy organization.  But it is clear that the audience wasn’t comfortable with that resolution.

A number of speakers highlighted a theme that I have discussed earlier about the importance of marrying technology with “social capital” to have optimal effect. Ethan Winn (software developer) summarized it as  “organizing practices apply online” and commented that once you build the trust through F2F encounters, you can give people responsibilities.)  Marshall Ganz, Harvard lecturer, former community organizer and train-the-trainer for the Obama grassroots effort, in response to a question about how to reach low-income people through technology, replied: “It’s important to distinguish between carpenters and tools. The best tools in the world don’t build a house. The campaign made the tools and equipped people to use the tools. The Dean campaign was successful in using technology to fund raise but the Meetups were not successful — no one knew what to do. The Obama campaign did that part well. People were hungry for tools to work with one another successfully. The technology AND the leadership together were what made the campaign successful. Also, the use of YouTube to enable people to tell their stories was extraordinary. That tool has just begun to realize its potential.”  And Sarah Compton (field organizer in MA for Obama) observed:  “I hope that technology never replaces face-to-face contact. When canvassing to NH, we tried to have a carpool in every town. Those carpools were also meetings and got people engaged. A proof that that was more successful in some ways than technology, the national campaign sent out a blast email about Drive for Change, but we got thousands more people to canvass through word of mouth.”

Here is a thoughtful post on the OFA-MA meeting by “Bottom Up Change”.

Here is video of “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement” [panel featuring Sarah Compton, Marshall Ganz, Juan Leyton (director of Neighbor to Neighbor), Ethan Winn and Alan Khazei (BeTheChangeInc.org and co-founder of City Year)

OFA-MA has many other resources from the recent meeting including a live-blogging account of the day.

Is “Organizing for America” really “Organizing for Obama”?

We’ve posted earlier about the $64,000 question: what will happen to the throngs of political supporters brought into the process by the Obama Campaign?

This has been partially answered.  Obama for America 2.0 [OBA 2.0] as it was loosely called will be called Organizing for America.

The language sounds empowering of his supporters (“you’ve built the largest grassroots movement in history”, “our journey to change America”, “we cannot do it without you”, I wouldn’t have been sworn in without you,  etc.), but a separate press release by Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia and head of the Democratic National Committee, indicates that Organizing for America will work within the DNC.  This organizational structure suggests that it will be more of a force to enact the Obama Administration agenda: in other words a one-way rather than a  two-way street.

He doesn’t answer how it will be staffed and funded, whether it will be a federated, with a chance for participants to rise to state or national leadership positions in OFA through voting, and most importantly doesn’t address whether it will enable individuals to contact each other: criticizing Obama if they feel he is not living out the ideals of the campaign, or organizing around issues different than the Obama Administration is focusing on.

I’ve indicated earlier that I think this extraordinary 13 million person network will have less staying power if the individuals feel they are merely foot soldiers without an ability to change or shape the political priorities.  (And the one other effort to help glean citizens’ priorities for the Obama Administration (Change.org),  seemed to fall victim to the “vote early, vote often” phenomenon, propelling the legalization of marijuana to #1, probably because Ron Paul supporters rallied their troops repeatedly).

The Obama folks also introduce by video Mitch Stewart as the Executive Director of Organizing for America, caucus director of Iowa and the person and the person who ran Virginia for Obama during the general election.

Stay tuned.

Watering the Obama grassroots post-election

(photo by MacaStat)

The 2008 election really succeeded in engaging new voices into the political process.  Especially Obama (see below), but also Palin’s appeal to white men (some based more on Palin’s looks than her policies), has drew new voices in American politics.

Obama, who has a background in community organizing,  hired some of the best community organizers in the country to build an unparalleled grassroots organization in his presidential quest.    He gave campaign volunteers responsibility and access to crown jewels (like voting lists) when candidates traditionally centralize power much more.  And Obama combined high-tech and high-touch.

As Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports: “The resulting bottom line is astounding: 3.1 million contributors, 5 million volunteers, 2.2 million supporters on his main Facebook page, 800,000 on his MySpace page and perhaps a million more names on Obama’s own campaign Web site. Even discounting for likely duplicates, Plouffe says he could end up “knowing” almost 7 million voters by Election Day—roughly one in 10 of Obama’s likely total. “These are people who are responsive,” he says. “They want to be respected and to continue to be involved in what we do.”

Now that Obama is elected, how will the Obama administration rate in the care and feeding of this tremendous network?  At our Saguaro conversations back in the late 1990s (in which Barack participated), it became clear that politicians have much more of a natural interest in stoking grassroots networks before elections and tend to neglect them after election victories, when it is often less clear both how to use these networks and “what’s in it for them–the politicians?”

The Deval Patrick Administration shows the potential dangers here.  Patrick, a very bright, young African-American Harvard Law graduate was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2006, also thanks to the brilliant campaigning of David Axelrod (the campaign strategist for Obama) in a campaign that had stronger grassroots civic engagement than any election Massachusetts had seen for decades. While Patrick announced that civic engagement was going to be one of the three pillars of his administration, his rhetoric has been stronger than his strategy in this regard.  While it is not clear that his grassroots supporters have turned on him, they certainly are far less moored to his Administration than pre-election.

As Fineman notes: “…[I]f you live by viral marketing, you can die by it, too. ‘His supporters have sky-high expectations and expect to be involved,’ says Will Marshall, who studied the Obama organization for the Democratic Leadership Council. ‘They are loyal but not easy to control.’ “  Fineman observes that this grassroots network could turn against Obama if he puts far more troops in Afghanistan.

But if Obama’s strategists adequately focus on how to best engage these volunteers, and one would hope and trust that his experience in the Saguaro Seminar helped deepen his commitment and his knowledge about civic engagement, this enormous grassroots base could be a galvanizing force against so many of the woes that face us (our economy, our high school dropout epidemic, our need to take action against global warming, our need to mentor those falling through the cracks, etc.).  Especially at a time of great economic need, when government’s purse strings may be limited by the economic bailout, unleashing a civic army of volunteers against our woes could be a doubly willing strategy.

As Marshall notes”If [Obama] wins, he’s going to have a personal following he can use to press his agenda,” says Marshall. “He can use these millions to reach over the heads of the Washington insiders, the Democrats on the Hill. It could be powerful.”

See “What Have We Created: Obama’s supporters have high expectations, and they may expect to have a voice in governing?”

See also A Civic Inflection Point in the U.S.?

Obama push for citizen service

The incoming Obama administration has spun their service effort into USAservice.org.

They are planning day-of-service events over the inauguration (which could be significant with 2-3 million Americans descending on our nation’s capital).  Their longer-term plans are less clear, but they have in the works plans to spotlight civilian service over MLK holiday weekend.

Buffy Wicks in this video explaining their efforts of “Renew America Together”, which is being launched the day before the Inauguration.

If you’re interested in this topic, read Nancy Scola (for TechPresident) on their service plans for MLK weekend.  They aspire to “reignite the American tradition of service and volunteerism and to that end the current call to action [on MLK's birthday] is viewed as a starting point.”

This type of initiative  is one of the reasons that I’m optimistic about the role that the Obama bullypulpit may play in a revitalization of social capital in the US.  It is always critical in these “Days of Service” that it be a starting point (ultimately interesting Americans in more regular service to others) rather than an end in itself.

Former Saguaro participant Jim Wallis (of Sojourner’s), who has been on the Obama transition advisory team on civil society and faith-based organizations, notes that he is calling the MLK day speech by Obama and service-day “an altar call to take action in our own lives and families, our local communities, and in our nation on the big issues that we face. We have been exploring the possibilities of not just service but all kinds of civil action, including community organizing and advocacy on social justice issues. The president-elect will be giving a call to action on that day before he addresses the nation in his inaugural ceremony the next day.”

Jonathan Alter has a well-reasoned Newsweek piece (“Don’t Muffle the Call to Serve“) on how national service might be an inexpensive way of stimulating our economy while accomplishing a lot of the useful rebuilding we need to get done.  It echoes David Brooks’ NYT column from Dec. 9 (This Old House”).  Here are some excerpts of Alter’s column:

The day before the inauguration is the Martin Luther King holiday, and the president-elect wants it to be devoted to service. But Barack Obama knows that one Monday of good deeds—even if it becomes an annual tradition when people help each other rather than sit home watching TV—isn’t enough. Throughout the campaign, he talked about something much bigger—a new era of civic engagement, with a quarter-million young people helping pay for their education by serving their country at home and abroad.

But as Mario Cuomo is fond of pointing out, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This year, you transition in prose, too. That means the dreams of the Obama Generation are in danger of being deferred even before their man takes office. The economists confronting the present crisis apparently don’t have a lot of time for programs like AmeriCorps, which uses a network of local and national nonprofits to employ 75,000 mostly young Americans to teach kids to read, to run after-school programs, to build affordable housing, to clean parks and streams, among many other service projects. The brainiacs aren’t sure these do-gooders are relevant to recovery. They’re wrong about that, in more ways than one.

This is why:

…[F]or 1 percent of the stimulus, about $7 billion, Obama could create 8 percent of the 3 million new jobs he has promised. Those 250,000 new national-service slots would simultaneously fulfill his campaign pledge to young people. And with 15 years of scandal-free AmeriCorps apparatus in place, service jobs can be established with Rooseveltian speed, an important criteria for inclusion in the stimulus. At about $20,000 each, AmeriCorps jobs are also much less expensive than those in construction.

The other standard Obama has wisely applied to the package is that every dollar spent should help the country long-term. Thus the projects enumerated by Summers would rebuild infrastructure, lessen dependence on foreign oil and reduce health-care costs. But investing in human capital is every bit as critical for the future. Service develops the talents of those who perform it as well as those they help. It changes lives. And communitarian thinking is contagious. Each year, AmeriCorps’s 75,000 full-time members leverage another 1.7 million volunteers.

Interview with key architect of Obama’s ground strategy

Many have commented how Obama’s election was a tone-perfect combination of high tech (MyBarack.com, new cellphone applications, rapid response to smear charges, assembling a text messaging database of millions, etc.) and high touch, mobilizing over a million volunteers according to the Obama campaign. (In Florida alone there were over 19,000 Obama teams.) In the Obama campaign’s endorsement of technology, they also hearkened back to old “shoe-leather” campaigning.

I was recently reading a quote from Obama in the Newsweek behind-the-scenes look at the Obama campaign and Obama, in considering whether to launch his campaign said (according to Valerie Jarrett a close Obama friend):

“[I]f he (Obama) were to do this (run for president), he wanted to make sure that it was a different kind of campaign and consistent with his philosophy of ground up rather than top down.”  Jarrett said that Obama was influenced by Saul Alinsky, a radical-realist community organizer, who had said “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”  Jarrett indicated that Obama knew he could find a non-threatening way to make people comfortable with change, including his own race and that he wanted to take the community organizing model and help it to go national in his campaign.

It’s a pleasure to be able to share a conversation with Marshall Ganz, a colleague of mine at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a community organizing maven. Marshall helped put meat on the bones of Obama’s vision of taking a community organizing approach from local to national scale; Marshall was a key architect of Obama’s “ground strategy”, training scores of trainers starting with Camp Obama (the ground zero of the Obama grassroots effort), and providing organizational consulting to the campaign. He comes out of a long history of grassroots organizing, dropping out of Harvard in 1964 to work on Freedom Summer. He then returned to California (his birthplace) where he spent a decade and a half organizing for Cesar Chavez on the Farm Workers campaign. He ultimately returned to Harvard, earning his Ph.D. and now teaches at the Kennedy School. He also trained organizers in the NH Dean campaign.

THOMAS SANDER: Marshall, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the Obama election.

MARSHALL GANZ: Delighted to.

SANDER: First, tell me a bit about the organization of the “shoe leather” element of Obama’s campaign. One thing that fascinated me is that the Obama campaign believed that to overcome racial fears of some white Americans, it was important to have other white Americans making a door-to-door pitch for Obama, convincing them that other whites thought this was a safe choice.

GANZ: On the approach, Obama, whom Palin mocked for being an organizer, didn’t canvass door-to-door as it has come to be done. Campaigns hire staff who by phone calling or going door to door identify supporters and then turn them on Election Day. The Obama campaign trained people to be organizers. The organizers recruited local volunteers, structured them into teams, trained them in leadership, assigned them goals, provided them with the tools to mobilize the voters themselves, and coached them to success.

SANDER: So less of a command-and-control operation and more of mobilizing and inspiring others.

GANZ: Actually building an organization based on commitment capable of motivating others, and holding them accountable for real results. That’s why Camp Obamas, where we launched these leadership teams, were so important. In particular we trained people in how tell their stories. The campaign was based on shared values – and story telling is how we translate values into action. In California, for example, we launched 200 teams in 2 weekends, and, coached by only 4 paid organizers, built a volunteer organizations that could make 100,000 phone calls in a single day. I know you talk about “social capital.”; I think this was “civic capital.”

SANDER: the Obama campaign mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The speed of this effort may dwarf other efforts we’ve seen previously (abolition, temperance, equal rights for women, environmental movement, etc.) Should this be thought of as a social movement and will it influence partisan politics?

GANZ: Typically the party structures themselves get ossified over time and set themselves up for renewal. We saw this with the changes that McGovern brought to the Democratic Party in 1972 or the changes that Conservatives brought in with Reagan in 1980. Once the parties become obstacles to renewal, they are ultimately displaced by a wave of people mobilized by social movements that take over the party apparatus. Social movements historically influence partisan politics, some times contributing to core partisan realignment, or, at the very least, to electoral mobilization. We saw this with abolitionists, the free soil movement, and the Whigs, with populists and the Democrats, progressives and the Republicans; and, of course with the civil rights movement that mobilized Democrats and the conservative movement that mobilized Republicans in opposition.

SANDER: Is the Obama victory a watershed for the Democratic Party?

GANZ: I’m not sure what that means exactly. I was part of two “successful” efforts to take over the California Democratic Party, both of which turned out to be chimeras. We soon learned that we had wandered into a swamp with all its little pockets of quicksand, undergrowth, overgrowth, and distinct loss of access to the sunlight (to mix metaphors).

On the other hand, it could signify that the Democratic Party – and American politics in general – have recovered from the racial divisions that undermined it in the 1960s’s. LBJ predicted it would take just about as long as it has – 40 years, the lifetime of a generation.

SANDER: Were there things about how the Obama campaign was organized that play into such a realignment?

GANZ: Well in my mind people place too much stress on the Internet and other new technology. It is very useful – but as tools placed in the hands of skilled organizers, not as a substitute for them. It made it easier for people to alert the campaign that they wanted to help and easier for the campaign to plug these individuals in to ongoing efforts. By “trusting” volunteers with access to the campaign’s sophisticated voter file, volunteers could target their work far more effectively, at the same time making their work transparent – this allowed for recognition, accountability, and learning as the work moved forward.

SANDER: What about the role of new voters and new volunteers?

GANZ: This campaign was very unusual in creating a venue, contributing the resources, and providing the strategic focus within which the “movement to elect Barack Obama” could flourish. Most of the volunteers and organizers were new to electoral politics, organizing, and advocacy work. Part of the appeal was the “values” base of the Obama’s call, as opposed to the narrow single-issueness of most progressive advocacy groups that tend to conflate values and strategy into identification with a particular approach to a particular issue, something that contributes to strategic rigidity and ideological purity. The combination of clear – and inclusive – values and pragmatic strategy is a very powerful one. To make change requires willingness to take deep levels of commitment, the risks of dealing with uncertain waters, a certainty about one’s cause. None of this is possible without shared values or moral commitment and Obama realized this and appealed to a much deeper moral level.

One of the key conditions was that the campaign was able to finance its own organizational structure, with its own integrity, requiring others to cooperate with it. It thus created genuine “free spaces” within which new people could become involved; as a consequence new ways of doing things developed and new relationships formed. In 2004, the Kerry Campaign wished for a national field program, but lacking the money, people, and vision, it was gobbled up by 527’s, by state and local party organizations, by unions, and other groups, and by everyone’s favorite subcontractors of services. It made the DNC look like the privatization process of the war in Iraq. No coherence, no integrity, and no space within which new ways of doing things could be developed.

The question is whether the “movement to elect Barack Obama” can sustain enough strategic coherence – and funding base – to become an ongoing force, engaging people in local, state and national forms of activity for a broad “program for a new America”, countering the influence of conventional interest groups. It requires a real organization, not another Move.on. Another question is whether this approach to campaigning — based in organizing and not in marketing – could spill over to an approach to policy based less on “service provision” and more on “active citizenship” or organizing.

I’d be very cautious about attributing agency to some monolithic “Democratic Party”, a creature I’ve yet to meet. It is much more a venue, a kind of political market place, in which actors interact with each other to advance their interests, create coalitions, etc. It is exactly NOT a constituency party like those in Canada and Europe, with real substantive power to choose leaders, decide policy, and mobilize on their behalf, as a party.

SANDER: Marshall, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.

GANZ: Sure. Let’s all work to see that this Obama infusion of energy, especially among youth, has “legs”, as they say.

Obama’s historic election

The election of Saguaro’s Barack Obama as 44th, and first African-American president marks itself as a truly historic election.  It makes me immensely proud to be an American.

Some notes on the election:

1) voter turnout:  preliminary turnout projections put the numbers between 134 million (Curtis Gans, American U.) and 136.6 million Americans (Michael McDonald, GMU).  SEE UPDATED NUMBERS HERE. [Some 30 million voted early and some 105 million were believed to have voted on election day.] This would translate into a voter turnout rate of somewhere around 64%, possibly exceeding the all time rate in 1960, or just below this rate.  [Curtis Gans notes on a Metro Connection interview that turnout was very high among Democrats, but actually lower in 2008 among Republicans; Gans notes that some states actually had lower turnout.  Gans notes that one shouldn't compare votes cast to number of registered voters since once can manipulate turnout rates depending on how recently they cleaned the voter lists for people who moved or died.]  (You can see from below chart that after declining until 1996, it has shot up in the last 12 years).  [David King, of the Kennedy School believes that voter turnout, without counting the absentee ballots was 64.9%, matching the 1960 rates and could rise higher.)  One can see this as half-full or half-empty;  it is disconcerting that even in an election with such important consequences for the future of the nation, and with such compelling personalities (Obama and Palin), and with unprecedented sums spent on advertising and GOTV (get out the vote) efforts, still over a 1/3 of all eligible Americans did not vote.  But nonetheless, it is a remarkable turnaround in the last 12 years.  Curtis Gans thinks that the trends of civic disengagement from voting are generally occurring and although he hopes Obama brings in a new era of civic engagement, he thinks we shouldn't infer too much from a couple of close elections in 2000-2008.

(Source: Michael McDonald, GMU)

2) youth vote:  Part of the story in the resurgence is youth voting.  We witnessed  huge increases in primary voting among younger voters 18-29 year olds (in many cases doubling or tripling number of youth votes 4-8 years ago in the primaries).  We have written  about what might be the beginning of a 9-11 Generation among youth, preliminary reports from CIRCLE were that youth 18-29 did not make up an increased percentage of voters in the 2008 general election [since all age groups were increasing their voter turnout, the youth's share stayed constant at about 17%).  SEE UPDATED NUMBERS HERE. But it appears that the youth are continuing to turn out at increasing rates (from 37% in 1996 to 41% in 2000 to 48% in 2004 to 49-54% in 2008). [CIRCLE is still projecting the youth turnout from the 2008 election; we'll fill this in when they come in with a definite number, but it could be the second highest youth turnout ever since 1972 when it was 54.5%.]  David King at the Kennedy School says the data indicates it was the highest turnout for 18 year-olds since 1972. Whether the glass is half full or half empty is a matter of interpretation;  voting rates for youth are still significantly below voting rates for seniors, for example.  And young people voted overwhelmingly for Obama.  [See the NYT's story "Youth Turnout up by 2 Million from 2004"]

3) mobilizing new people into the political process:  2008 was an unprecedented year in terms of the numbers of volunteers and donors to the Obama campaign, and an exquisite combination of “high-tech” and “high-touch” in his campaign (with tens of thousands of door-to-door canvassers coupled with a highly sophisticated use of e-mail, texting, use of cellphone, and websites).  [We've written about that earlier here and here. ] But with the massive increases in the number of registered Americans, preliminary reports were that first-time voters were not noticeably higher than they were in 2004 as a percentage of the voters (even though their absolute numbers increased, since the total number of voters increased).  In the process of his campaign, he spurred 50,000 local events, 1.5 million volunteers on the web, 8,000 web-based affinity groups, and 3.1 million donors who contributed almost $700 million to his campaign. It didn’t hut that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes helped worked for the Obama campaign. [My colleague David Lazer talks about in "Obama's Machine" [Forbes], how Obama might unleash this network in the future to his advantage.]

4) What will new Obama administration look like?  What will be their priorities?

In some regards, it is too soon to tell.  But there have been some inklings of important strands announced by Barack on the stump, above and beyond his obvious focus on energy independence, ending the war in Iraq and trying to make the economy work again.

- Focus on sacrifice: Alexandra Marks article in Christian Science Monitor discussed this theme which Obama also returned to in his speech last night from Chicago.

Obama in his victory speech: “So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers — in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.”

- Role of the citizen:  Mentioning Obama’s focus, Michael Sandel noted “…[A] new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen.”  (From Thomas Friedman’s column, “Finishing Our Work”, NYT, 11/5/08)

From Obama’s victory speech: “[The campaign victory] was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth….[A]bove all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand….This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.”

- Focus on service:  from Barack’s mention of a bold plan for AmeriCorps expansion as a campaign promise, to his appearing in the ServiceSummit with John McCain and Richard Stengel of TIME, to his invocation of service in his victory speech.  [As Michael Sandel noted, “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.” (Friedman’s column, “Finishing Our Work”, 11/5/08)]

- Slate magazine’s John Dickerson also had an interesting post on  6 ways that Obama could show he is a new type of leader

And E.J. Dionne (who was a fellow member of Saguaro with Barack) wrote an op-ed today “A New Era for America” talking about how he expects that in the same way as Barack completely recast the campaign process, he will recast politics.

Yes, it is time to hope again….Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between “values voters” and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician….Above all, it is time to celebrate the country’s wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation…. Obama inherits challenges that could overwhelm any leader and faces constraints that will tax even his exceptional political skills. But the crisis affords him an opportunity granted few presidents to reshape the country’s assumptions, change the terms of debate and transform our politics. The way he campaigned and the way he won suggest that he intends to do just that.

Barack’s as Muslim as Sarah Palin

McCain/Palin’s slanderous attempt to portray Christian candidate Barack Obama as Muslim, by repeatedly having surrogates refer in nasty tones to Barack Obama by his full name “Barack Hussein Obama”, has spurred some impressive and inspiring reactions to seize a higher moral ground than McCain and Palin.

A lot of Facebook page owners (who also are not Muslim) have changed their middle names in sympathy to Hussein.  So I would post as Thomas Hussein Sander.  See this thread of Hussein is My Middle Name.

It’s reminiscent of the 1993 Billings, Montana story where a Jewish family’s window was shattered for lighting a menorah.

When a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a Jewish child whose window bore a menorah, the community response was extraordinary. An organized alliance of citizens, churches, unions and the media banded together. The local paper printed a full-page, color picture of a menorah, so that others could hang it in their windows in solidarity. With the help of merchants, by late December nearly 10,000 people in Billings, Montana had this symbol of Jews overcoming persecution displayed in their windows.  PBS made a movie of this called Not In Our Town. (Thanks to Forgotten Fires for the specifics.)

And now this Massachusetts Observer page has claimed Barack O’Bama as Irish with a humorous rhyme.  What’s next?  Japanese Obama-san?

The Great Schlep: using Jewish social capital to lead Obama to Florida victory

A migration of younger Jewish voters is going to the battleground state of Florida in what some have termed ‘The Great Schlep’ (borrowing the Yiddish for a long and arduous journey) to convince their grandparents to vote for Barack.  It’s a consummate use of social capital (familial social capital) to change votes; and studies show that face-to-face appeals by friends (or family) work better.  [I blogged about the Obama iPhone application along these lines.]

When Mike Bender, one of the Great Schleppers, “brought up the idea of voting for Obama over Thanksgiving dinner last year, he was met with an uncharacteristic silence…..[His grandparents'] reaction was, as they said, ‘I’m a little meschugah.’ (crazy)  This despite the fact that Bender’s grandparents were lifelong Democrats.

The idea gained momentum when Ari Wallach (co-executive director of Jews Vote) and others enlisted comedian Sarah Silverman. See her humorous video here where she explains all the commonalities between Barack or African Americans and elder Jews (including their love of track uniforms)

(Note: Viewer discretion advised; lots of 4 letter words, some offensive)

“The Silverman video quickly became a Web sensation, garnering about 2 million hits in the two weeks since it was posted on thegreatschlep.com, organizers said. Thousands of people pledged to call their relatives in Florida and more than 100 people volunteered to pay their own way to travel to the Sunshine State to campaign for Obama among Jewish voters, Wallach said.”  There are 650,000 Jews (with very high voting rates and high affiliations to the Democratic party) living in Florida.

Note:  for the etymology on schlep, see William Safire’s column where he explains that it originally came from German meaning “to drag, haul, lug.”…”Earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses: ‘She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags . . . her load.’ The closest synonym is drag, but schlep has a greater connotation of exasperated weariness on the part of a person clumsily trying to cope with an unwelcome burden. This has given rise to a second meaning to the noun: ‘an arduous journey.’”

It’s interesting because,  even beyond Jews, there is much higher support for Barack among younger generations than Baby Boomers.  This came out during the primary where Baby Boomers were far more likely to support Hillary than Barack.  And it fed into the ‘Mom won’t you vote for Barack” effort.  Maybe there need to be a lot more schleps.  Could we get Latinos to convince their parents to vote for Obama and find a catchy name for this as well?

See CNN story on the Great Schlep here.

How low can McCain and Palin stoop in campaigning?

John McCain and Sarah Palin continue to campaign at some of the basest levels we’ve seen in recent years.  Sarah Palin now regularly throws “meat” to racist bigots that I’m embarrassed live in America. Does she believe that her best and maybe only hope of becoming V.P. at this point is to incite an assassination of Barack Obama?    The simple fact that she dresses it up in lipstick and says it with a smile doesn’t make it any better.

(photo by thekateblack)

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank described this scene in Clearwater, FL:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Cindy McCain has joined her husband in the nasty, angry tirades. [Spreading more lies about "Obama not funding the troops in Iraq" when this is equally true of McCain who refused to back a funding bill for U.S. soldiers in Iraq that had a withdrawal timeline.]

And John McCain continues to dwell on the fact that Barack Obama has served on non-profit boards with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, even though the two are not even close friends and Ayers is now a tenured professor in Chicago, Ayers been commended for his recent educational work, and got a Citizen of the Year award from the city of Chicago in 1997.  [Not to make light of the subject, but Jon Stewart nails what is going on.]

His latest is this “about-to-air” commercial which the New York Times calls “paint-peeling” in tone (10/10/08)

I know McCain is embarrassed that he is not stronger on the economy, and E.J. Dionne has noticed that McCain, in his campaign desperation, has decided to start putting “John McCain First” rather than “Country First” as his campaign slogan claims.  The only mark that McCain has any scruples is recent claims that he has put the brakes on advertising that tries to make hay out of comments of Obama’s ties to his previous pastor, Rev. Wright;  McCain apparently, as least as of today, feels that this is a bridge too far.  Let’s hope he holds on to at least this shred of campaign decency, even if his campaign numbers fall further, and current polling shows a 168 point electoral landslide for Obama.

One would hope that McCain would have learned something positively from the nasty smear campaigns that George Bush’s campaign ran against McCain in 2000, but instead he appears to have learned: ‘if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”  Desperation has no fury like a McCain scorned…

Let’s hope that Americans have greater common sense than to fall to McCain’s baiting.

Coda: David Tanenhaus, who met Ayers and Obama in the early 1990s, writes about how Ayers’ 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court and the serious national discussion that ensued ushered in policy reforms of blended sentences, “whereby kids, even though tried as adults, received suspended sentences and were then referred to juvenile programs instead of rotting away for years in adult prisons.”

By the late 1990s, such ideas had become part of the national dialogue. Approaches that Ayers helped publicize were being adopted in several states—including Texas under then-Gov. George W. Bush. Juvenile justice was, in fact, a cornerstone of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda. In his 2000 acceptance speech, he spoke movingly of a 15-year-old African-American boy he had met at a juvenile jail in Marlin, Texas, who had committed a “grown-up crime” but was still a “little boy”: “If that boy in Marlin believes he is trapped and worthless and hopeless—if he believes his life has no value—then other lives have no value to him, and we are all diminished.” The passage could have come directly from Ayers’ book….

Leading Chicagoans, including Mayor Daley, now commend Ayers for his service to the city. “I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago, but I remember that period well,” Daley said last April. “It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles.”

See a related comment on McCain’s deplorable tactics in Gail Collins’ “Confessions of a Phone Solicitor” (NYT, 10/23/08)

Clever Obama iPhone application to use social networks

The Obama campaign has released an application for the iPhone that cleverly sorts your address book, prioritizing which friends you should call to convince them to vote Obama.  (“Call Friends” sorts your friends by how close the race is in that state. So you can call your Ohio friends or Missouri friends and not bother with your California or NY friends.)  It’s a smart marrying of the fact that friends are much more likely to convince friends politically, coupled with the technology that helps you to easily see where your social networks may make the most political difference given battleground states and the electoral map.  The ‘Get Involved’ Button uses GPS to help you find the closest Obama campaign headquarters.

Another interesting part of the application is that it shows how many calls you have made using this application and how many have been made nation-wide, enabling one to feel a growing sense of momentum and part of a larger national cause.  (The software doesn’t transmit who you called, but records the number of calls made with the application so they can centrally keep track.)

Download the Obama for America iPhone application here.

Here is the blog post of its developer Raven Zachary.

See earlier blog posts of mine about use of technology in the Obama 2008 campaign.  See also this one and this one.