I am a campaign blogger for BarackObama.com and this is crossposted at BarackObama.com/blog.
Barack Obama has inspired tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people to engage in the political process for the first time in their lives.
This campaign believes it's important to not only engage the already active, but to recruit new bodies in the march for progressive change. This weekend, Oprah Winfrey attracted thousands of people -- some of whom drove miles through the freezing rain -- to show up and listen to speeches about the necessity of political change in this country.
This wasn't about glitz and glamor. This wasn't just a photo-op. This was about organized grassroots mobilization.
Take a look at the numbers:
* At least 66,500 attended the rallies (More than 29,000 in Iowa, more than 29,000 in South Carolina and 8,500 in New Hampshire)
* 4,250 volunteers helped to build the events in the week prior and the day of the events (2,300 in South Carolina, 1,300 in Iowa and 650 in New Hampshire)
* In South Carolina, 68% of the folks who signed up for the rally had never communicated with the campaign before. 1,300 supporters volunteered the day of the rally and more than 9,600 signed supporter cards for the first time. The first attendees arrived at the stadium between 5:00-5:30 a.m. yesterday morning.
* In Iowa, tickets were distributed out of all 37 field offices around the state. In Des Moines alone, 1,385 volunteer shifts were completed for individuals who wanted tickets to the rally.
* In New Hampshire, over 2,300 new supporters joined the campaign just this week leading up to the rally and more than 650 new volunteers signed on to help the campaign.
In South Carolina, where over 29,000 showed up to hear Obama and Oprah, we organized the world's largest phone bank (we even got certified by the Guinness Book of World Records).
Watch the video (starts about a minute in):
It's worth noting that South Carolina is a state where we have one of the most innovative and genuinely grassroots field program of any campaign.
Andrew Golis of TPM Cafe described our field program as "citizen-based organizing":
The new approach, based on old American traditions of political organizing, emphasizes the importance of engaging voters and bringing them into the campaign. You recruit activists to join your work not based on some narrow unpersonalized targeting but face-to-face meetings that bring a sense of common purpose. When they join your work you ask them to organize their own communities by finding common purpose with others. You help them to build neighborhood committees, host house meetings to recruit new activists, plan outreach that makes sense within their neighborhoods. You give up some control of the message and allow people to speak from the heart instead of from the handed-down Message of the Day.
Take a look at this video featuring South Carolina Field Director Jeremy Bird (the same guy who appears in the phonebanking video), who explains how our program works and how we're empowering the grassroots by treating voters like citizens, not consumers:
Through the program, scores of new community leaders are being trained. Ms. Grace Cusack, who threw a meeting at her home in Florence, South Carolina shared her thoughts:
This grassroots model embodies what our candidate is all about. Barack Obama got his start in politics on the South Side of Chicago, where he worked as a grassroots organizer.
Every day, this campaign is bringing in new people and we're not sitting on our laurels with this new support -- we're training and putting these folks to work for grassroots change.