I have written about Obama's ground game for a while.
Why the young are inspired by Obama? And why the Democratic Party need to embrace them.
View From the Ground in Iowa.
icebergslim hits iowa.
Barack Obama. On the Move.
Obama and the Locals.
Obama and Iowa. Revisited.
Obama and Iowa.
Just a few. I said this will come down to GOTV/GOTCV, moreso the air game.
Home base for Barack Obama lies on the opposite side of town, in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood, home to mostly working-class African-American families. One of Obama's first volunteers here was Antoinette McCall, a substitute high school teacher who has never worked a campaign before in her life. McCall became active 11 months ago, donating what little money she could to Obama's campaign. She used Obama's website to recruit volunteers and run a phone bank from her living room. She convinced friends who own beauty salons to organize their customers, and created a database of hundreds of Obama supporters.
This is what has happened all over this country. The Obama Campaign made people, like you and me, responsible for how this will eventually turn out. How? He gave us tools to organize, phone bank, canvass, and talking points on his positions.
This is unprecedented in politics. For me, this means that the old way of doing things is done. People will demand more from these campaigns than just asking for a check and giving lip service, tidbits for what is really happening.
Ground Game. This is an expensive part of any organization. It is tedious, time consuming, frustrating, exhausting and frankly hard. You continually, must always keep in touch with your solid base, your almost solid base, your tossup base, your leaning to someone base, and the no thank you base.
Yes, that is hard work.
Which means that if you state that you are building a grassroots organization, you need people who know how to do this. Meaning, been there and done that. Obama was futuristic enough to snatch these folk up early, while Clinton sat on the sidelines and thought what he was doing was a waste of time.
Dorr became active in the Clinton campaign last week, after a national campaign staffer asked her to make phone calls. "When I first came in, there was nobody here," says Dorr, 78, who has helped so many campaigns over the years that she's lost count. "This whole week, this office was basically empty."
This has been going on all over the country with the Clinton Campaign. Why? She has run her campaign as her husband did in 1992, with modifications, as Mark Penn. On paper it was a stellar plan. Focus on the large states with the largest delegates, do drive-bys/fly overs of all the others, with exception of a fundraiser.
That is the old way of doing things. Alloting your budget for airwars, pumped up polls, and not relying on what is actually happening on the ground is a formula for disaster.
Why? Many on this site in various states that saw Obama opening offices EARLY, in the 2/5 states, continued to state the polls were wrong. And this was repeated over and over again. And guess what? In reality, the polling was wrong this cycle. The polls never picked up on the young vote, the disenfranchised voter, the new voter, the independents and republicans. Thus you saw New Hampshire, South Carolina and Super Tuesday, all the pundits were WRONG.
One of Obama's first volunteers here was Antoinette McCall, a substitute high school teacher who has never worked a campaign before in her life. McCall became active 11 months ago, donating what little money she could to Obama's campaign. She used Obama's website to recruit volunteers and run a phone bank from her living room. She convinced friends who own beauty salons to organize their customers, and created a database of hundreds of Obama supporters.
"It's like we had this whole movement built up before the campaign staff even got here," says McCall, 36. In a few months, McCall, a political novice, has built an organization rivaling that of some state senators who form the backbone of Clinton's establishment support.
This has happened all across the country. Have you ever wondered why just office openings across this country have had hundreds of folk showing up? Simply put, they have been organizing, thanks to the Obama Campaign, all along. This is something much needed that professionals running political campaigns WISHED THEY HAD.
Obama's successful recruitment of outsiders was born of necessity — Clinton enjoys endorsements from Ohio's popular governor and many Democratic officeholders. If she retains her (albeit shrinking) lead in the polls, it will mean that a traditional, top-down campaign rooted in the party establishment still can win in the clutch. But if Obama scores an upset, it could prove that a new breed of grassroots campaign — viral, internet-based, built from the ground up by neophytes like Antoinette McCall — is finally ready for prime time.
There is nothing wrong with party establishment, at all, but it should not be the only matrix in running a campaign. Obama has proven that you need local activists and volunteers to do the grunt work, meaning the main contact for the ground. These folk tell you, in candor what is going on good/bad, what needs to be addressed, fixed and what is stellar.
How the Clinton Campaign missed this is unbelievable? Well, no it is believable, it is called dismissing the 50-State Strategy, believing in limited ground game, expecting the old machine type pols to get the vote out. Typical top-down strategy. This failed for her miserably.
Barack Obama will be our Democratic Nominee, not because of this, that, or the other, but because we put him in the position to be. Simple as that. It was all of us, our hard work, tenacity, committment and belief of not only the man, but the campaign, which is all of us.
p.s. Many have commented on Howard Dean. Dr. Dean goes without stating, there would not be a 50-State Strategy without his vision, but this diary is more focused on what we accomplished for this campaign, thus far. The analogy of Dr. Dean and the Obama Campaign is one that should be analyzed and written about down the road.
There is still much to do, click on the above and get involved.