Last night, I sat perhaps fifteen feet away from the man who may be the next President of the United States. I heard him deliver an outstanding speech. It's the new speech, the one he rolled out at the JJ Dinner in Iowa on Saturday night to wide acclaim. He gave that speech yesterday at a San Francisco fundraiser in front of over 6,000 people screaming, stomping and cheering our hearts out.
One current media narrative seems to that Barack Obama has found his voice again - he's giving speeches at the level of the 2004 Convention speech that catapulted him to national fame. And because he's giving great speeches, he just might win the nomination.
I think this account has it exactly backwards. And it misses the real story of the JJ dinner, a story prominently on display at last night's Northern California event. Largely invisible up until now, Obama's field structure is now coming into focus. That's what is energizing the campaign and the candidate. If Obama wins in Iowa, California and elsewhere, organizing - not oratory - will be the reason. You see, Obama isn't going to win because he's giving great speeches. Obama is giving great speeches because he just might win.
(crossposted at One Million Strong)
The Obama campaign has been relentless about two things: (1) raising enough money to be competitive with Clinton and (2) building field structure. The first has been fairly visible, with the quarterly reports providing a clear progress indicator. The second has been happening largely below the radar screen. We tend to focus here on what we can see - who has made an endorsement, what has a candidate said about a particular issue. Knowing who is "winning" the field structure war is tough, because we can't really see what the campaigns are doing. We largely rely on impressions or anecdotes, or gut feelings about who is more organized.
On Saturday, we got to really see relative levels of campaign organization. Here's the most important fact about the JJ dinner - 99. That's how many counties are in Iowa, and every single one of them sent volunteers to the dinner. Rather than just concentrate on getting as many bodies there as possible, the Obama campaign used the JJ dinner as a "dry run" of their field structure. It's a test to see how the field responds - you ask every team across the state to do the same thing at the same time on a single day. Because that's what you need to do come primary/caucus day.
They have their volunteers organized in every Iowa county. And when they needed to turn out every county for the campaign on a single day, they did it. And they flooded the event with their people, dominating the turnout. Will they be able to do the same thing on January 3? No one can know for certain. Yes, the usual caveats apply. But this was an incredible show of organizing strength, breadth, and depth.
In California, the volunteer field structure is based on Congressional Districts. Each CD has a team of 7 people, with specified roles (phonebanking, canvass, data, etc.) Each team includes one person who has the job of building volunteer teams at the level below - area or city teams, and then neighborhood teams, and then precinct captains. This kind of structure, derived from traditional organizing techniques, but never used on this scale in a Presidential primary, leverages Obama's large volunteer network to build state-level field operations. Although the Obama campaign has a lot of resources, no one can afford to put enough paid field staff in a state like California to cover it all.
As this HuffPo post explains, the Obama campaign is very deliberately building field in the February 5 states based largely on trained volunteers. Assuming the race is very much up for grabs after the early 4, having a structure in place in as many of those states as possible is a huge advantage. It means if Obama is building momentum in the early states he will be poised to capitalize on that. I know the other candidates have volunteers on the ground in California. But I have seen no evidence that the other campaigns are organizing their volunteers down to the precinct level here. (It would be interesting to know how the other campaigns are approaching California and compare strategies, so I welcome your comments if you have information about that).
We have done a couple dry runs in California, not yet on the scale of the JJ Dinner, but the system can and does respond. Last night's fundraiser in downtown SF was full of the emotion and excitement we know Obama can generate. According to media reports, a racous and enthusiastic crowd of over 6,000 people packed the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. It was also seemingly a field test. CD teams from the surrounding region sent people. Arrayed on the floor and holding tall banners styled almost like a nominating convention, stood representatives of most of the 21 Northern California CD's. On the signs, you could read the cities and towns, San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland of course, but also Sacramento, Napa, Fresno, San Mateo, Santa Rosa and many more. This matters more than you might think - California apportions its delegates based on Congressional Districts. You can't simply sweep into the big media markets and assume you will carry the state.
And the geographically-based field structure has an advantage. We know our communities. We are calling and canvassing our neighbors, literally. We have a sense of what kinds of messages and strategies can work where we are. It's messy, because it's such a huge organizing project and it is bound to be uneven. It's risky, because the campaign's paid staff and centralized messaging is depending on volunteers to carry our these strategies and they can't fully control it. It's far from perfect. But it is exciting to be a part of it. The payoff, if it works - and I recognize that's a very big if - could be huge.
The campaign knows we matter. Volunteers were literally front and center at this event. The CD organizing teams had the prime spots on the floor, right in front of the stage. And why was I was sitting on the stage, behind Senator Obama, when he gave his speech? It wasn't because I gave a lot of money to the campaign, or because I was an important local political figure. Just about everyone who got those special seats on the stage last night was a volunteer working in the Northern California field structure. Here's a photo of the stage and some of the volunteer field organizers making it happen in California. And there's dozens more who deserved a seat up there with us given the organizing work they are doing.
And what did we do last night at the event? Sign up more people. The first thing Obama did when he took the stage, after thanking various people and entities, was pull out a supporter card. Volunteers had handed out cards and pens to everyone who came in. Obama explained that he wanted everyone there to fill out a card, and we collected piles of them. I see a rather large sorting and data entry project in our immediate future. The campaign will probably parcel out the cards to the CD teams and we will call these people. We won't just ask them to vote for Barack. We'll ask them to join their neighborhood team, or maybe be a precinct captain. I was pigeonholing people last night for some neighborhood teams that need members.
Yes, there was a speech. And it couldn't have been delivered better. I think that's because the organization is coming together. I think Barack draws energy from that. Last night he was with a "fired up" crowd of the people who are out there every day working for him and he gave back to us from beginning to end. Here's the SF Chron account:
Obama was in his element Wednesday night when he pulled into San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for a campaign rally. Thousands of people, most of them young, stood in a line that snaked around the building, waiting to get in for a look at the candidate.
By the time author Alice Walker introduced Obama, the crowd of about 6,000 - the largest to come to one of his "change" rallies - was roaring.
***
Obama's backers left the hall buzzing about his appearance.
(Here's a news video clip of the speech.)
I was going to write today about the speech and its messages, about how it spoke of seizing a critical moment in our history. Then I realized that the speech was the end product of a much larger dynamic.
There's a growing sense we just might pull this off, that we might really own the ground game. That could turn Iowa. That could start turning polls everywhere else. And that in turn could make the difference on February 5.
In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner hears voices telling him to build a baseball stadium - "If you build it, they will come." Obama's Field of Dreams is slowly but surely becoming quite real. He is asking us to build it. Who knows what is to come.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign in California, but when I post here I speak for myself and not for the campaign in any way. The campaign has had no input on this diary. The ideas, and all the words in it, are my own.