Fellow and Sister Kossacks:
If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin on Thursday (and especially if you’re also thinking and wondering about what could become of this historic movement after the votes are cast and counted) please come join the conversation:
The Organizing of the President:
What’s Next for the Obama Movement After the Election?
A Conversation with Al Giordano
Political reporter, The Field
Thursday, October 23
7 p.m.
147 Education Building
University of Wisconsin-Madison
(Download a full size .pdf or Word .doc version of this flyer, print copies and please do distribute it to organizers in or near Madison, Wisconsin.)
And we’ll do it again - in Chicago - on November 6th. And later throughout the country, where invited.
What’s this about? More at the jump…
What will become of all of this after the election?
How will people – who have collaborated across generational, racial, geographic and other lines throughout this campaign - remain in contact and not slink back into our identity and market niches?
And how will we organize to make sure that the Change We Need becomes a reality on so many fronts?
The Obama campaign has certainly been thinking about this, and planning for it, and will have some announcements to make after Election Day, but we need to do that ourselves at the local level in every corner, simultaneously without waiting for instructions.
After all, isn’t that one of the lessons of the 2008 elections?
Here’s a cautionary tale from four years ago:
On Election Night in 2004, the official Kerry-Edwards blog – which had hundreds of fresh comments and news rolling in about problems with the right to vote all day long - was suddenly taken offline at 2 a.m.
One source that was there, staffing the blog, provides this account:
“…at 2 am, without any indication at all, the blog disappeared. No one answered phone calls. It was clear they had all turned out the lights and left. I went into the MT program and saw that Ari had shut it down. I could have turned it back on, but by then I was so pissed--truly, a sense that they never got it, never saw the people who worked so hard on it as the incredibly smart informed and hardworking folks they were, never really understood the relationship between changing hearts and minds through dialogue to the ATM that was feeding them. I left it down.
“People were massively hurt. There was a forum that was on a separate server which was run entirely by volunteers and the campaign did not turn that off; they had forgotten it was there. There was an IRC chat room and most of the bloggers went there; the chat room was run by another volunteer and existed on a server in Kansas, I think. I spent almost 48 hours without sleep in the IRC, helping people cope with their sense of outrage and disappointment, most of which became directed at John Kerry himself, despite my constant efforts to help people separate the issues out.”
So many people in disparate corners of America lost the contact with each other that the website had provided them.
The Obama campaign hasn’t shown any indication that it would remove its own interactive website – my.barackobama.com - and social networking sites so suddenly, but nor has it indicated that it won't, and one of the lessons of ’04 is that folks who have been involved need to develop and preserve our own independent routes of horizontal communication with other supporters, not only throughout the nation, but also – and especially - locally.
In many places, your local FO (Field Organizer) and other staffers will soon go back to where they lived before. Their email addresses and cell phones provided by the campaign or by the state Democratic Party might no longer exist. Your local HQ will probably close. And what of all the great people you’ve met? Will you know where to find them, then? And if they’ve moved on to some other place, guess what? We now have to self-organize without them.
And if you’re one of those 10,000 plus organizers that were trained at Camp Obama or as deputies or have been staffing those offices, you may not have thought much about what comes next for you. (And I’m especially addressing this to those of you that have been so changed by this experience that, say, going back to grad school doesn’t seem like such a great option now. You've tasted what it is to be a community organizer, and everything else has changed for you.)
At The Field we try to look multiple steps ahead. It’s what we’ve done all year. And I have some thoughts I’d like to share, for the first time, Thursday night in Madison - and, again, two days after the election, in Chicago - but mostly we’re convening these conversations because I’d like to listen to anybody else that has been thinking about it or making plans for the next stages of the organizing.
We have also been studying what happened in 1992, after Bill Clinton’s election: How so many national progressive organizations that had become strengthened as a bulwark against 12 years of Reagan-Bush – civil rights and liberties, environmental, pro-choice and so many other groups - saw their funds dry up and had to lay off staff or exit the scene altogether because their supporters and donors presumed that getting a Democrat elected was enough.
And I’m sure that many of you share my view that national centralized organizations have severe limits and potential problems that local organizing efforts do not. The time has come when we are no longer dependent on national organizations to be in contact with others seeking the same goals nationwide. I’ll have some thoughts on that to share as well, as I’m sure you do. A big part of 2008 has been wrestling that fulcrum away from the Beltway.
Most of us know that nothing really ends on Election Night: the work, in a way, begins only once – and especially if - the White House is won.
Win or lose – don’t slack up or presume victory yet, however promising the landscape, don’t leave the posts and stations where you’ve committed to work, keep your promises made to “leave it all on the field” (to quote Kos) - we’re going to need to reestablish some networks beyond the blogosphere. After all, so many of the volunteers and organizers we’ve met along this road don’t read blogs. Many, new to campaigns, haven’t had the time to read blogs or watch cable TV. It is these talents we need to seek out, embrace, and organize with them after two weeks from now.
Barack Obama has done America a great favor: He has organized us.
If he gets elected, we’re going to have to return that favor and organize him:
So that he and his administration enjoy the conditions to comply with all the worthy goals on so many fronts that he has outlined.
There are ways that some will try to do that based on past models that didn’t work too well before.
And there will be some new, more decentralized, ways that shall be pioneered very soon, and that have learned so much from the way that the Obama campaign has been organized.
That’s why the conversation is titled “The Organizing of the President.”
Hope to see you – if you’re in or near Madison - there on Thursday night. (We'll videotape it for those that can't be there.) And hope to see you everywhere after this stage of the struggle is won.
Best,
Al
narconews@gmail.com
p.s. The Wisconsin Field Hands are holding a smaller social gathering after the talk at the University on Thursday. If you’d like an invitation, please write me at narconews@gmail.com and introduce yourself.
And on Friday night, October 24, the Chicago Field Hands are holding a similar gathering. I’ll be there, too, both to socialize and network, and finalize plans for the November 6th public event. If you’re in or near the Windy City, hope to see you there.