I looked again at the clock in the upper right corner of my laptop screen, and calculated the ever-shrinking number of hours of potential sleep ticking away before I had to be up and out of the house in the morning.
It was only September, but already sleep deprivation was becoming a recurring feature of my life. Most of my young and relatively unencumbered colleagues could at least sleep until five minutes before the 9 a.m. daily conference call, but I had to be on duty with my kids much earlier than that. Not to mention that this schedule was a lot harder on my 40 year old body than it would have been at 25.
It was crazy, punishing, exhausting and often frustrating. And I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be doing it.
Yesterday I shared August - the first installment, my account of the first month on the job. Today I bring you September. I hope to write about October, then GOTV, then the Aftermath. As I wrote yesterday:
There are some things I feel I can't share, either because they are other people's stories to tell, or because they really belong to the campaign. But what I can give you is a sense of what it felt like to me having a front row seat to history. And it will help me make sense of it too.
August began with a rapid-fire introduction to campaign life, and ended with the entrance of Sarah Palin. In between I had to build a structure and start running a field plan, while learning my new job at the same time. And August was probably the least intense month I experienced.
September kicked off with an outpouring of post-Convention volunteer interest. September was also the launch of an intensive schedule of Camp Obama trainings - huge logistical challenges with even bigger personal and field payoff. By the end of September, the pressure was building and the challenges mounting. I was worried I couldn't keep up the pace. I should have known it would only get worse.
The Grand (Re)Opening
In the first few days of September, California decided to have a real official launch of the new paid field staff and the field offices. Actually, our East Bay location had been open since late July, but as a volunteer office. Busy getting organization off the ground, I treated our "Grand Opening" as an official field office as an annoyance that interfered with my "real" work. I didn't expect much. There were only 10 RSVP's on the MyBO link.
About ten minutes before the event was scheduled to start, I came downstairs to the main phonebanking area from my workspace on the second floor. The room was already beginning to get packed with people spilling out onto the sidewalk. My volunteers were in top form, working the crowd with clipboards to take signups. Within a half hour it would become almost impossible to cross the room. Here's some photos and a description of what the event looked like from the perspective of our volunteers.
It turns out that Sarah Palin was a great help to me. While plenty of people simply fretted and complained, others recognized the need to come in and get to work. We ran out of volunteer sign up sheets that day.
Oh God It's Friday
Very late nights at the laptop in my home office soon became a necessary bad habit. During the day I needed to be interacting with people - phone calls, meetings, quick one on ones to assess volunteer leaders, checking out how the offices and phone banks were working. My core team and I and our laptops spent much of the day sitting around a large table in our office, interacting almost constantly. Any kind of thought work, or planning, or simply trying to keep up the facade of answering my e-mail, was left to the late night hours when no one could call me. OK, when only a small subset of people would call me.
Friday nights were always the worst. Saturdays were huge phonebanking days, meaning late nights cutting lists and getting things ready. And most Saturday mornings I was up and out even earlier than during the week - I had to help set up for a Camp Obama somewhere. If I wasn't preparing phonebanks I was preparing for Camp Obama. Or both. So I had very few Friday nights during the campaign where I got more than a few hours of sleep, and at least a couple where I had none at all.
Camp Obama
The first weekend of September was the first weekend of Camp Obama - a signature intensive organizer training developed by the campaign in 2007. As I usually explained at the beginning, this isn't "how to phonebank" or "how to canvass." Instead it is how to become an organizer. All our volunteers would still be phonebanking, canvassing, and helping out the campaign in a lot of ways. But thanks to Camp O, they would be a lot more effective.
They would work in small groups to learn how to tell a "Story of Self" and how to connect their stories with the experiences and concerns of others. As I constantly told volunteers anxious about voter contact, you don't need to memorize talking points to persuade an undecided voter. You need to find a way to make a real personal connection. We were also training future leaders in communities around my region, who would in the short term support the campaign but in the long term be a more transformative force.
Here's how Marshall Ganz, the organizer and scholar who developed the program, explains Camp Obama:
The purpose of this weekend training, Ganz explained, was not only to learn skills, form teams and get organized--but much more importantly, to learn how to tell our own stories, how to "put into words why you're called, and why we've been called, to change the way the world works."
Those "stories of self" and "stories of us" were to be the most powerful tool for these campaigners--along with the ability to teach others how to tell their stories--back home recruiting and motivating volunteers and building relationships.
Camp Obama also provides a great energizing and motivating experience. As exhausted as I always was on those Saturday mornings after those sleep-deprived Friday nights, I would walk into the room, see the crowd of people ready to get to work, and be revived. Cheering, clapping and chanting were the order of the day.
But it was also backbreaking work to organize these events. Setting up locations, food, preparing the presentations and written materials, sorting through floods of applicants, and finding enough facilitators took hours of phone calls and e-mails every week. I had one team that basically did nothing but organize Camp Obama trainings for weeks.
So why take huge staff and volunteer resources and devote them to training? Wasn't that an unusual move for a political campaign on a short timeline? It took only one Camp Obama to reveal the payoff. Volunteers left that room ready to give virtually all their free time to the campaign, and to take a far bigger role than simply showing up for some shifts. They committed on the spot to travel to battleground states and knock doors, they set up phonebanking parties and local organizing events, they figured out how to recruit more volunteers. They became instant additional organizer capacity at a time when we were supposed to be growing fast and furiously.
The Power of Five
That first Camp Obama was also a great example of needing to improvise solutions to problems on the fly. One part of the Camp O agenda was supposed to be calling volunteers to get them to come to future organizing meetings. But in the frenzy of the late Friday night, we were not able to get the volunteer lists ready. By the time we had the lists, it was almost time to make the calls, and we couldn't get to a printer fast enough.
What if we just took the script we had prepared but had them call the numbers of friends, family and neighbors already on their cell phones? In other words, use the opportunity to bring in new people, not yet part of our volunteer base. And as a bonus, no phone lists to print.
The so-called Power of Five would be used again and again over the fall, intentionally this time, to increase volunteer turnout.
Under Pressure
September was full of successes, but I was feeling the strain. I made mistakes nearly every day, lots of small ones, some bigger ones. I would look at the clock, realizing my reporting deadline passed an hour ago while I was in the midst of doing something else. I started each day with a commitment to my many unreturned voicemails and e-mails and ended having made little or no progress on them. (I still feel guilty about that.) My constant inability to remember where I parked my car became a running joke. I frequently misplaced my keys, my notes, my wallet. I lived in utter terror of losing my phone or my laptop, without which I could not possibly function.
I often told volunteers how important this election was, in order to motivate them to give more time than they perhaps had planned. But the result was to constantly reinforce for me the urgency and significance of my work. A lot of people were counting on me. And God, we had to win. The alternative was unthinkable. I didn't want to be the one to screw this up.
Did I mention the not sleeping part?
Next - October - Phonebanks, Phonebanks, Phonebanks, Campaign Fuel, Don't Coast