I've written before about aspects of Obama's amazing ground game, like phonebanking on a massive scale, integrating small donor fundraising into grassroots organizing and using and improving the Dean 50-state strategy:
By rejecting the idea of a clear dichotomy between "red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats" Obama firmly aligned himself with an authentically netroots vision - Democrats can and should run anywhere. Many of us on this site believe passionately in the DNC's so-called "50 State Strategy" - the idea that the Democratic Party needs to be everywhere, contesting elections in every state, red or blue. The swing state strategy, the win Ohio and Florida, the try to get to 51% math, the concentrate all your forces on a few key swing districts and concede the rest in advance to the Republicans -- that strategy may get us an election or two. But it won't grow the party and it may cost us dearly down the road.
Look at how Howard Dean famously describes this strategy: "Election by election, state by state, precinct by precinct, door by door, vote by vote . . . . we're going to lift our Party up and take this country back for the people who built it."
State by state, precinct by precinct - that describes Obama For America right now, before a single primary vote has been cast. Barack Obama is not running an Iowa strategy, or even an Early States strategy. He is running a broad campaign in multiple states simultaneously, building field offices and infrastructure and training a huge cadre of volunteers. And in doing this he is going deep into red state country. If he wins the nomination, the next day he will have a national campaign, ready to go, and people fired up in a lot of places Democrats don't usually even bother campaigning.
And I'm not the only one - here's just a few of the portrayals, from the Washington Post to Salon toTime Magazine.
Of course I must also tip my hat to the work of some talented diarists here describing various aspects of Obama's campaign on the ground, such as Populista,Jennifer Clare, Nuisance Industry, Yoshimi, psericks, Just Angry, casperr, snout, k/o, kath25, icebergslim, and many others I will be embarassed to discover I have left out (but which you will hopefully add to in the comments).
All of these and the many other analyses emphasize a few, key elements: (1) an effort to put people on the ground well ahead of actual voting or caucusing, in as many different places as possible, frequently in places where Democrats rarely invest anything; (2) empowering volunteers to play significant roles in developing and implementing strategy; (3) training, training, training as many people as possible, frequently turning people new to political activism into top notch canvassers, phonebankers and precinct captains; (4) using technology in creative ways to leverage scarce resources, to reach out more broadly, and to permit a more organic, social networking model to take hold.
By building out, first in Iowa, then in the four early states, then in every single February 5 state, then in every state to vote or caucus since, and by doing it often months before any other campaign bothered to show up, the Obama campaign built its own institutional advantage. That advantage was often practically invisible until the votes come in. But because they built the organization, they were ready once a series of victories generated new energy and excitement. The campaign could capitalize on the new volunteers showing up, they new voters who wanted information - they were ready and waiting with a detailed message of what to do and how to do it. And that simply snowballed into the overwhelming victories we have seen in the last 11 contests.
There has been another kind of snowball effect, too. It's the fact that once the campaign trained a set of paid staff and volunteers in one state, they were ready for action somewhere else. In California, we've kept our phonebanking operation up and running since February 6. We've sent our trained precinct captains to help build up the precinct captain program in Texas. Why waste all the work we put into developing the systems and training the people? Each time, the learning curve gets shorter and shorter.
That doesn't mean Obama will automatically win every contest. But it does show why his delegate advantage probably can't be seriously eroded. Even states where he has lost, he has kept the delegate count close by focusing carefully on GOTV and GOTC. I wish we had been able to pull off California. But I know we kept Clinton from running away with it, delegate wise. And I expect that even if she wins tomorrow, it won't meaningfully change the delegate math. Obama is already on the ground in upcoming states. He will simply keep winning more delegates as the process goes on.
It also shows why this seemingly drawn out experience of multiple primaries and caucuses could be a good thing for the Democrats, at least until now. We've built up a trained army of volunteers in dozens of states, including many that are potential swing states in the fall, and in red states where Dems need down ballot help. I cannot understand why some people believe it is a bad thing that he brings new people into the process and spreads our power to new places. It means that this campaign is already ready to wage a general election campaign, and has already been out talking to Democrats and allies all over the country.
Obama's model isn't new. In fact, it comes out of organizing model pioneered by anti-poverty advocate Saul Alinsky, one it turns out both Obama and Clinton are familiar with.
Power flowed up, [Alinsky] said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside
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But when Obama first ran for office in 1995, he echoed Alinsky's credo -- and Clinton's thesis -- in arguing that politicians should not see voters "as mere recipients or beneficiaries."
"It's time for politicians and other leaders to take the next step and to see voters, residents or citizens as producers of this change," Obama told Hank De Zutter of the Chicago Reporter. "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?"
It also follows in the tradition of the organizing work of the civil rights movement, and, as explained above, owes a heavy debt to the Dean campaign, and the technological innovations of the netroots and online organizers like Move-On.
Finally, Obama's organizing model also draws heavily on the social entrepreneur model:
Understanding the radicalism inherent in this philosophy requires thinking of Obama as the first "Social Entrepreneur" President. Some of the most exciting social justice activism today departs from a traditional nonprofit model toward a so-called "social entrepreneur" model, one that focuses on innovative approaches to achieving socially beneficial ends. This framework takes what market-based approaches do best, which is foster creativity and invention, and turn it to socially responsible ends.
"Social entrepreneurs identify resources where people only see problems. They view the villagers as the solution, not the passive beneficiary. They begin with the assumption of competence and unleash resources in the communities they're serving."
David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Think about microlending, the Echoing Green program, social marketing, and many more examples.
Perhaps the best-known social entreprenuer organization is Ashoka, which describes the movement this way:
We are in the midst of a rare, fundamental structural change in society: citizens and citizen groups are beginning to operate with the same entrepreneurial and competitive skill that has driven business ahead over the last three centuries. People all around the world are no longer sitting passively idle; they are beginning to see that change can happen and that they can make it happen. The result of this transformation will ultimately be a world where all individuals will be able to spot challenges, address them, and improve their lives. Rather than a tiny percentage of the world controlling the wealth and making the decisions that effect our lives, every individual will be empowered to determine his or her own future.
Indeed, Obama's widely praised new National Service Plan has an explicit social entepreneurship function.
What's the core of the model? Participation. Sounds an awful lot like the approach of a candidate who has blown the roof off of small donor fundraising and volunteeer-based campaigning strategies. Sounds a lot like a candidate who will "ask us to be involved in our government again." For Obama, we are not passive beneficiaries of policy. He will make the Washington policymaking space more open to our involvement than it has every been, but it will be up to us to come in and fight for the change we want. If we don't step up to the plate, he won't impose something on our behalf. Because he knows that kind of top-down approach is doomed to failure.
When Barack Obama talks about "change we can believe in" he means this active engagement with the world. He means that we can make it happen.
So this isn't new. Yet it hasn't been used successful by the Democrats on a national level in at least a generation. Lately, our party has focused on raising lots of soft money, doing earned and paid media, and trying to ride so-called "microtrends." What that has meant for Democrats is coming up with very small innovations that are relatively noncontroversial and can get you that little bit more of the electorate to put you over the top. Forget national health care. Let's talk school uniforms!
Something funny happened though, on the way to winning with the swing state strategy (i.e. the Northeast, the West Coast, plus Illinois, Ohio and Florida.) The Republicans, especially Karl Rove, started thinking about getting votes in new places. They took micro and worked it macro:
In 2004 the Bush team identified which Web sites its potential voters visited and which cable channels they watched. It spent its money accordingly, advertising on specialty cable outlets such as the Golf Channel and ESPN, whose audiences tilt Republican. In this way, Rove could reach out to potential Republican voters who lived in otherwise heavily Democratic neighborhoods, and who would once have been missed in get-out-the-vote efforts based on neighborhood or party registration alone. . . .
Two years ago, in the presidential election, the Republicans used some form of these methods in 12 states; since then the party has spent $15 million to make the database available to all 50 states, and it has trained more than 10,000 party loyalists to use it. During a single week last September, as part of a grassroots effort called the "72 Hour Program," G.O.P. activists knocked on the doors of one million potential Republican voters around the country.
But there was a classic, Rovian weakness in the approach. The goal wasn't to figure out how to bring people together, but rather how to split them in infinite ways and harvest a series of small advantages. Those advantages when compounded, could be the margin of victory. They too, were thinking small in the end.
In politics, as in science, there are "lumpers" and "splitters"—those who consolidate, and those who discriminate; those who celebrate the inherent similarities among voles or voters, and those who relish the differences. . . . But there have been moments when powerful forces and charismatic figures have combined to forge new coalitions that reconfigured prevailing party alignments and upended long-held assumptions. In the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the greatest lumper of all, building a governing consensus that lasted for the better part of 50 years, until Ronald Reagan, another major-league lumper, came along and replaced it with a new coalition built in part on disaffected former Democrats like himself.
Karl Rove has always been a splitter. He doesn't have to think about it; it is the core of his being. In Rove's eyes, everyone is a micro-target.
This is a classic Obama coalition, right? Take the good microtargeting strategy from Rove's playbook that looks for new votes in overlooked places, jettison the divisive right wing nonsense, marry it to an old-fashioned Alinsky organizing model with a long history in labor and Democratic politics, and a set of new technology tools pioneered by Move-On and the Dean campaign and improved substantially by this campaign. Ignite the fire with an incredible candidate, and, by the way, out-McCauliff McCauliff by figuring out a much more effective way to raise huge amounts of dough. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a junior Senator from Illinois seemingly came out of nowhere to hold the race to draw through Super Tuesday against a very strong Democratic candidate, and then turn it on for 11 wins in a row.
But what Obama really brings to the table, by using all of these elements so effectively, is his powerful ability to use inspiration to generate participation.
Lots of people claim that Obama's speeches are inspiring but empty - they lack "substance." What is interesting about that charge is twofold. One, it suggests that speeches that are incredibly inspiring must be somehow distinct from speeches about "substance" because "substance" must be wonky and boring by definition. The second is that "substance" is defined solely on the basis of whether it is about policy or not. There is no other kind of "substance" to political speeches.
This misses the substance of what Obama is putting out there in every single speech - the need for all of us to get engaged and participate. His goal is to inspire us, not for its own sake, but as a motivation to action. The substance is that we have a job to do. We must act. And we have transformative power - "Yes we can." How he combines rhetoric and action is the real power of the Obama campaign, one the Democratic Party would be wise to embrace. It radically shifts power down and has far more system change potential than what we've tried lately.
Inspiration to participation can be the future of the Democratic Party. Instead of "passive beneficiaries" voters will be architects of change. Change we can believe in. Yes we can.
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