In addition to the 50+ hours I spend each week at my day job, I have been putting in another 10-12 hours per week working as a volunteer leader in the Obama campaign in my area. The brilliance of Obama's leadership with regard to this campaign will only become obvious, I think, in the coming 12-24 months and beyond. In contrast to Kerry's tepid campaign, the Obama campaign is building a grassroots framework that will exist long after this presidential campaign is over and it's this investment in the future that's going to help the Progressives in this country reclaim their rightful place at the political table.
In our township we have broken down into two teams. Each has an overall leader as well as a person in charge of each of the essential aspects of the campaign mix: canvassing, phone banking, volunteer coordination and data entry. Each of these leaders is responsible for making sure that there are people (volunteers) in place to handle their respective duties. It's a mini-organization at the neighborhood level that allows people to campaign face-to-face with their neighbors, the people they see in their communities every day.
What this means is that we're building an organization AT THE NEIGHBORHOOD LEVEL that will exist after the election and can be called upon in the future to lobby for specific issues, respond to local concerns quickly and, most importantly, turn out to elect Progressives in local and state races.
We're honing our voter lists, finding out where activists are and recruiting them to get involved and we're getting out the message that the Progressives are present in their communities, that we care about the issues and we are politically saavy enough to get things accomplished.
This is happening across the entire country. It's citizen-focused government at its core and shows how, even in a country as large as ours, grassroots politics still has a role to play - a significant role, in fact. No matter who wins the presidency this year, Senator Obama has already changed politics in this country and his impact on the Democratic Party will resonate for many election cycles to come.
And that, as they say, is a Good Thing.
I'm just sayin'...