Can Obama Turn the Democratic Party Upside Down with the Biggest Voter Mobilization Drive in History?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted August 4, 2008.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign is seeking to register "millions" of new voters immediately after the Democratic Convention, according to top campaign officials who say the effort is one facet of a "capacity-building" effort this summer that includes extensively training thousands of campaign workers as community organizers.

The voter registration effort is part of a broader strategy to not just elect Obama, but also to alter the political landscape by shifting power from Washington to the grassroots, the officials say, to cultivate a base for significant political reforms. The campaign sees its training and voter registration efforts as the cornerstone of building a new progressive movement like the rise of conservatism during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

"We need everybody in this party to get behind this effort to turn out thousands and thousands of volunteers in every single state in the country, to hit the streets and go register millions of new people that weekend alone," said Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, speaking at the recent Netroots Nation conference. "It's not about whether or not we will get Barack Obama elected. It is about whether or not we will have a progressive majority in this country for decades to come."

Last week, the campaign and the Democratic National Committee announced it would commit $20 million to "engaging and mobilizing" Hispanic voters in an effort that will include "voter mobilization, voter registration, online organizing, community outreach and paid advertising" and "also include Camp Obama trainings around the country."

"We expect our demographic to turn out at 80 percent," said Jason Green, the campaign's national voter registration director. "We are all about cultivating leadership."

The plan to train thousands of new community organizers and register millions of new voters is not business as usual for Democratic presidential campaigns, which for years have been run as top-down operations with little input from the grassroots. Instead, the campaign is seeking to blend the best aspects of community organizing, which stresses relationship building, with established, nuts-and-bolts voter outreach tactics to win.

A handful of experts who have worked in these dimensions of campaigns said the Obama plan realized a longtime hope of community groups to have a real role in presidential campaigns. However, those same people -- who did not want to be named -- questioned whether the Obama campaign had "the experience to do it right." Some longtime Democratic Party campaigners agreed. As one voter outreach expert put it, before listing many things that his group took years to master, "I want to believe."

Neither Hildebrand nor the other campaign officials who divulged their grassroots strategy at the Netroots conference replied to requests for follow-up interviews. However, as the deputy campaign manager concluded his talk, he said there were very good reasons why the campaign's strategy could work in 2008: the public wants real change; its candidate is charismatic; the campaign has the money -- and the volunteers -- to make it work.

"If we don't use this opportunity, if we don't do this right, shame on us," Hildebrand said, "because we will never have it as good as we have it right now."

The Obama campaign also has a track record of winning in 2008's primaries using this same strategy, which it is now institutionalizing for November's election.

Exhibit A: South Carolina

"They said the way you used to win down here is you pay off the ministers, you pay off the state senators and the state reps, and you have some chicken dinners," said Jeremy Bird, the campaign's South Carolina field director during the primary, recounting the thinking he found among local Democrats when setting up shop in March 2007. "That didn't jibe with our candidate's message, or his bio, or anything that he said since he started to run for president or started running for the state senate."

Bird, who joined Hildebrand and others at the forum for bloggers and independent media, exemplified the Obama campaign's new ethos.

Bird began by telling his story -- which echoed the campaign's narrative. He grew up in Missouri in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist family and got involved in community organizing after graduate school in Boston. In 2004, he worked for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and then for the Democratic National Committee, and after the election for organized labor. After reading one of Obama's books and relating to his work as a voting rights activist after law school, Bird joined the campaign. He arrived in South Carolina in March 2007 with little more than some videos and his acumen as a community organizer.

Instead of courting the local political establishment, Bird said he sought out community leaders and held "thousands of one-on-one meetings," where he would show a video and then listen to their concerns. The meetings typically lasted 45 minutes or more -- a long time for a top staffer of a national political campaign to spend with anyone. The most responsive leaders were then asked to host local gatherings, Bird said, where they introduced the candidate and campaign to their community.

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Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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