Inside the Obama Campaign: A Grassroots View

I believe that the Obama Campaign for Change of 2008 has changed American Politics. But even more importantly, It has changed my life in ways unrelated to politics. I have lived in my community for five years, and due to this campaign, I feel like I have just moved in. I know many of my neighbors I had never met, and feel a greater bond to many I already knew.

This is how grass roots politics takes root. But leadership of this sort starts at the top. For me, the one single event that symbolizes how bottom-up change started at the top was "The Call." The strange thing is that I was not supposed to be on "The Call" -- I got it by accident and just listened in. But it tied me into the campaign and made me realize I was part of something much bigger than myself.

Campaigner
I got involved in the Obama campaign as much due to my wife's efforts as anything else. She is dynamic, energetic, and very committed. She volunteered to be a Team Leader for Sen. Obama. It meant recruiting volunteers -- and having a daily call with the paid organizer and committing to achieve daily targets (to register voters and recruit volunteers and canvas door to door, etc.) There was the daily call between team members and the emails sent out to volunteers.

My wife and other team leaders on her team recruited more than 50 volunteers at house parties and calling them up. The Obama campaign taught us to find those we knew, and get them involved. The local organizer we met spoke about how we were in the "relationship" business and that this campaign would be won one relationship at a time.

After my wife joined her team, we were told that Michigan was a must win. The campaign elites impressed upon the new Lieutenants what they had to know.

We were told that Obama had to win Michigan to be President.

We were told that Barack Obama could not win without putting away this state.

We were told Kerry won by only 100,000 votes in 2004. We were told that 485,000 voters had moved out of Michigan since 2004 -- and 85 percent plus of these were union or Democratically registered households.

We were told that we started out as a result over 385,000 votes behind. It became the goal to win Michigan without which the Presidency could not be won.

My wife worked tirelessly. She got so many to register to vote. What amazing me most is that East Lansing, a small town, had eight teams off campus, and many more teams on the university campus. My wife's work as a co-leader of just one of eight teams was not at all unique. Many others made the same high level of commitment. The teams were working for months.

Fast forward almost three months. The East Lansing team registered 10,800 newly registered voters -- fully 10 percent of those newly registered in the entire State of Michigan. It was all going to come down to the last three days.

The Call
Then came "The Call." It was on Saturday night just before Election Day. In many of our minds, the Election was already over. The polls showed Obama with a commanding lead. I figured he was a "shoe-in." Complacency was setting in. We were already counting the Electoral College votes and figuring we had this one in the bag.

But "The Call" changed that. The phone rang. I was home -- my wife was at the Obama office. It was a recording of Barack Obama telling us -- as one of 20,000 team leaders nationwide, that he was going to ask us about the last 3 days.

After "The Call" began, we listened for about ten minutes before Barack Obama came on the line. During this part of "The Call," we saw the last weeks and months flash before our eyes. The campaign top brass reviewed what teams (as a group) had accomplished. Specifically, we heard from Jon Carson, the national field organizer, and David Plouffe, the national campaign manager. It was Saturday night, and we were told this is the final push.

This call put all of the work we were doing in our small town in a much larger context. It made it all seem more real and more important. It create a sense of national community. All this intense organizing that had gone one was made palpable by a series of anecdotes and statutes.

Then we learned that "His" plane landed in Springfield, MO, and Obama came on the phone � speaking intimately to thousands of his team leaders.

Obama said he was grateful for what each volunteer had done. I recall thinking to myself - can I really be given credit for "His" success in this campaign. It was an electric moment. But Sen. Obama was understated and calm. He spoke directly to each one of us.

By the time "The Call" was over, I had cell phoned many neighbors and we were all on my lawn, listening to Barack Obama … as he was calling the last plays of the game. Anyone who thinks he was not hands on, doesn't know. This campaign was managed and planned down to the last detail. The most important "detail" was a community organizing vision of how to lead.

No Ordinary Campaign
Then I realized the campaign was about each volunteer deciding they had to run it and take ownership. This is how it was supposed to work. When the candidate calls your house, just after you put your son and daughter to bed, at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night, and asks you to give up your Sunday and Monday and Election Day, and says the Election hinges on this, I could not refuse. He was saying he needed us to work now and what we needed to do. He said if we did not do this work, the campaign would be lost. He said we would then lost this moment of change. I decided that, if he cared enough to call me personally, we had to increase the level of our work.

The intimacy of "The Call" was made possible by the technology and the organization. In that one "Call," the people and the technology were one. He was talking to me and asking me to raise my level of commitment. The technology of The Call made it personal, urgent and irresistible. It was highly motivating. I was convinced I could do more -- and then I did.

"The Call" from Barack "Obama had a huge impact on each Team Leader and their group. It changed the thinking of those involved most directly. The volunteers came streaming in. There were over 900 people who committed to 3 hour shifts or more in the last three days. This was not an isolated situation. We heard that 16,000 volunteers agreed to volunteer for a 3 hour shift or more in the Indianapolis area in the last three days. This is what "The Call" produced -- as well as weeks and months of building the teams and creating the relationships.

After "The Call," the next three days in the Obama office were very hectic with volunteers streaming in. By late Sunday morning, the canvas work in East Lansing was all on track to meet our goals. We met 99% of the target goals for doors knocked and calls made, etc.

But the Lansing office gave us word in East Lansing, when we tried to send them volunteers, that the North precincts in Flint, MI needed our help, and canvas goals here were being met. There was an excess of volunteers and teams quickly mobilized to send, in just a few short hours, a couple busloads of hastily recruited volunteers to travel 60 miles to Flint, to canvas some more, in economically depressed neighborhoods of my home town (Flint, MI). Those precincts got covered. We heard stories of cheers going up in the office as each wave of volunteers from East Lansing who came to walk in Flint arrived. Many of these same volunteers drove back on Election Day to do more get out the vote and precinct work.

In the End, in the two days before the Election, more than 13,000 door hangs were put on identified voters' doors. The East Lansing Obama team leaders kept their promise to fulfill the canvassing goals. Sen. Obama's personal call to arms had an effect.

I must give credit for the success of the volunteer efforts to the people and the technology.

The technology included use of Google networking databases and calendar and project sites and sophisticated phone calling technology. The record fund-raising numbers the Obama campaign achieved was based on an internet solicitation strategy.

I got emails at just the moment I was most likely to give, and then would give $20 or $40 or $60 based on the intensity of the moment. The technology was used to organize the teams and the volunteers and to construct list serves that tracked our group progress.

The vote database programs gave easy access to creating canvas sheets. Walking lists and telephone canvas sheets were tailored to our voter identification efforts. All of this meant volunteers' time was put used in ways that gave it a very big impact.

The key lesson of this campaign is how an energized base with all of this amazing use of technology had such a catalyzing effect on getting new voters registered and then turning them out to vote in record numbers.

A grass roots form of ground up organizing works only if the candidate inspires people and the issues matter enough to motivate the "base" to use precious time to organize for a cause.

If Bill Clinton had this technology, he would have used it. I believe each Presidential campaign next time will "reverse engineer" these methods. Lyndon Johnson once said that if you want someone to vote for you, then you have to ask for their vote.

What will be said after this election is that, if you want to win, you have to develop grass roots methods, by asking those who care most about your campaign, to dig down deep and work very hard.

Grassroots Democratic Revival
The amount of energy in the final push is like nothing I have ever seen. I heard that 4 million people volunteered in some way for the Obama campaign. Those volunteers came from contacts made to them on Facebook, from emails they got linking them to You Tube speeches by Sen. Obama and to the Obama girl video. There were the phone call parties at which living rooms of cell phone users called to the contested primary states to support Sen. Obama.

We had technology to call and persuade voters that was unbeatable. A screen capture on the computer gave five or six numbers to call at a time. Each voter was called and persuaded. It was possible to quickly and easily maximize our efforts persuading voters in other battleground states. This was especially important since Michigan was the only state where voters could not cast a ballot for Sen. Obama during the Presidential primaries. But then the General Election brought the battle to Michigan when it became a crucial battleground state to be won.

Team leaders in East Lansing (including my wife) and all over the country, answered "The Call." They responded exactly as he asked.

There is no magic bullet in the technology or the Obama community organizing model.

A grass roots campaign probably could not have worked with Sen. John Kerry. Adam Walinsky, who was Robert F. Kennedy's speech writer, is quoted as having said about Kerry that he could not win the Presidency since his speeches were mired in harsh realities and focused on divisive issues, and did not seem hopeful or based on looking out for the best in our future.

There is also no way to recruit for a far flung grass roots campaign if the candidate is not believable. Sean Wilentz's new book Age of Reagan closes with a Chapter on how the media and Republican strategies painted Al Gore as a phoney baloney -- in much the same way as they did Dukakis.

If the candidate allows their persona to become non grata in that way - as a phoney - no amount of grass roots organizing can be used to win a campaign for them.

But with the right candidate, and with the use of all this new technology, grass roots campaigns work. They work if the candidate gets it and uses new technology to empower and energize the grassroots to own the campaign.

When people are empowered, they can use their energy to build on existing relationships to achieve a higher cause together.