« Makeba In Memoriam | Main | Guilt and Grace »

The Ground We Stand On

By Lawrence Goodwyn

I had studied social movements most of my academic life, so when some kind of rhythmic popular mobilization put in an appearance in American presidential politics in 2008, I paid attention. By February, when it arrived in my neck of the woods, the Research Triangle of North Carolina, the pundits were calling it “the Obama ground game.” I signed up so I could get a close look.

Over the next eight months, I got a fairly broad sense of how this ground game came to be a direct extension of the personal politics of a presidential candidate who had learned the kinds of things that community organizers come to learn. It played out before me in the Research Triangle. But a variety of other kinds of political and social connections flashed into view as well. I discovered the outreach of a thing called “Radio One” from urban America and also the emergence of organizing sites called “staging locations.” Attending these various happenings were neighborhood talents rarely if ever previously focused on presidential politics. As much as I could discern, these sundry structures were fashioned by men but they were augmented and given improvised vitality by women. This latter theme was a constant that, for me, became the most enduring rhythm of the 2008 campaign.

The seeds of the Obama campaign in North Carolina’s central piedmont were planted by the impressive breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses. Victory in a state whose population was five percent black put the Southern periphery into play – Missouri, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina. In the aftermath, “Durham for Obama” was a web site that counted 76 participants, including three women who decided to see if they could generate an organizational meeting. They lined up a large room in the downtown public library, decided on a meeting the week after Super Tuesday, got an announcement in the local newspaper and additionally invited some friends.

They hoped for a turnout of 30 people and got 130, about half and half, black and white. One of the women, a Duke University creative writing professor named Faulkner Fox, had under her belt two years as an organizer for the National Abortion Rights Action League. “Okay,” she told her two co-conspirators, “we’re in a rare moment in history. Organizers know how hard it is to get people to do anything. Obama has done it – he’s got these people here. We know there are things we can do now, not only things that are possible, but things we know how to do. We simply cannot not do it. Let’s go.”

She called for volunteers to form committees. Fund Raise. Canvass. Baby-sit for canvassers’ children. Phone banking. Tech squad: some to create a website for a members’ database, others to do data entry. People stepped up. Six committees, three black chairs, three white ones. It worked out that way. One purpose: register the unregistered, and then get everybody to the polls.

Three Obama staffers arrived late in March. John Gilbert, the regional director, was 24. Like the great majority of paid Obama staff in battleground states, Gilbert possessed energy, patience and, crucially, a minimum need to flaunt his self-importance. In his brief political life, he had been raised according to the mantra: Respect. Empower. Include. In the world of the ground game, this translated as: Do not EVER give orders to volunteers. Explain when asked, teach when people clearly seemed puzzled, but never ever do anything that demeans volunteers. They possess the one irreplaceable quality that makes things possible in democratic politics: they want the candidate to prevail and the energy they bring to the campaign proves it. Do not tamper with this energy.

John Gilbert found a volunteer organization in place in Durham. Its focus, simply and relentlessly, was on registering the unregistered. In due course, it was all anyone talked about. Gilbert left Durham’s volunteer structure intact. Within it, a rumor soon became so sanctioned it acquired the status of revealed truth – namely that the empty but imposing building across Main Street was to be Hillary’s headquarters. Ultimately, it became clear the rumor was empty. Clinton had no ground game in Durham. What she did have was a fair assortment of state employees responsive to the state’s amiable Democratic Governor, Mike Easley. How this conceivably fruitful “coalition of the elected” was obliterated by the Obama ground game was first illustrated by the TROSA Initiative, which I witnessed in full Technicolor.

The acronym TROSA stands for Triangle Residential Option for Substance Abusers. As an enterprise, TROSA was a widely admired ornament of Durham’s intermittent capacity for serious civic engagement, backed by nonprofits, religious groups and sectors of corporate muscle within Research Triangle Park.

TROSA works – big-time. A fair assortment of brawny guys from Durham went to prison for narcotics and, when they got out, a goodly number could be found darting purposefully around town in vans labeled TROSA Moving. Many victims of outsourcing, particularly from the piedmont’s decimated furniture industry, drifted from unemployment to substance abuse to prison and eventually – for some – to gainful employment at the TROSA Furniture Shop or at New Beginnings Furniture and Picture Framing. TROSA headquarters, just on the edge of an old tobacco-factory district, dominates a square block ringed on all sides by ancient two-story boarding houses where upwards of 250 former substance abusers – male and female, black and white – lived.

In the spring of 2008, a TROSA administrator (a former parole officer and, presumably, Clinton supporter) gathered the formerly confined to explain North Carolina’s early voting laws for the upcoming Democratic primary. The sheer energy in the room, palpable at the beginning, rapidly drained away during the parole officer’s filibuster. In contrast, the next speaker, Faulkner Fox, spoke very briefly and in conversational tones. She said she had expected to be impressed by what “you men and women are trying to do. You are not the only people around here trying to change the way you live. Not long ago, in the South most people of one color spent much of their waking hours trying to prevent people of another color from registering to vote.” You could feel the energy start to come back. “People were told they were too ignorant to vote, they could not pass a simple test on the constitution. It was wrong to try. Some college-trained people passed, but were not allowed to register because, they were told, there was a second step: they had to pass the test in Chinese.” Knee slapping sounds now. Yeah. “Nothing more to tell,” said Faulkner Fox. “Except things have changed now. Turn around.” The audience turned to find a half-dozen young women in blue jeans, holding aloft in the back of the room clip boards full of registration forms. “In North Carolina, if you have finished your parole, your civil rights have automatically been restored. You can get registered right now. The young women can show you how to sign up. Primary election day is May 6. Who wins in North Carolina may well determine who is going to be favored to become the next president of the United States.” Fox did not once mention the name Obama. Approximately 100 people in the room had completed their paroles. Virtually every single one got registered that evening.

In the ensuing early voting period, a large majority of TROSA’s rank and file got together and marched to a nearby polling place. The ex-prisoners vote was not statistically significant. But the mobilization was emotionally galvanizing for the increasing ranks of Durham canvassers, though the word “galvanizing” conceals what was really going on inside the ground game – namely, intimate story telling about serious matters. Faulkner Fox began her recruiting effort by relating to the people at TROSA a personal story about the Southern caste system. To say the least, the audience was experientially well-briefed on the subject and its bearing on their own lives in America. Speaker and audience were therefore intimately connected through the growing social network that populated the Obama ground game. Within a week, three people told me the TROSA story. Two were stuffing briefing packets for precinct canvasses and the third was logging into our data base the names and addresses of all the newly enlisted volunteers gathered that day. Each story I heard differed a bit in remembered details but all carried the same meaning – the forthcoming turnout was going to be the most authentically representative in our regional history and, therefore, (they increasingly believed) Barack Obama was headed toward a huge victory in our county’s Democratic Party primary.

Registering voters is about organized momentum, something that can be achieved only by recruiting vast numbers of energized human beings willing to perform demanding menial work. Yet “recruiting” is not a category of political science and while it encompasses political activity that can be studied (and thus “learned” in a perfunctory manner) it demands, for its implementation, concrete knowledge that has to be acquired experientially. One does not learn to be an organizer who can recruit by reading books in some graduate school.

An essential key to the ground game was Barack Obama himself. The opening triumph in Iowa raised people’s sense of strategic possibility but it was the candidate’s victory speech on election night that began the vast wave of recruiting that would carry him to the presidency. Alone of the candidates in either party, Obama placed the nation’s crippling partisan deadlock at the center of his analysis. Though, for years, the impasse had the entire population talking to itself about “Red States” and “Blue States,” the logic of the Iowa message was directly aimed at the sensibilities of the old New Deal coalition that lingered now as the Democratic Party’s activist base. When in speech after speech Obama stressed he was “not asking you to believe in what I can do for you, I am asking you to believe in what you can do for yourself,” he was speaking the language of community organizing in America. In all of its dimensions, the task of registering voters had three parts: (1) recruiting large numbers of volunteers (2) training them to throw themselves at large numbers of unregistered people (3) and finishing the sequence by getting the newly registered recruits to the polls on election day. In Durham, starting from scratch, the target was to get 6,000 new registrants to the polls for the primary and, as we would later learn in June, a higher new number – a much higher new number – of additional new registrants for the November general election. But the immediate targets were early voting (April 17 to May 3) and then on election day. On May 6, Obama carried the city with 56,000 to Clinton’s 22,000, making Durham the percentage leader in the state that clinched Obama’s victory for the Democratic Party’s nomination. The rout had been signaled by an astonishing fifty-seven percent turnout in early voting – unprecedented in a party primary in the entire history of politics in North Carolina.

For the general election, Chicago cleared its throat and announced that Durham County’s winning margin of 34,000 would not do – not even close. For the general election, we were told that our modest county, a place of 220,000 residents, had to provide Obama with a net margin of 60,000 over McCain. The figure was especially daunting because it dwarfed Kerry’s 2004 general election margin of 39,900 in Durham. In a little over two months we had trained thousands of new canvassers and had the name and web address of every one of them in our growing data base. But now we had to find at least 20,000 more votes?

The rhythms of American politics: In the high summer of 2008, foot troops of both parties seemed to feel everybody had earned a rest. McCain stirred conservative anxiety because he failed to find anything stirring to say or do. Although only slightly older than Reagan was in his first effort as GOP flag bearer, McCain looked considerably more shopworn and didn’t sound half as good.

On the other hand, the long primary wrestling match between Hillary and Barack had exacted an enormous tax of energy and treasure from the Democrats as well. A kind of wistful musing came to characterize the national tap dance around the source of this bi-partisan anxiety and indecision. The source was not hard to locate. It was just very hard for Americans to discuss with each other.

How do you talk about “race?” After all, the country knew a huge amount that it did not remotely know before Iowa. For one thing, there was this nice young Senator from Illinois, almost Kennedyesque, one might say. Smart too, actually probably smarter than Kennedy. Loyal, also – to all the impressive array of people he understood: Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the black community, his white grandmother. The man could talk coherently about all three – and in the same sentence. Additionally, a nice looking wife, Harvard law also. And two well-mannered little daughters. Finally, he spoke so well of the country: “Only in America could a campaign like this be possible.”

There was, of course, the other stuff. The middle name. The “madrassa” schooling. Palling around with terrorists. When all was said and done, nobody who liked Sarah Palin knew anyone who said, “God Damn America.” While the land was palpably awash in Democrats who proclaimed, with teeth-gritted intensity, “I want my country back,” it was also full of passionate social conservatives anchored in their profound understanding of Barack Obama: “He is not one of us.” Clearly, both parties had arguments deeply rooted in the common heritage. White supremacy, consciously and selectively employed, was the glue that held the evangelical and corporate wings of the Republican Party together.

By late August, it became undeniable that the hype accompanying the arrival of Sarah Palin galvanized the base of both parties. In Durham, a movement quietly began among erstwhile Clinton supporters that soon acquired the name, “Durham Women Vote.” To join the movement, one had to agree to write letters to twenty friends or acquaintances in Durham or around the country explaining why you were voting for Barack Obama for President. Five weeks later, in early October, I ran into one of the movement’s founders, a fifty-year old Democratic Party official named Kathy Moore. She provided vivid details of the wholly unanticipated impact of the effort:

Our aim was to politicize and activate the recipients of the letters. There has been some of that. But the people who have really been set on fire are the letter writers themselves. Somewhere along the way, in most cases between the first and fifth letters, people found their explanations were getting better and better and with it their enthusiasm for Obama too. It was amazing. One woman got herself into a prose flow and then, unfortunately, broke her leg. Immobilized, she wrote 200 letters. She may elect Obama all by herself. We’ve got people doing it out of state. I have 800 people in our data base. I cannot get over it. Most of us don’t even know each other! After the inauguration, we’re going to reward ourselves with a celebratory dinner in a downtown hotel ballroom. Just the 800 of us.

Sarah Palin came to Greensboro, North Carolina soon after the conventions and the Karl Rove lieutenants who had taken over the GOP presidential campaign saw to it that she sent a clear signal about the subliminally racist campaign on tap – the one between the Democrats and the “real Americans.” For a moment, a heady moment indeed for desperate conservatives, it looked like Palin constituted the magic genie-in-the-bottle through which the issueless McCain forces could PR their way out of the Bushite wilderness. A number of new polls were immediately brandished by GOP operatives that suggested a huge Palin-induced surge, one that presaged a genuine horse race to the finish line.

It turned out that Democrats had a better weapon in the form of a politically adept and statistically savvy math whiz named Nate Silver who initiated the most intellectually sophisticated website in American political history, one capable of holding the American polling industry to new standards of accountability. Silver’s website, “fivethirtyeight.comm,” appeared on the scene in the spring of 2008. Its strategic value consisted of elaborately developed statistical models that “weighted” the accuracy of all national polling companies in a manner that, by late summer, began to severely constrain such super polls as “RealClearPolitics.” The latter, a creative Republican-leaning enterprise, relied on aggregated results of five or more selected polls to infer levels of purported objectivity that offered the possibility of being beyond challenge. Silver’s analyses effectively checkmated those prospects.

Meanwhile, the 16-day period of early voting for the general election began in mid-October amid a mobilization of Obama’s volunteer army that was so overwhelming it had become the talk of the city. Obama canvassers simply swamped the shopping malls of Durham. In all of them, people had begun to put their hands up defensively and nod their heads vigorously: “Already registered.” “Already voted!” Starkly declining registrations confirmed only one new registrant per canvasser per hour. The well had begun to run dry. A structural dilemma appeared, mandating new tactics: the ground game could now deploy thousands of trained canvassers who were instantly reachable by email – and a rapidly declining number of places to send them!

This was the moment for specialists. One of them was Cornell Jones. Born 64 years ago to a North Carolina sharecropper, Jones had been sent to New Jersey at an early age to live with an uncle and eventually found his way onto the New York City police department where he served for twenty years. Retiring to Durham, he soon established himself as a “public man” with useful skills in commercial and residential real estate and a cool hand in the newly relevant world of voter registration. He taught by example. For Cornell Jones, eating a meal involved first registering the staffs of fast food places. Getting gas involved the same drill. With enough time and logistical support, he could have registered every black service worker in North Carolina as well as a carefully sifted sector of the white citizenry as well. He had different riffs for different folks, but, he explained, “when they cannot manage to find the words to talk straight to you, or even look you in the eye, you can confidently resign from offering assistance without feeling like you have let your candidate down. You haven’t.”

By early October, with the pace of registration in sharp decline, a plan materialized. Though registration was through the roof in Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, a fair number of outlying rural counties were severely under-registered – at least by the new standards to which we were all becoming accustomed. I accompanied a band of Cornell Jones’ recruits one Saturday morning to Granville County on the Virginia border, while an even larger group of Durhamites mobilized a caravan and trekked 80 miles to the town of Goldsboro. Combined, the Saturday excursions into the countryside added 800 new voters to the Obama data base.

Another form of “outreach” came through the efforts of Radio One – the consortium of 52 urban black radio stations scattered across America’s metropolitan centers. The relevant one for our purposes was, of course, the Durham station. Three of its components – featuring gospel, hip hop, and what might be called “general audience programming” – combined their resources to launch a variety of news and voter registration programs that reached far beyond Durham to include regions as distant as Petersburg, Virginia. As might be expected, the Obama campaign integrated itself into black radio with an intensity not previously achieved in any previous presidential campaign. It also became yet another base from which Cornell Jones could practice new varieties of outreach to unregistered voters. The man was beyond “cool.” He gave new meaning to two time-honored words of political description: energetic and creative.

Cornell and I got back to Durham in time for what was, for me, the most revealing and educational moment of the entire eight month campaign. The occasion was the mid-October briefing on the Staging Locations, the organizational linchpin of the get-out-the-vote campaign for election day. The “briefing” involved much more; it would be accurate to describe the topic of discussion as the formal unveiling of an elaborately integrated canvassing-phone banking operation repeated two to three times over the final days of early voting and election day itself. Seventy persons were in attendance. While I knew only a few as intimate acquaintances, most of the faces were by now familiar, a good number dating back to the early weeks of March and April that culminated in the decisive victory over Clinton in the May primary. Collectively, they represented the hard core of volunteers of the local Obama ground game. Here were the people who ran precinct phone banks, precinct canvassing, liaison with other precincts concerning recruiting locations, and data entry projects. They were the absolute heart of the ground game.

Eighty percent of this activist core were women. Perhaps as many as ten percent were under thirty. Far more were over 50. Also, I became aware I was looking at one of the last hurrahs of the ‘60s generation. They seemed to be about 20 percent of the room. Highly energized gray panther types. Presiding, so to speak, was good old Spencer, age 23, an area coordinator who never made any pretense he was “running” anything. He was the consummate paid staffer: he respected, he included, he enhanced and was, in turn, respected and well-liked. The first thing he did was suggest that we go around the room and find out what each person had to say.

It was like turning on a spigot. A fair number wanted to offer a personal perspective on the Obama ground game. “I first got heavily involved in presidential politics in 1968 for Gene McCarthy and there was real passion in that campaign, but nothing like this. Nothing compares to this.” And “We absolutely have to win this.” And “I started with Bobby Kennedy and I thought the stakes were high then, but never like now.” And one person spoke one quick sentence – “This is the most important political campaign of our lives” – and sat down. “By Far” was one of the most recurring phrases. Electing Obama was “by far” the most important thing. “I have never worked so hard for so many weeks and months. By Far. Not even close.” But there was another idea, from the elders, that was repeated three times: “I never thought I would live to see this day.” Old warriors, telling stories to each other, a few nights before the onset of two weeks of Early Voting.

We had all received, upon entering, a 24 page, densely packed instruction pamphlet which Spencer read from rather than explained. I will skip over the details, faithful reader, though Spencer did not. Indeed, he read from the 24 page pamphlet in a tone that betrayed he was as dazzled by all the detail as he guessed (correctly) we were. I won't try to convey the magic in the figures here – maybe those formulas are a little out of time now – but I will offer a short description of the red letter day.

Seven hundred and forty five people signed in at a familiar Obama residence on the corner of Watts and Trinity Street on election day. They came, they picked up things, they left, usually looking somewhat determined. The ones who stayed behind looked driven. You could ask anyone to do anything and they would just do it. Right then. And if the task at hand required a level of expertise they did not have (which happened, but not often), someone within hearing distance would know what to do, or who to get, or somebody else would just step in and begin. Volunteering was not necessary. To get yourself “integrated” into the scene, you simply had to sit down on the floor in any room (except the kitchen) and wait. People came through bearing stacks of stuff to be pasted or tied to, or folded into other stacks of stuff. “Yell out when you finish and we’ll pick it up.” The norm at a Staging Location was the sense of urgency. It was like a giant ground-level mist that failed to obscure much of anything because people were breathing it in and out – a nice equilibrium of rhythmic anxiety.

There’s one more paragraph of figures that is surely relevant, as follows. Early voting turnout in Durham totaled 97,000 people. In my precinct, 3900 early votes were cast leaving only 1300 remaining for election day. The names of all 3900 early voters were on printed sheets of paper taped to the gymnasium walls of Forest Hills Elementary School. In 2004, John Kerry got 77,000 votes to 37,000 for George Bush. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama got 103,000 votes to 32,000 for John McCain. All voting records were shattered. And the custodians of Durham for Obama had 11,000 active volunteers in the data base.

“Going forward,” as they say.

From January, 2009

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/6

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The Ground We Stand On:

» Teen Mobile from Teen Mobile
Kelly Hu Bikini Kelly Hu Bikini [Read More]

Tracked on February 8, 2009 11:46 PM

» Porn Vidio from Porn Vidio
Teens Bbs Teens Bbs [Read More]

Tracked on February 8, 2009 11:46 PM

» Teen Mobile from Teen Mobile
Scavenger Hunt For Teens Scavenger Hunt For Teens [Read More]

Tracked on February 8, 2009 11:47 PM

» From StatsDaemon.com from DaemonSD
Where are you from? Is it a secret? :) [Read More]

Tracked on February 20, 2009 07:38 AM

» Stats news on Daemon from SDemon
Can i take a one small picture from your site? [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 03:27 PM

» Stats news on Daemon from SDemon
Can i take a one small picture from your site? [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 03:27 PM

» Statd Daemon was here from SDemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 06:31 PM

» Statd Daemon was here from SDemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 06:31 PM

» Statd Daemon was here from SDemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 06:32 PM

» Statd Daemon was here from SDemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 06:32 PM

» Statd Daemon was here from SDemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 21, 2009 06:32 PM

» Stats news on Daemon from StatsDaemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 11:13 AM

» Stats news on Daemon from StatsDaemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 11:13 AM

» Stats news on Daemon from StatsDaemon
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 11:14 AM

» From StatsDaemon.com from StatsDaemon
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 03:46 PM

» From StatsDaemon.com from StatsDaemon
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 03:46 PM

» From StatsDaemon.com from StatsDaemon
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 03:46 PM

» From StatsDaemon.com from StatsDaemon
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you. [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2009 03:46 PM

» From StatsDaemon.com from DaemonSD
Everything dynamic and very positively! :) [Read More]