A Community Organized

Community organizers are the new oilmen. For a change, one of them is in the White House. They walk the marble halls of Congress with a certain swagger, as if their backpacks were designer briefcases and their jeans and baggy blazers were tailored pinstripe suits.

"I tend to get a little nervous," confessed Chermel Rosmond, a faith coalition volunteer from the Bronx, entering the Dirksen Senate Office Building yesterday to do a little work related to the stimulus bill.

"I'm excited and nervous all at once," said Jolene Poen, a retired food-factory supervisor from Idaho heading to the White House to watch President Obama sign the children's health insurance bill.

There's never been a better time to do what they do: Be an obscure, idealistic, possibly burned-out toiler in a broken neighborhood or a starving country hollow, those American battlegrounds where faith is fragile and clear-cut victories are rare.

The desperation out there is greater than ever, sure. But for once hope seems rational -- at least, so think the community organizers, the few who do it for a low-paying living and the many who volunteer because they think it's right.

Obama is the first of their ilk to make it to the White House. He organized on the South Side of Chicago for three years at $10,000-a-year in the mid-1980s. They call Obama the "community organizer in chief." He gets it. They are certain his mojo will take hold in Congress. Caught between the organizers at the grass roots and the one in the White House, Congress will see the light, they imagine.

And so they have come to Washington: talking of the poor, the people of color, the women, the immigrants, the "community" of America, as opposed to America the land of individual space.

It's a big adventure for the community organizers, but they're also fulfilling a timeless and predictable rhythm of Washington, a migration that takes place every four or eight years. Remember eight years ago, when it was the turn of former oil explorer George W. Bush to have his first 100 days? That was a season of energy executives.

The community organizers had felt dissed when Sarah Palin made that crack at the GOP convention: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

But they felt more than compensated by the status their profession acquired from Obama's treatment of it as an authenticating part of his résumé.

He "better than anyone understands what the community needs," said Monty Shaw, an insurance salesman and volunteer with Sunflower Community Action in Wichita, who came to town Tuesday for a couple of days of lobbying on the Hill. "You don't have to explain to him. He did it."

Unsaid is that Obama left organizing when he sensed "the limits of what could be achieved," as the organizer who hired him said during the campaign. Obama beat it back to the Ivy League, got a law degree, entered politics. Yet he never turned his back on the old crusades. "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer?" he said to a reporter in Chicago when he first ran for office in 1995.

Obama devoted more than a third of his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," to his organizing days. He portrayed the hard-won incremental progress, and also the gloomy, doubt-filled times.

"Over two months had passed since the botched police meeting, and things had gone badly," he wrote. "There had been no marches, no sit-ins, no freedom songs. Just a series of miscues and misunderstandings, tedium and stress."

That's the reality behind the romance of fighting for the People.

And yet here they are, still at it, still on it, the community organizers. A dozen of them, from all over the country, sat in a sun-splashed conference room on U Street NW, happily hatching plans to bring their message from the bottom to the top, to the folks running the country.

They were practicing their "message," role-playing, prepping for meetings on the Hill. Their borrowed congressional face books still listed Obama as a senator.

"People of low incomes should not be forgotten in the stimulus package," said Gisela Jones, a retired radiation therapist who volunteers for the United Valley Interfaith Project in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Organizers have borne their messages to Washington before, of course, but never quite like this. The effort started more than a year ago with a "community values" forum in Iowa attended by presidential candidates. Then came a meeting of 2,500 in Washington in December that drew incoming Obama administration officials: "I am here representing somebody who began his career as one of you," senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told the group.

Now comes the 100-day strategy, in which during each of the first 14 weeks of the administration, 10 organizers from 10 groups from across the country make calls on the Hill. They craft their advocacy to fit with the news of the week.

The effort is coordinated by the Center for Community Change, a behind-the-scenes organizer of organizers founded in Washington 40 years ago, just as certain liberal hopes of the 1960s were starting to sour. The center has rarely felt more in sync with the mood of the country.

"I don't think anyone realizes how hard and fast this pendulum has swung back," said Gabe Gonzalez, director of the center's Campaign for Community Values. "President Obama, from our perspective, is a symptom, not a cause. There's a fundamental shift in America."

Gonzalez calls it a rediscovery of the "barn-raising" communitarian strain that exists in the American psyche, alongside the "John Wayne mythology" of frontier self-reliance. "We want to capitalize on that."

Translated into the language of community organizing and lobbying, this means, for example, the stimulus package should reserve some of those "shovel-ready" jobs for poor people and minorities.

This week's visiting organizers fanned out in three teams going to 27 offices yesterday. They were granted meetings mostly with staffers, with the occasional actual member of the House or Senate.

Rosmond, a volunteer with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, was well received in the offices of Reps. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. and Danny K. Davis, both Illinois Democrats.

She did not look as nervous as she felt. What steadied her nerves was thinking about the reasons she was there: Her neighborhood and her fellow laid-off co-workers. Rosmond, an accountant, and the others lost their jobs when their bank was merged into another. Their unemployment insurance runs out next week. There are no jobs. She was turned down for a department store sales job.

"It's so bad in New York," Rosmond said. The stimulus bill must reach people like them.

Before her White House visit, Poen, a volunteer with the Idaho Community Action Network, got a more skeptical reception in the offices of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho).

She listened in frowning silence as a Minnick staffer explained that his boss was planning to introduce a much smaller stimulus bill, which wouldn't embody some of the goals of the organizers.

Afterward, over lunch in a crowded House-side cafeteria, Poen and her lobby partners shrugged off the skeptics, unpersuadable, for now.

Community organizers are good at that.

"You've got to stay strong and stay focused," Poen said. "If you let yourself get down, the movement doesn't move."