Beyond His Email List

If you are young and hungry to change the world, no place is better than Washington. Other capitals were grafted onto rivers and ports, indebted to the commerce, industry, and history that preceded them. Washington was hacked out of swamps and farms for the sole purpose of doing politics. And although politics tends to get a bad rap around election time, even politics as usual is, at heart, an awesome endeavor. It is the remarkable arena for reconciling the cacophonous voices of “the people,” whoever they may be, without resorting to guns. “We dicker and compromise, and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk, we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody’s head bashed in. That’s politics,” Robert Heinlein, the great American science fiction writer, once observed.

As Washington prepares for the arrival of President-elect Obama, many of its denizens are speculating about what changes his mailing list of 13 million names will make in the political arena. Obama has said little on the subject, although his campaign’s post-election task force has called for his supporters to organize “House Parties for Change” this weekend to talk about what they would like to do next.

Some of Washington’s interest is professional: Obama’s list reaches into every congressional district in the land, and the Obama campaign has nearly $30 million left, before paying taxes and outstanding expenses. Other speculation is merely professional envy. Everybody here speaks for some portion of the American people; the more people you have, the more doors open as you go about trying to make change. Thousands of groups—including AARP; the AIDS Research Alliance of America; the Alliance for Justice; the American Association of Airport Executives; the American Federation of Teachers; the American Frozen Food Institute; the American Liver Foundation; and the American Quarter Horse Association—are already pursuing Washington agendas to fix America, and that’s barely a portion of the first letter in the alphabet. What, those collections of voices wonder, will the new guy do?

Most of the speculation, though, tends to ignore what Obama did, and so misses what he is about to do. Obama did not build a list of 13 million names—including 3 million donors, 2 million volunteers, and 1 million get-out-the-vote troops—by asking people to write letters or e-mails to Washington. Instead, he deployed a small army of field, regional, and state organizers to meet with local—and, in the case of environmental and other such affinity groups, virtual — supporters. He asked them to talk to one another and to their neighbors about why they supported him, and about what they could do to help him get elected. His campaign deftly wielded technology as an adjunct to these face-to-face meetings, pushing information out and inviting recipients to connect not with campaign headquarters, but with their neighbors.

Obama, in other words, built an old-fashioned movement in an old-fashioned way. What he told his supporters, and what his supporters told Chicago then, or Washington now, wasn’t nearly as important as what they told one another. He provided a structure, set the tone, and validated their work. They formed their own communities, and in post-election surveys and interviews, they said they wanted those communities to continue.

And that is what Obama appears to be doing with his 13 million names. Last weekend, his state organizers huddled in Chicago for a meeting; earlier this week, his field organizers began getting phone calls: Would you be interested in possibly coming back to work? Not for Obama, exactly—the president-elect will soon be responsible for the free world, two small children, and one puppy; he won’t have time to lead a dedicated movement— but for what you started, an association of communities that share Obama’s vision?

OFA 2.0, which is the initiative’s working title (adapted from Obama for America, the campaign committee), is still taking form: Funding is undecided, specifics are scarce, and focus will be shaped in part by this weekend’s house parties. “No structural decisions have been made,” said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. “The campaign has assembled a team of organizers from battleground states to work with our volunteers and allies on the next steps for the organization.” But the idea, apparently, is to provide paid staff support for communities organizing not just around Obama’s legislative agenda but also around state and local initiatives. Its vision is no less than a “national, grassroots-driven renewal of civic engagement,” according to an account that a California Obama organizer posted to his blog, which sounds very audacious—until you realize that both grassroots and national community organizing groups have spent the past few years quietly building the infrastructure for renewal.

Community Values
Last week, several thousand joyful community leaders from 30 or so states piled into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton for a boisterous conference titled “Realizing the Promise: A Forum on Community, Faith, & Democracy.” Melody Barnes, who will lead Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, and Valerie Jarrett, his longtime friend and newly appointed White House senior adviser, both attended, a nod that conference organizers frankly admit they would “never” have gotten in the past. The other attendees even had some debate about just what to do with the pair.

“Typically, when we have politicians up [to a meeting], it is extremely scripted, pressing for commitments on particular things,” explained Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, which co-sponsored the conference with the Gamaliel Foundation, the group that many years ago hired the young Obama as a community organizer. In this case, the groups made a conscious decision to let Jarrett and Barnes simply speak.

 It was, after all, only a month after the election, and the Obama team still seems to “get it” on a host of issues. More important, community organizers are working out what, exactly, you do when you suddenly get your long-demanded seat at the table. “Community organizing grew up in a period in which poor people and people of color were disregarded by policy makers.

 As a result, it adopted a tone of confrontation,” Bhargava said. If Obama isn’t going to ignore the poor, then the “tactics and tone have to shift dramatically to engage in a constructive back and forth about how to solve the country’s problems.”

 The local groups that the CCC and the Gamaliel Foundation work with were not part of the Obama campaign; their nonprofit status precludes partisan politics. Many of them, however, are eager to reach the Obama volunteers and have developed local networks that are likely to connect with OFA 2.0 in one form or another.

 For nearly 30 years, Republicans have kept their multifaceted campaign networks alive through churches, religious groups, the National Rifle Association, and anti-abortion groups. Democrats have had no comparable infrastructure, except perhaps the shrinking labor movement. The community-organizing model that Gamaliel and the CCC teach was born amid the rough-and-tumble machine politics of 1930s Chicago, where getting involved in elections could only lead to corruption, and so decades passed before community organizers saw much point in pursuing electoral politics. As a result of this divide, Democrats developed a curiously fractured body of supporters, with sparse social ties among their constituent bases.

 “Community organizing and electoral politics used to have one-night stands, but they’d never talk about it in the morning,” Bhargava said. “Today, they’re talking they might get hitched. If we can [combine] the best of community-organizing relationships and commitment to issues with the scale and urgency of electoral politics, there could be a resurgence of citizen engagement in a transformative and sustained way.”

 Consider, for example, the Rev. Milton Wells, who made a 14-hour bus trip from Kalamazoo, Mich., to attend the Promise gathering. In addition to pastoring Open Door Ministries, an affiliate of the Church of God in Christ, Wells coordinates Kalamazoo’s prisoner re-entry program. He also helps to lead a youth-violence-prevention program, the county’s poverty reduction initiative, a local interfaith advocacy group, and a neighborhood association. He is the type of man who attends city council meetings and gets called upon to do most anything anyone wants done, and he is so much larger than life that addressing him as anything but “Reverend” or “Sir” seems unthinkable.

 “We’re here,” he said, “just to ensure that our voices are heard and some promises that were made are kept.” Wells expects Obama to fix jobs, health care, and the rights of immigrants; he, himself, will be returning to work in Kalamazoo. “I’m a firm believer that we have to participate in our miracle,” he said. “What I have to do with my communities is to continue to keep them engaged. It wasn’t enough to get them to the polls to vote; now, we have to do our part, and the elected officials have to do their part.”

 If you are struck that a black pastor from Kalamazoo, where just 4 percent of the population is foreign-born, would include immigration reform among his top three priorities, then you are sensing the political change recognized and shaped by the Obama campaign and by community organizers. Democratic supporters are traditionally sorted into constituent groups, each of which is presumed to have parochial interests—the black community, the Hispanic community, labor, youth, urban college-educated whites, and so on.

 From the start of his campaign, however, Obama clearly articulated a very different framework, one that transcended and unified constituent interests. “Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people,” he said in his 2004 convention speech. “It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams yet still come together as a single American family: ‘E pluribus unum’—out of many, one.”

 The CCC took the e pluribus unum framework and turned it into the Campaign for Community Values, which it launched with the December 2007 Heartland Presidential Forum attended by four Democratic presidential candidates, including Obama. More than 80 values forums have followed across the country. Obama’s Ohio primary campaign featured One Million for Change, a successful push to knock on 1 million doors before March 4.

 “The conservative movement was very good at talking about individualism, and there are strains there that everybody can respond to,” said Gabe Gonzalez, the campaign’s director. “But community values has strains that everybody can respond to, too. If you want to engage in deep structural change, it is no longer possible to engage simply at the level of issues. You have to engage in values.”

 The community values campaign’s priorities are health care; immigration; and worker justice, which encompasses job creation, fair wages, and worker rights. So, for example, the CCC and Health Care for America Now, a large advocacy coalition of grassroots and professional groups that some CCC affiliates are involved in, talk about health care not in terms of individual rights but in the context of community benefits.

 “All of us benefit from healthy communities, where we all have access to affordable, quality health care from a provider of our choice, at the time we need it, at a cost we can afford,” the coalition’s mission statement declares.

 Similarly, the group doesn’t talk about the legality or individual rights of immigrants; it instead discusses the community-level impact of a broken immigration system. Some time ago, Gonzalez was speaking to white union members in southern Illinois, who would not generally be considered sympathetic to immigrants.

 “You have to understand,” Gonzalez told them, “these people live in fear that men with guns are going to knock on their door one night and take them away. Many years ago, it was union men who lived in fear of that knock.”

 One of the old-timers stirred. “It wasn’t,” the union veteran said, “all that many years ago.”

 A Community History
Obama’s appeal to community, in addition to individual, values, has a strong historical basis; the “socialist” charges lobbed at him are remarkable from a long-term perspective. Barn-raising cooperation runs every bit as deep in the American psyche as does bootstrap individualism; more than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was astounded by Americans’ propensity to join together in common causes.

 “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” he wrote in the 1830s, continuing to detail his amazement at the anti-alcohol associations, for example. “The first time I heard in the United States that a hundred thousand men had bound themselves publicly to abstain from spirituous liquors, it appeared to me more like a joke than a serious engagement, and I did not at once perceive why these temperate citizens could not content themselves with drinking water by their own firesides.”

 The century-long temperance movement is usually offered as a cautionary tale, its leaders having lost popular support after their national victory and witnessed the amendment’s repeal just 13 years later. But prohibition was only one of many policies that grew out of the membership-based associations of the 19th and 20th centuries. Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, has traced the roots of much of American social policy back to those federated social groups.

 Before Social Security came pensions for Union Civil War veterans, with generous definitions for “Union” and “veteran.” Before welfare came mothers’ pensions for needy widows, settlement houses, and a federal Children’s Bureau, called into existence by women’s groups whose members couldn’t yet vote. Labor fought for workplace safety, minimum wages, five-day workweeks, eight-hour workdays, and unemployment insurance, and later put its muscle toward getting the New Deal through Congress. The American Legion drafted, lobbied for, and helped implement the GI Bill.

 Then, sometime around the mid-1960s, the associations changed. Young Americans stopped joining the old groups, starting a decline in civic engagement that Robert Putnam, another Harvard professor, eventually described as the “bowling alone” phenomenon—a reference to the rise in individual bowlers and the decline in bowling leagues. Young people of that era had reasons for avoiding their parents’ associations, many of which were racist, sexist, or reliant upon the volunteer time of women who didn’t work outside the home, but the groups they created were markedly different from their predecessors. The old stalwarts—the Elks, the American Legion, the United Methodist Women, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the like—were based on social memberships that tended to ignore class divisions and to embrace broad agendas. The new associations, on the other hand, tended to be issue-specific and were usually aimed at Washington.

The change began with the civil-rights movement, according to Skocpol, where impatient, leadership-based groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee outpaced the more sedate membership-based NAACP, and then spread into the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement, and the citizens movements. The result, Skocpol observed, is “a new civic America largely run by advocates and managers without members, and marked by yawning gaps between immediate involvements and larger undertakings.”

A few years ago, though, the pendulum began to swing back, as a new generation of young people was drawn into community and political work. “Political participation patterns for youth went down for 30 years and then suddenly, around 2001, it looks like a reverse checkmark, which has gone constantly up for the last several years,” said Tom Sander, Putnam’s research director at the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, an initiative aimed at increasing civic trust between groups. “Some people think it’s Obama. We think Obama was an ideal candidate to seize upon this, but the youth interest in politics was dry kindling waiting to be lit.”

 Skocpol agreed: “Young people had started to get more involved, but this campaign was a real jump. The long-term tradition of American civic organization is based upon a federated model with big national centers but also lots of local activity; I think that with the new technology, the Obama campaign managed to invent a new model of that.” Both research and experience shows that the key to getting people involved in politics and community activism is to ask them, she said. Political leaders who validate that asking, who say, “We need to take social responsibility,” take it to a new level.

 The Michigan Experience
Andrew Virden, a field organizer for Obama, came into the campaign in the usual way: Friends told him about the rising politician; he took a look and was smitten. The Minnesota native had never done politics before, but he waited six hours in line to see Obama speak and then signed up for e-mails from the campaign. One of those e-mails invited supporters to apply for an organizing fellowship; he did, and in June 2008, Virden and another fellow were dropped into Marquette, Mich., a small college town on the conservative Upper Peninsula of Michigan that is not accustomed to having its own presidential campaign staff—much less two.

 Previous campaigns deployed one field organizer to cover the entire Upper Peninsula, said Jack LaSalle, the former chair of the Marquette County Democrats; the Obama campaign sent 10 in all, much to LaSalle’s delight. He managed a successful statehouse campaign this year, and the Obama staff and volunteers were generous with their support for down-ticket candidates.

 “Everybody thinks that by purchasing media, they can overlook the field campaign,” LaSalle said. “It’s had the long-term effect of cheapening the political process, because to the extent there’s no participation or activity in the precinct, people participate less. And participation matters because the tools we see used in the campaign are not strictly campaign tools any more than they are labor-organizing or community-organizing tools: They are how human beings organize to work with each other.”

 Virden wound up spending five months in the UP, learning as he went along. “It was interesting,” he said. In the beginning, “we weren’t given a list of people to talk to or call. We were told our job was to meet with people and sit down over coffee to talk about why you’re involved with Barack Obama, why they are interested in Barack Obama, and who they might know or who might help. The point of the one-on-one was to get a house meeting,” he said, “and the point of the house meeting was to get the host to gather friends and family in their home and have an audience where you say, ‘I’m with the Obama campaign and this is what we’re doing. Are you interested in helping?’ ”

 So, for example, after Judy Stock signed up to get an Obama yard sign at the Dickinson County Fair, Virden called to ask if she wanted to get involved in the campaign.

 “No,” she said. “I just want a sign.”

“We’re having an organizational meeting,” Virden replied. “If you came to that, I could give you the sign there.”

Stock didn’t much want to go. She believed in Obama, having read both of his books and reviewed his website before asking for the sign, but she is not a joiner. She and her husband,
Doug, used to go to the Elks Lodge after work, where Doug was the Exalted Ruler from 1990 to 1992, but now that they’re older, they like coming home after work, and the lodge can get awfully smoky. The Stocks own a balloon store in Iron Mountain, a town of 8,000, and Judy is shy outside of work.

On the other hand, she knew the woman hosting the meeting, and she figured that showing up might be the only way to get her yard sign. She went, and was dismayed to hear Virden ask everybody to give their name and reason for attending.

 “It’s a good thing I was at the end of the line,” she said. “I had time to get my thoughts together: I don’t like to draw attention to myself.”

 Afterward, Virden handed her the sign and a sheet of phone numbers: Would she like to try making some calls for Obama?

 She practiced the calls in her kitchen before dialing. “I made a couple of calls, which wasn’t bad, so I made a couple more calls,” she said. “It was interesting: I found a lot of people wanted to talk to me. If they had questions, I answered if I could; and if I couldn’t, we tried to find the answers.”

 Then Virden asked Stock if she wanted to knock on doors. She didn’t, but she agreed to walk with him as he knocked on doors one Saturday morning. “He did most of the talking at first, then he said, ‘OK, you can try this,’ ” she said. “Once you get past the first one, it’s OK. I met a lot of different people, heard a lot of good stories, and bad stories too. I lost a pants size. Andrew said that was cool—he was very cool. He got me fired up. I don’t know if I could have done it without his motivation.”

In October, with the Michigan vote secure, the campaign sent Virden to Indiana. By that time, he had built a Michigan volunteer base that didn’t need him anymore but misses him just the same.

 “We are not in an area where we are really very organized,” said Millie Hofer, a retired nurse in Menominee County who joined the Obama campaign after a friend gave Virden her name. “Andrew, when he came, he pulled us together. He was like a leader for us, and I don’t think we have the leadership right now, which is kind of sad.”

Like Stock, Hofer had never before knocked on doors to ask people about candidates or issues. “I was never asked,” she said. “The only small comparison: We have every year a festival, and the

Democratic Party had a booth there to sell ice cream and pop for fundraising. I worked in that booth during the days when they had the festival.”

Hofer’s top priority is universal health care. Having grown up in Germany and worked as a nurse in Michigan, she has seen firsthand the benefits of a universal system and the dangers of limited access to care. It’s what she talked about when she knocked on doors for Obama, and she would like to help him achieve it, but she doesn’t know how. “I would not know which avenue to pursue in the area where I live,” she said. “The only contact I always had was with the local Democratic Party. They are very nice people, but there was never a way to reach out any further.”

Both Hofer and Stock say they miss the people and the energy from the campaign and would like to stay involved somehow. They get regular e-mails and updates from the Obama team, which is nice, and they saw the invitation to hold a House Party for Change this weekend, but neither county is organizing one: December wasn’t a good month for the volunteers, but they have all promised to stay in touch.

“All-volunteer organizations need to be nurtured by a staff person,” LaSalle noted.

Virden is attending a house party in Minneapolis, where he now resides; he thinks he would like to work for Obama, either in or out of Washington.

Going Forward
Back in Washington, at the Renewing the Promise Forum, National Public Radio analyst Juan Williams inadvertently outlined the challenge that OFA 2.0 faces. He asked a panel discussing the economic crisis for the “one thing” that community leaders in the audience could do back home.

“We’re going to need massive doses of public works and infrastructure, and we need to give money to people who are going to spend it right now,” replied Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, Janice Johnson, chair of the Virginia Organizing Project, answered, “We need to really get on the train and be sure that we have a comprehensive health care plan that is set up according to the guidelines in Health Care for America Now.”

“We need to stop prioritizing banks, bankers, and institutions that believe in private profits but ask the public to pick up the bill when things don’t go right,” responded the Rev. Kevin Turman, president of the Gamaliel Foundation Council of Presidents. “The second thing is, I think we need a Marshall Plan for our people and for our neighborhoods.”

Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, declared, “We must ensure that we share in this prosperity, and the way we could do that is workers in this country should have the right to freely form and join unions.”

So, when asked what community leaders could do, Mishel, Johnson, Turman, and Baker instead all immediately identified things that Washington could do. Nobody suggested getting Millie Hofer out knocking on doors again to explain universal health care. Nobody said it would be useful to invite Judy Stock to an economic-revitalization meeting.

Granted, the presence of two Obama White House advisers probably skewed the responses somewhat. All four of these activists are keenly aware of the power of the ground game, and they have been working with Gamaliel; the CCC; funders; and local, state, virtual, and national groups to build a new civic infrastructure that can carry them all forward. But all of this is still new, and people are feeling their way forward.

“My personal opinion is that organizations may be overrelying on the perceived change that comes from a leadership shift,” said Bill Vandenberg, director of the Open Society Institute’s Democracy and Power Fund. “But I increasingly see national organizations realizing that they cannot be as useful advancing policy in D.C. if they’ve got nothing on the ground, and I see local groups realizing that it’s not enough to work locally, because their issues intersect at the federal level as well.”

The future of Obama’s movement, in other words, doesn’t rely on Obama, or even on whatever becomes of OFA 2.0. The future of his movement will be determined by the many people who understand what it accomplished. If you want to change the world, go to Washington; if you want to change Washington, you might want to go next door and knock.