Self-Organizing and the Obama Campaign

Markos criticizes Obama for his statement that he saw something new at the George Mason rally that could reshape the political world.

There’s a bit more to the story though than what he said in that story and it reminded me of a good post I forgot to link to the other day just before the motherboard went kaplooeey.

Not Paul Begala at Blog PI picked up on a link to an old Chicago Reader article I had linked to which contained the following:

What makes Obama different from other progressive politicians is that he doesn’t just want to create and support progressive programs; he wants to mobilize the people to create their own. He wants to stand politics on its head, empowering citizens by bringing together the churches and businesses and banks, scornful grandmothers and angry young.

His own words:

In America … we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.

And what people said about him then — Johnnie Owens of the Developing Communities Project:

A lot of organizers you meet these days are these self-anointed leaders with this strange, way-out approach and unrealistic, eccentric way of pursuing things from the very beginning. Not Barack. He’s not about calling attention to himself. He’s concerned with the work.

And Madeline Talbott, “lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization”:

He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.

It might be stretching it to call the campaign an organization as of yet–it’s staffing up and the shortened time frame it’s operating on shows–though I think there are some incredibly bright people who will get it up and running soon enough. And as such the online activities are pretty weak as of yet and I hope to see it get off the ground.

Obama was organizing when Markos and I were still in High School and he ran one of the most effective GOTV and voter registration drives in Illinois partially based on the principle of empowering people to act on their own. The internet adds an entirely different dimension to this, but he’s a quick learner.

I do have a criticism of the Dean campaign however, and I think it’s effort at creating self-organizing wasn’t nearly effective as another campaign that year–the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. It’s often an undertold story about how Bush increased his vote percentages nearly everywhere–even in deep blue states where he didn’t spend any money–like Illinois.

How did that happen with Barack Obama heading up the Illinois ticket and Alan Keyes depressing the Republican turnout–self-organizing in churches. Karl Rove seldom talks about this, but he is a master at using the networks created by religious conservatives to do a lot of the work without ever telling them or even communicating directly with them. They are motivated because the man they were backing seemed to them to be their guy and they set up phone banks and canvassing operations in their own community.

In contrast, Dean’s campaign attracted people from around the country to go to Iowa. Not the same effect as having your neighbor do it for you.

So, yeah, there is something to Obama’s statement sounding naive (I think it might, just might, have been a bit of useful naiveness), but it’s not Dean for America that deserves to be the model, it’s Bush-Cheney 2004.