| Obama and Organizing
Much has been made in the media about Obama's background in community organizing and the ways it has influenced his campaigns. To its credit, the Obama campaign has generally acknowledged that it is not engaged in community organizing in any pure form. As his national campaign field director wrote:
This campaign is about a new campaign focused on exploiting the "enthusiasm gap" we enjoy over other candidates by marrying traditional field organizing training with the community organizing tactics Obama learned as a young man on the south side of Chicago.
However, while the media generally acknowledges this language of an admixture of campaign and community organizing, it doesn't make the distinction between them clear. There is a tendency, therefore, to treat what Obama is doing as if it were actual community organizing, as if it were an effort to generate a bottom up, volunteer-led effort in a broad sense.
Bottom Up Leadership?
In a narrow sense, Obama's effort does seem to give a range of flexibility to local volunteer leaders. They seem to be given wide leeway in how they will organize themselves, and how they will approach their task of reaching voters. As one organizer in Texas said , "Our job is not to run in here to tell you how it's going to be . . . . This is your campaign. Not our campaign."
In other ways, however, the campaign looks much like any other campaign. Volunteers are given mostly pre-programmed scripts to use during canvassing, and are given pretty clear instructions about how to engage the voters they meet.
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, they are given Obama's policy positions to disseminate as part of their effort. In other words, as one would expect, volunteers have the power to decide how to campaign, but not what they will be campaigning for. They are campaigning for a person who can make his own independent decisions, not for an established issue. In fact, there have been moments in the campaign when volunteers let their own unique perspectives show too much (the Che Guevara poster) and needed to be tamped down.
Of course, some level of common "voice" is necessary in any collective effort. But within the campaign context, pressure to conform to a candidate's given vision, or, paradoxically, lack of specific vision in many cases, seems much more intense. This is obvious, but I'll come back to it later.
Obama's Key Organizing Technique: Telling Personal Conversion Stories
To design his campaign organizing strategy, Obama seems to have turned to long-time organizer and Harvard lecturer Marshall Ganz, who participated in the civil rights movement and was a key organizer with Ceasar Chavez, among other efforts.
In trainings for key leaders, Zack Exley reports, Ganz exhorts participants to "inspire" voters.
It literally means to breathe life into each other . . . . And we can do that by telling our stories to each other. That's what Barack did for us when he told his story. And that's what we can do for others when we tell them our stories.
A key goal of the training, Exley noted, was to "learn how to tell our own stories," or, as Ganz said, to "put into words why you're called and why we've been called, to change the way the world works."
Participants worked on telling their story about how they came to support Obama in the correct way, using "materials and worksheets" that gave "structure and flow to the story telling process." The aim was to be able to "tell their 'story of self' in less than two minutes." Or 30 seconds if a person is phone canvassing. Or a "couple key ideas" if someone is canvassing.
Throughout their training materials, this idea of telling one's personal reasons for supporting Obama remains central. There is also reference to policy, and to Obama's policy statements, but these take a back seat to the storytelling.
Field Organizer Kim Mack told a group of volunteers in California, for example that "potential voters would no doubt confront them with policy questions. Mack's direction: "Don't go there. Refer them to Obama's Web site, which includes enough material to sate any wonk."
In a reply to an earlier post on Open Left, lorij reported an experience with Obama canvassers:
Two Camp Obama trained volunteers, the foot soldiers of this "movement" were at my front door yesterday. They "loved" Obama and wanted to make sure that I would vote for the man who is transforming politics from all the bitter fighting of the past. They urged me to read his book but couldn't give me one reason why they thought his positions would be preferable to anyone else's. In fact, the best they could do is point me to his website if I was really that interested in issues.
Given what I have read about the training volunteers in Obama's campaign get, it seems likely that this approach is reflective of his volunteers more broadly.
An "Evangelical" Approach
This use of personal stories to try to help others come over to our point of view is a classic tool, as well, of efforts to convert people to a new religion. In evangelical circles, one develops the same kind of "conversion" story, and there are numerous websites giving detailed instructions for how it is supposed to be structured. Interestingly, the recommendation is generally to keep these to a couple of minutes, just as Ganz recommends.
Let me emphasize that I'm not accusing the Obama campaign of being some kind of "cult" as others have That accusation seems ridiculous to me. Instead, the Obama campaign is trying to do what all campaigns do, one way or another: to get people to believe in a particular person.
Ganz makes this resemblance to religion explicit. "Where does hope come from?" Ganz asked at a training. His answer? "Faith . . . . That's why faith movements and social movements have so much to do with each other."
The goal is to get beyond mere intellectual agreement with a candidate and activate a deeper emotional connection. Ganz noted that:
There is a kind of suspicion of emotion that goes pretty deep-that emotion is dangerous and uncontrollable. . . . [But] what moves us to action is not neck up; it's the heart. That's sort of where we can get the courage to take risks.
The Harvard Citizen reports that "this is all rooted in Ganz's academic work on motivation, narrative and action, which draws on psychology, literature and case studies of successful activist movements. The more particular the story, the more listeners are likely to be drawn in, identify with their own experience and want to get drawn in."
Jonathan Tilove reports that Ganz believes that "Hope . . . is not empty optimism, but the prerequisite for creative social action." However, as I note below, there is reason to be concerned about an approach that separates policy from faith, and that focuses on an individual instead a specific social change that one is fighting for.
In fact, in the "Motivation, Story, and Celebration" (PDF) unit of his online organizing course, Ganz argues that there are two relatively discrete ways of knowing-relatively unemotional analysis and more affective storytelling. Analysis in a collective is concluded through deliberation. The affective side of knowing is conducted collectively through storytelling. In this course, Ganz explicitly relates his vision of storytelling to religious "testimony." Of course, these two always overlap in reality-but one or the other is emphasized more at any particular moment. (This relates to some of what Glenn W. Smith has been mulling over elsewhere on this blog.)
In Obama's campaign, as far as I can tell, storytelling is placed far above critical deliberation. And this makes sense in the context of a campaign. Deliberation is useful only in the realm of strategy-how to get Obama elected. There is little place for deliberation about what Obama should think or say.
In fact, you don't really want to focus too much on the specifics of policy, because people can easily disagree on the specifics. It's on commitment, "faith" in the person as a relatively non-specific symbol of our collective desires on which we can "agree." A "we" is easier to achieve as long as "we" don't worry too much about what "we" want in any detail.
Perhaps there will be deliberation about this after the campaign. But these volunteers will not have been educated in how to do this, or encouraged to develop the habits of engaging in deliberation as a constant part of their efforts to engage in the public sphere.
(With respect to Paul Rosenberg's thoughtful posts about the relationship between Obama and early 20th century forms of progressivism, this aspect of his approach seems to put Obama much more firmly on the populist and not the pragmatic, intellectual progressive side.)
Community Organizing: It's Not About Telling, It's About Listening
One of the core techniques of organizing is the "one-on-one" interview. Leaders sit down with members of the community-often their own church or community organization-and have about a 45 minute dialogue with them about their lives. The aim is threefold.
First, one-on-ones seek to uncover what people's "passions" are, what issues seem to engage them the most. By knowing someone's passions, you know what kinds of issues you are most likely to get them involved in for the long haul.
The second goal is to create a relationship. After having a dialogue like this with someone, you really feel like you have connection with them. This is someone who may not see you as a friend, but at least sees you as an honest acquaintance. This is someone you can call up a couple of months later and ask to get involved in an issue, and they wouldn't think it was strange.
The third goal is to try to hook them into some public action. One way I have heard it put is that a one-on-one is meant to help people make their private pain public. Something that bothers you or really engages you inside, because of something in your history, can become a driving force for more collective change.
I will return to a discussion of one-on-ones later in this series. A couple of key points seem relevant, here.
First, they are not attempts to recruit anyone and everyone. You are trying to find out not only what a person's passions are, but if they seem to have the kind of energy to make it worth recruiting them. If they don't, you may try to get them to a big rally, but you will probably look elsewhere for a core leader.
Second, you are not trying to manipulate people. You offer them an opportunity to participate in some campaign based on what you have learned they care about. If they do, great, if they don't, well, you don't have time to spend trying desperately to convince them. These are ideals, of course, but in my experience, they are pretty accurate.
Of course, people who participate also learn a common language for engaging in collective action. So there is some "conversion" happening, here. But it is conversion into a way of acting together, not to commitment to a particular person.
Note the difference from the Obama approach. In the community organizing model, leaders go out to listen, in detail, to what other people have to say in an informal, mostly unstructured setting. In the Obama approach, people go out and tell people carefully scripted stories about why they have become Obama supporters. Even when Obama leaders listen to each other's stories, these stories are relatively circumscribed as to their topic, and are quite brief. They are unlikely, by themselves, to generate the kinds of relational connections that the one-on-one process is designed to create.
The Obama approach is designed to tell people how to think-here is a story of how to convert-even if they may construct the details of their own story differently, and what to think-Obama is really cool.
The Obama approach is about telling while the organizing approach is about listening.
[NOTE, however, the UPDATE added below, where I discuss how the Obama campaign actually does seem to be using one-on-one's to recruit leaders and core volunteers]
Self-Reinforcing Scripts
Telling a script about a candidate that someone else has given you will probably eventually become just empty words. It may reinforce your commitment to the candidate to a limited extent, but probably won't be that powerful.
On the other hand, it seems likely, to me at least, that retelling and retelling your own conversion story will have a much more intensive effect. You are constantly telling a story about yourself, about who you are and how you think and what you care about. Telling this story, with emotion (manufactured at times or not) would seem to be a powerful tool for magnifying commitment among canvassers. As Ganz notes in his organizing course, "the significance of the experience [of moving from despair to hope is] itself strengthened by the telling of it."
In the beginning it was a narrative you made up, a narrative that could have been different had you constructed it at a different time, even at a different moment, choosing 3 minutes of speech, or so, from the vast complexity of your own life. But as you tell it again and again and again to others, it seems likely that it will increasingly become a more core reality of your self. We know that long-term memory is usually fairly plastic, consisting more of general outlines of what has happened than of detailed specifics. It seems likely that retelling one's story is likely to reduce the plasticity of one's story of one's self, and therefore to reduce the chance one will change one's mind.
Further, telling stories to others is a form of public commitment-making. It is probably harder to change one's mind about something when one has emphatically stressed one's commitment to others in such a public and emotional fashion than if one has simply made a private decision, or even if one has more casually mentioned one's decision to a few others. The key, here, is not that you have just made a pragmatic decision to support a candidate, but that you have declared your "faith" in them and related this to "who" you are by drawing on critical moments of your own personal history.
The Centrality of Deliberation in Community Organizing
The deliberation in community organizing groups may not always look like the ideal middle-class model of reasoned discourse, often including much more affective reference to personal stories. In contrast with Obama's campaign organizing approach, however, deliberation is nonetheless critical to organizing. In community organizing, then, the two aspects of Ganz's ways of knowing-"critical deliberation on experience" and "storytelling of experience"-come together.
Usually a relatively small subset of the organization's members is engaged in deliberation over the long-term. In the ideal, they come together informed by their one-on-one interviews with their constituents, armed with information about what the mass of members cares about. In drawing on this data, these key leaders argue about what would be the right issue to engage in, looking to a wide range of considerations. This is deliberation in which a range of relatively equal leaders contend about how their community should be improved.
The key issue in organizing is usually not about "who" to support, but about "what" needs to happen to produce social change. Even when it is about "who," a key consideration is about how electing a particular person can empower the group to accomplish its ends. There is no "faith" in individuals. On the contrary, there is "faith" that politicians, especially, cannot be depended upon in the absence of the capacity to subject them to collective pressure.
Thus, the telling of one's conversion story is likely not only to be an effective tool for converting others. It is also likely to help maintain and deepen the commitment of one's core leaders, building up their defenses against the predictable attacks, gaffes, and other vicissitudes of any campaign and of the post-election world.
"No Permanent Enemies, No Permanent Friends"
Again, community organizers simply don't focus on commitment to individuals. They have had too many experiences with apparently wonderful people that get elected and then start acting like politicians always have to act. Community organizers, unlike campaign organizers, often stress that they have "no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends." Yes, again it is true that they may try to get someone elected, to the extent they can. But this doesn't guarantee their support in the future. They elect someone not because they think this person will necessarily do what they want, but because they think this person can at least be influenced to move in a direction that the organization wants.
THAT IS THE BEST YOU WILL EVER BE ABLE TO GUARANTEE FROM A POLITICIAN.
Once a person gets elected, they become a "target" just like everyone else in the power structure.
It is this second step that campaign supporters, like Obama's, are not prepared in their campaign training to take. They are equipped to support Obama, but they are not equipped to pressure him, or others, on specific issues in any coherent and structured collective manner.
Community organizing groups, then, tend to focus on specific issues, particular social changes that they would like to see happen, even as they remain pragmatically flexible about the specific forms these changes eventually will take. Then they engage with (and if necessary fight) whoever they can best get to who can make the change they want.
The Limits of Commitment to a Person Instead of a Program
The campaign organizing model Obama is using is designed to get him elected.
The problem with supporting a person as your end goal is that you must essentially trust (have "faith") that that individual's decisions will match your own beliefs and desires. Because you are electing a politician, someone who has actually made it quite clear that he is aiming to find reasonable compromises between a range of different groups, your commitment cannot be to his policy statements. These are really just "placeholders" for the kinds of decisions he would like to make.
Once he gets into office, he will be buffeted by a myriad of different pressures and influences. That's the definition of being a politician. If you don't compromise and bend, you won't get anything done, and you won't get elected next time. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Someone who won't think much or change their mind, an ideologue, or just a close-minded narcissist like GW, isn't really someone you want as president anyway.
Committing to a person, then, involves commitment to their character, to their ways of making decisions. It involves trusting that the person will end up doing "the right thing."
In community organizing, in contrast, "power" resides in the organization. For example, the name of the organization I work with, CHANGE, carries the reputation of the history of the group. It is not any individual that powerful people respect, but instead the power of the at least somewhat democratic collective. Every individual member, therefore, is expendable. And the benefits or failings of any individual will not be enough either to make the organization powerful, or doom it to insignificance.
The Definition of "Nonpartisan"
From the perspective of community organizing, Obama is not really "nonpartisan." He is a democrat, enmeshed in all of the pragmatic possibilities and limitations that position entails. This natural partisanship, however, is threatened by the possibility that he may be TOO open to multiple perspectives. This brings into question his commitment to particular social values and policy directions usually linked to the partisanship of a party. It might, in fact, as others on this blog have noted, be better for Obama to be MORE partisan.
Community organizing groups are truly nonpartisan. They are not linked to a specific party, or to the tensions and realities that this positioning entails. They fight, in general, for issues. At best, their focus is on a commitment to a set of shared values, and, in contrast to Obama, those who do not share these values are NOT INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN INTERNAL DELIBERATION. When leaders of these groups talk with people who don't agree with them, they are very clear that they have emerged out of the relatively safe space of their organizations into a public realm where concessions and negotiation are based as much if not more on power than on reason or even emotion. It is almost always the case, in fact, that the organization's capacity to make its power felt is what gave it a place at this public table in the first place.
In other words, being "nonpartisan" in terms of one's political allegiance in the context of community organizing, means that one actually is quite "partisan" in terms of one's commitment to a set of values. This different kind of commitment involves a shrinking of who can be part of an organization's "we." Some people are not now, and may never, be part of this "we." (It can make sense to bring in very conservative democrats to a party, but it doesn't make so much sense to bring these people into your deliberations within an organizing group.)
This necessary defining of "us" and "them" is easier to avoid if one focuses on a person as a "symbol" of one's collective hopes. Our "we" is less constrained by pesky commitments to particular substantive commitments.
Action Training and Leadership
It is true that both community organizers and Obama's campaign volunteers learn to act, and to act strategically to achieve their goals. However, all of the campaign action is oriented around voting. There is no training about how to influence people once they are elected. Thus the campaign volunteers acquire no direct skills for actively influencing their candidate after the election except through whatever mechanisms Obama may create for them once he is president.
Because they have been given no effective skills for independent action, Obama will clearly maintain a tight control over the volunteer community he has created. People who become disappointed may leave. But they have not acquired any capacity for acting independently as a collective, at least not in any effective and coherent manner, after they leave.
In fact, the only non-Obama activity I have heard Obama volunteers getting involved in was a service activity, not an effort to organize against power. Mike Newall, for example, reported on "a neighborhood sweep-up event organized by Obama Works, a grassroots public service organization inspired by Obama's community activism background." As I have noted earlier in this series, this service approach is actually diametrically opposed to the organizing approach, siphoning off energy that might actually generate social change. So there is an extent to which Obama (or his leaders) may, in some cases at least, be mis-educating volunteers about the nature of effective social action in America (maybe because they don't understand what organizing is).
It's Not Community Organizing
To summarize, Obama's organization is not training community organizers. It is training what seem to be quite effective campaign workers.
And I'm not critiquing his campaign effort particularly. Is there anything wrong with this clearly effective campaign strategy? I'm not sure. Certainly one could raise concerns about the focus on the affective rather than on analysis and policy. But the fact is that most campaigns probably win with this kind of focus. In any case, I'm not an expert on campaigning. Others may have more to say.
The truth is, it seems pretty unlikely that one could simultaneously train people to be effective community organizers and effective campaigners on the Obama model. As should be clear from the discussion above, these seem like quite different activities.
On the other hand, it might be possible to create an effective campaign strategy that integrated more community organizing skills, a strategy that was less "top-down" in its policy and value thinking.
In any case, you could be much clearer with volunteers about what you are and are not training them to do. And you could tell them something about what you aren't teaching them, so that they know what they need to learn. And you might even give them a taste of what these other skills and perspectives look and feel like.
And it seems problematic to represent the Obama campaign as truly "bottom-up," because it seems to be bottom-up only in terms of campaign strategy, not in terms of policy dialogue or engagement. To this extent, the Obama campaign is much less different from standard campaigns than the rhetoric may imply.
UPDATE
A student who attended Camp Obama sent me the following email and gave me permission to put it up:
A lot of what you say in your piece on OpenLeft is a fair analysis of the way the campaign has played out in practice, but it is also somewhat unfair in its depiction of Ganz's model and the goals of Camp Obama. Telling the "Story of Self" conversion experience is only the first of a three-step process. The second is to find an authentic "Story of Us" based on shared goals and experiences (not to tell your audience what those shared goals are), and the third is to tell a "Story of Now" to motivate action to achieve those goals. The one-on-one interviews central to community organizing that you discuss in your piece are a prominent part of the Camp Obama training.
So, I would say that the reality of the fact that we're working on a campaign has prevented us in the short run from engaging in community organizing at the same time, and you do a good job of talking about that. But those of us who are volunteers in the campaign and understand the distinction really have been given the tools to, at a later date, start engaging in more authentic community organizing around issues rather than a person.
See this Word Document for a description of what Ganz means by a "Story of Us" and a "Story of Now." It's not clear to me that this is that different than the testimony I was talking about, above--in fact in the videos from Camp Obama. Also see the audio and video about camp Obama on this web-page where Ganz directly relates the "Story of Us" to religious communities.
See episode 7 of the Camp Obama web-page where Ganz does a nice job of teaching a particular version of one-on-ones.
The one-on-ones seem to have been focused on internal team-building, so they are apparently serving some function at least to core Obama volunteers. Do Obama volunteers do this as an ongoing practice? Ganz is clear in his explanation that the one-on-ones are focused on "why I/you like Obama and what "resources" "you" can bring to the campaign, and an avoidance of any discussion of policy. But they could potentially generate the kinds of connections necessary for building more long-term power.
The fact that they at least learned how to do "one-on-ones" does give some indication that the Obama "organizing" trainings may move more towards actual skills for social action and the creation of durable collective power in the future. I didn't write about the Obama Fellows program because I could find no information about it, but this gives me hope that the fellows will get more of an organizing background. They will still be doing campaigning, probably still under the "telling your conversion story" model. But if their efforts focus on recruiting leaders and core volunteers, they may actually be acting more like traditional "organizers." Of course, what happens after the campaign will probably be most telling.
It's important to remember that they are still recruiting someone not to work on an issue, but to support a person. How can a transition happen?
I'm also happy to hear that a respected organizer like Ganz didn't just do the "testimony" approach.
UPDATE II
Apparently the "organizing fellows" are getting essentially the same thing that the Camp Obama folks got. From the barackobama.com website:
The Obama Organizing Fellows will engaged in a three day intensive training -- which will be familiar for any of you that attended Camp Obama.
Three days is an extremely short time to learn about organizing, and learning much about organizing is made even more unlikely by the fact that most of the time is apparently taken up by learning about campaigning. The brief approach wasn't suprising for initial volunteers, but I had hoped that the volunteers would get something more substantial. It's a disappointment.
Note: given limited time, I have scoured the Internet as best I could. I have not read everything I found, but tried to read everything that seemed relevant. I welcome comments and corrections. |
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