Report from PA: Phone Calls & Meat Balls

by: Justin Krebs

Sat Oct 18, 2008 at 22:37

I wasn't here with Drinking Liberally; I was here with the Krebs family, and scores of other New Yorkers who bused in to knock on doors.  When the sun went down, we didn't go home -- we went to the phones -- in the sweet and photogenic storefront that hosts Obama's Easton operation.

What keeps this place going is a core of team members -- staff, fulltime volunteers, a 13-year-old kid that made calls next to me -- and, the secret to every good operation, plenty of food.

Obama and the Crucial Difference Between Campaign and Community Organizing (Core Dilemmas of Commun

by: educationaction

Mon Jun 02, 2008 at 12:29

The media and the net has focused on Obama's background as a community organizer, and his community organizer approach to campaigning.  His is supposed to be a "bottom up" instead of a "top down" approach.  One newspaper argued that "regardless of the outcome . . . the Obama campaign will leave behind a new generation of trained community activists."  In fact Marshall Ganz, the designer of Obama's organizing approach states that "We're training a whole bunch of new leaders."

In this post, I argue that what Obama is doing has little to do with the core tradition of community organizing that I have been talking about in this series, and that he was trained in himself.  His approach is unlikely to "leave . . . a cadre of activists behind" that can generate power outside of the context of Obama's machine.

Traditional organizing seeks to create local groups whose direction is determined by local leaders.  Leaders elicit stories about the desires of many potential members, creating a broad network of relationships based in common goals.  Obama's approach is essentially the opposite.  Leaders go out in the community to tell people their stories in an effort to bring them over to Obama.  

Let me stress that my point, here, is not to critique the Obama campaign.  In fact, I'm generally an Obama supporter, although not a particularly strong one [written prior to his winning the primary].  Efforts to mobilize voters are probably necessarily quite different from efforts to create strong local organizations.  But in part because few people in the media seem to really understand the distinction between these, many stories blur this distinction in problematic ways.  And the distinction is critical, because the campaign model, in its very structure, is directly opposed to the goals of community organizing in crucial ways.  (To some extent this post is related to Paul Rosenberg's earlier posts on Obama as a classic progressive.)

Those new to these posts may want to read Part I and Part II of "What is Organizing?"  See the full series here.

More detail after the flip.