After putting more than 2,000 organizers through intense two-to-four-day training sessions in Chicago, Camp Obama expanded to four more regions in August.
Camp Obama is proof positive of Obama's truly being a "fifty state campaign" far beyond what any other Democrat can accomplish in 2008. It gives Obama the ability to turn those much-talked about 258,000 (and growing number of) small donors into an unprecedented field organization.
Camp Obama is, in the words of one its organizers, what makes the difference between Dean '04 and Obama '08. It is not the only difference: Senator Obama's realistic shot at racking up a super-majority among black voters, for example, beginning with early primary states like Michigan and South Carolina is not an advantage that Governor Dean ever enjoyed.
The political press corps and pundits tend to ignore field organization: they don't understand it and there has been so little of it in recent presidential cycles anyway. Camp Obama marks the return of the ground war to US presidential campaigns.
After the jump, videos, links galore, and background information about an innovation that will change the history of this campaign... and the country.
In 2004, the Howard Dean campaign called its housing units for out-of-state volunteers in Iowa, Camp Dean. But it did not offer intensive training to Dean volunteers and so the only similarity was in name only. The Boston Globe’s Rick Klein reported at the time:
...many crucial organizing tasks -- door-to-door vote canvassing, phone-banking, and logistical support like organizing rides to caucus sites for senior citizens -- have fallen to untested volunteers from outside Iowa.
It has rubbed some in Iowa the wrong way. Some caucus-goers say they are sick of having their mailboxes overflow with pro-Dean letters from residents of other states, and wish the "Deaniacs" from around the country would stay out of Iowa…
Volunteers get 15-minute crash courses in how to canvass door to door -- don't go near loose dogs, don't get into arguments, and write everything down -- and they are assigned to towns they have never heard of to spread the Dean gospel in groups of four. Besides the orange hats, they get bags of Cheetos, granola bars, and bottled water.
.
One key difference between Camp Obama ’08 and Camp Dean '04 is that between 36 hours-or-so of intensive training and the "15-minute crash courses" offered by the latter. The Obama campaign appears to be building not only for early primary states, but for Camp Obama alumni to deploy their newfound skills back home in their own districts and precincts.
Here's a video from last weekend's Camp Obama in New York. It begins with some words from City Councilman and US Marine veteran James Sanders, Jr. (D-Queens) and then offers an inside look at the Obama campaign's organizational strategy:
Here's the money quote:
“What’s the difference, what’s the main distinction between the Howard Dean campaign and all that enthusiasm and all those big crowds and this campaign? What’s the biggest distinction between the two? And I’ll tell you. It’s this. Howard Dean never did this. What is it? Training. Putting a large investment up front about the strategy, the tactics of how we win. We have now trained over 2,000 people in Chicago. 2,000 people have gone through three-day, four-day trainings like this and are going back to their home states and developing field structures, organizing structures, in their congressional districts.”
Meanwhile, an unprecedented field organization is being built. Here’s Part I of video excerpts from a recent “Camp Obama” training session in California; a presentation by Students for Obama which has chapters on 40 campuses in California, more than 500 chapters and more than 300,000 participants nationwide:
So, what is going on at these trainings? The Boston Globe’s Scott Helman attended a recent Camp Obama in St. Louis, Missouri and reports:
The hours were long, the expectations were high, and participants received little more than Einstein's coffee, caramel cream can dies, and a hearty thank you.
But that was incentive enough for these ardent supporters, who came from Missouri, Illinois, and elsewhere for a crash course in political activism. They learned from veteran political hands how to throw a successful house party fund-raiser. They learned how to explain Obama's policy positions to skeptical voters. They learned the mundane details that make a neighborhood canvass work.
"Always make sure you supply your volunteers with pens," an Obama field staff member instructed at 8:15 p.m. the first day, almost 12 hours into that day's session…
"People are hungry," said Marshall Ganz, an organizer since the 1960s who teaches at Harvard and has been helping the campaign run Camp Obama. "They want to make a difference. They care about what Obama represents. They really are invested in trying to turn hope into reality. It takes work to do that."
The troops trained at Camp Obama have two responsibilities: recruit supporters from their home neighborhoods and flood Iowa and other early primary states at key points in the race. Yet Obama's advisers are determined not to repeat a mistake they believe Dean made in the 2004 race, when he imported into Iowa scores of out-of-state volunteers with no connection to the voters they were trying to mobilize.
Temo Figueroa, Obama's national field director, asked everyone in the St. Louis group to commit to at least three trips to Iowa before January. But he made clear they would be paired with Iowa activists…
(Helman apparently didn’t read his own newspaper’s ’04 coverage about “Camp Dean” when he wrote: “The camp strategy is not new -- Howard Dean ran Camp Dean in Iowa in the 2004 race, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana created a similar training program, Camp Bayh, before dropping out of the presidential contest late last year.”)
Actually, it is something very new on a much larger scale than anything since the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s: Two-to-four-day training sessions with some of the best community organizers in the USA are unprecedented on the scale of thousands, the size, so far, of the army Obama is putting through boot camp.
The aforementioned Marshall Ganz, director of Camp Obama, is legendary among community organizers. Here's his brief bio from Harvard University where he lectures today:
Marshall Ganz, Lecturer in Public Policy, entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. In 1964, a year before graduating, he left to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing. During the 1980s, he worked with grassroots groups to develop effective organizing programs, designing innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and, after a 28-year leave of absence, completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements, civic associations, and politics.
Of course, 16 years of "experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing" is not seen by some insiders as real experience: they'll underestimate Camp Obama just as they underestimate the lived experience of the man for whom it is named. But as anybody that has organized grassroots campaigns outside of the electoral cycles knows, it is the kind of experience that any president or leader ought to be required to have: one develops an understanding of real Americans much better than those that get it only second-hand from pollsters and consultants. Community organizing experience, in short, marks the difference between governing people from above to being at one with the people.
Since most reporters don't understand the power of community organizing, Camp Obama has been the subject of only a very small number of press reports. Among them: a St. Louis TV station reports that the local Camp Obama there trained 60 volunteers in one weekend:
The St. Louis Camp Obama is the second one outside the Chicago metro area. Geographic groups worked Saturday afternoon on planning house parties to raise campaign contributions. After hearing from Steve Engelhardt, the communications director for Congressman Lacy Clay, participants wrote news releases describing their Camp Obama experiences. "You don't want mixed messages..you don't want bad information going out there," Engelhardt warned. Recently elected St. Louis City Alderwoman Kacie Triplett described her successful campaign for the Sixth Ward seat. "Politics is all about connection and communication," Triplett told the volunteers. Then she shared her campaign motto with the crowd: "You Can't Buy Hustle."
This video from that St. Louis Camp Obama reveals that low-dollar fundraising is incorporated into the battle plan: The emphasis on getting real people to invest in the campaign should bode well for the Q3 campaign finance report in October:
It seems that the trainees at Camp Obama work in sub-groups to set up actual house parties and other organizing efforts. In that video, a table with no more than eight seats organizes a small-ticket fundraising event with the goal of raising $2,500 in fifty dollar donations. If by the end of 2007, Camp Obama will have trained 8,000 people, that could mean a thousand such fundraising events and another $2.5 million into campaign coffers... raised from donors likely to give again as the campaign heats up in '08.
Dig a little deeper, and Camp Obama is already occuring at a much wider scale than the campaign press releases have let on. Here’s an item about a Camp Obama in Idaho:
As of yet, no other Democratic candidates vying for president are putting this much time and effort into Idaho's constituents.
After completing the training, each participant will be required to make a commitment to volunteer in Nevada, the West's first primary state.
Plan to attend the full training and submit your application at my.barackobama.com/CampObamaWest. Volunteers must attend both days.
That training is occurring this weekend.
Wait. So it's not just in Illinois, New York, California, and Missouri? An online form for applications to Camp Obama in the western regions reveals still more Camp Obamas popping up in places where no other candidate or campaign has tread, in the following locations on the following dates (these ones appear to be two day sessions for Saturdays and Sundays):
Salt Lake City, Utah: August 25 and 26
Denver, Colorado: September 8 and 9
Albuquerque, New Mexico: September 15 and 16
Anchorage, Alaska: September 22 to 23
Could it be that this is happening in all regions, everywhere at once? Only a national campaign with a fifty state strategy could hold training sessions in Alaska, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Idaho this early. This also speaks to the fact that Obama will have a real organization on the ground in all primary and caucus states whereas the Clinton campaign and others will have to depend upon those politicians that endorse their candidate to put theirs on loan (anybody that has worked as a campaign field organizer knows what a dicey and nail-biting situation that is, to have to rely on “loaned” field organization: It ends up being expensive and more often than not it simply doesn’t yield results: think of Senator Harkin in Iowa in '04. Organization is rarely transferable).
And it seems that not all the Camp Obama sessions have been publicized. Here’s an after-the-fact report from a two-day training session in Tucson, Arizona:
I really don’t know where to start… Camp Obama was an amazing experience! “Life-Changing” may be a little excessive but we were introduced to a whole new and innovative form of community campaigning that will send our efforts and momentum nation-wide. We literally shed buckets of sweat and tears this weekend as we were hunkered down for 2 days of campaign overload, but when we emerged, we emerged as a stronger more unified Arizona for Obama!
As expected we left with a message that “help is on the way” but not in the way I was expecting. We were given the tools to succeed, the keys to the car, and the strength to get things done even if we wont have campaign staff holding our hand. This campaign belongs to us now.
This is known, in community organizing, as "working the margins." It means that while your rivals are all competing for the same big endorsements and usual suspects in the early primary states and big cities, the Obama campaign is utilizing Camp Obama in the places everyone else will get to late in the game: and if the strategy pays off, Obama will have established political fortresses in those regions and it will then be "too late" for anyone else to break through.
Meanwhile, Camp Obama Chicago is in high gear, with sessions scheduled weekly for the next six weeks:
Wednesday, August 29th – Thursday, August 30th
Wednesday, September 12th - Thursday, September 13th
Saturday, September 15th - Sunday, September 16th
Wednesday, September 19th - Thursday, September 20th
Wednesday, September 26th - Thursday, September 27th
Saturday, September 29th - Sunday, September 30th
National Public Radio reports that the Illinois camp is also training native Iowans:
…the four-day training sessions, with about 50 volunteers in each weekly session, cost the volunteers nothing, though they are responsible for their own transportation and lodging.
University of Iowa student Andrew Wiess, a 21-year-old intern in Obama's Iowa City office, says he hopes the camp makes him and other volunteers greater assets to the campaign, so "you go back to Iowa City, or where ever you're from, and just be able to make more of an impact and really know what you're doing, to maximize your potential that way."
Tia Upchurch-Freelove, 19, came with Wiess from the University of Iowa as part of the group Hawkeyes for Obama. She says that even though she's lived in Iowa her whole life, she came to Camp Obama to learn more about how the state's caucuses work.
"It's really funny, because it seems like a lot of people would know about the caucuses, but for young people especially, they're not taught as much about the caucuses as they should," she says.
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times adds some more info:
In 2004, Howard Dean made a big mistake in Iowa by sending in squads of out-of-state volunteers wearing orange hats (the hats backfired because it pegged them as outsiders) who were numerous and exuberant but ineffective in the Hawkeye State.
Intent on not repeating problems of past presidential campaigns -- and leveraging the proximity of Illinois to neighboring Iowa -- the Illinois Obama operation is:
• Organizing sister city programs. One getting off the ground is between Illinois communities and Iowa. For example, Obama backers who live in Evanston or the Lake View neighborhood on the North Side would be assigned precincts to get to know in Cedar Rapids.
• Training volunteers to canvass voters -- which means shoe-leather door knocking to find out whom a registered voter supports, leans toward, or wants to know more about.
Obama canvassers will be fanning out across the country. The idea is not to have strangers making calls and house visits but to use all the social networking tools available to make real people-to-people sustained connections.
• Building networks for low-dollar fund-raising.
Tombari Bonkoo adds this from Associated Content:
For those who may see the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign as a hype and light-weighted, there are more groundswell organizational experiences and a corridor-full of strong and dedicated political geniuses to his candidacy than any other presidential candidates from both parties.
The campaign, in the past couple of weeks, has embarked upon building a massive ground crusaders throughout key states such as California, Georgia, New York, Chicago, Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire to offset the fear mongering tactic of inevitability by his top rival.
The more intensive three-day session is coming to Atlanta, Georgia, next weekend, and Blog for Democracy adds another interesting tidbit:
By the way, so far Obama is the only Presidential candidate to open an office in Georgia.
The investment that the Obama campaign is putting into training thousands of field organizers is a clear sign that it is ready to wage a ground war. The campaign's FEC reports suggest that it is also putting aside about fifty cents of every dollar raised for the air war (paid advertising) and unless another candidate bounces back in the Third Quarter FEC filing reports come October, that means it will be dominant on the air and punishing on the ground.
But its most lasting impact may go beyond electing a mere president. So many of the young people that were similarly intensely trained in the southern Civil Rights movement of the 1960s went on to become great leaders and make history on many other fronts on behalf of worthy causes. Camp Obama, at the rate it is going, may surpass 10,000 trained organizers and put them to the test in the primaries and caucuses. After the campaign, they'll still have these skills. And that will be good for all America, regardless of which candidate people support today.