Dear friends,

I write to you today to encourage you to support Senator Barack Obama as our next President of the United States.

Last week Rachel and I dropped everything and drove down to South Carolina to volunteer for the Obama campaign. What we witnessed was a revolution that rewrote the rules of politics in that state: rather than paying off local bosses with exorbitant “consulting fees,” the Obama campaign got individual people involved again in our common civic life. The result was a historic turnout that dwarfed not just previous Democratic primaries, but the Republican primary from a week earlier.

In short, Barack Obama is not just running a campaign; he is leading a movement. This isn’t surprising given his experience as an organizer on the streets of Chicago. And I believe that this nation sorely needs the kind of change that happens only when Americans mobilize together.

Senator Obama rightly admired Ronald Reagan’s ability to “change the trajectory of America,” even if he disagrees with the nature of that change. The sun has set on Reagan’s Morning in America, and for 20 years now we have dwelled in its shadow. We cannot afford to meekly inherit that legacy, which holds that military might outweighs diplomacy, that government can never be part of the solution, that selfish attention to our individual interests makes our nation great.

At this juncture in history, we need more than a pile of position papers carefully calibrated to please just enough micro-interests to cross the 50% threshold. We need a new light to discern a new vision.

Let me be clear that I bear no animus towards the other Presidential candidates. In November 2000, I stayed registered in New York so I could cast my ballot for Hillary Clinton. Her victory brightened an otherwise disastrous election, and I remain proud of my vote and of her distinguished record in the Senate. I have also agreed emphatically with every one of Edwards’ main issues. I am impressed with Senator McCain’s distinguished service and personal integrity. I even think Mitt Romney, who lost interest in governing my state, shows promise as a competent executive.

But Barack Obama is the kind of leader we discover perhaps only once every generation. Being in South Carolina before the primary, I saw first-hand the excitement that Obama inspires in people from all walks of life. Grandmothers came out from the neighborhood to volunteer so that their grandchildren could see what it meant to work for something greater. Students drove down from North Carolina to help usher in the future they dream of. (Something’s going on when college students show up to volunteer at 6am on a Saturday!) Middle-aged professionals came from Florida, and Maryland, and as far away as California because they knew that our country could aspire to something more than just the mere sum of individual interests.

By the end of that day, a new set of leaders emerged: leaders young and old; black, white, Latino, Asian; women and men; all changed in our own hearts and ready to get to work for our country. When people wonder how Obama can deliver on his promise of change, I point to those of us gathered that day and respond that change has already begun.

I write this letter to you to spread this hope born of what we’ve experienced. Please don’t let the rancor of these past few decades stop us from reaching for a better government. Barack Obama embodies the hope that we need not accept the world we’re given but rather have the power to change it. He deserves our support in the Democratic primary in your state this upcoming Tuesday.

In friendship,

Gene Koo
Cambridge, Mass.

We got back from South Carolina on Monday afternoon and found waiting for us an Obama flyer and a written note to call HQ to come volunteer. I’ve been making calls after work out of the main state office in Somerville ever since. Massachusetts is reputed to be Clinton territory, Kennedy/Kerry/Patrick notwithstanding, but we are pounding the phones hard to find our supporters. I’ve mostly been reaching answering machines in the western Boston suburbs, but even so I’ll make some hasty observations:

1. The same impulses that certain folks have when I call — reticence, uncertainty, or disagreement — plays out rather differently here than down South. Those who plan to vote for another candidate in South Carolina might play along just to be polite, but here they’re much more apt to just hang up. A good number of folks I’ve called also see voting as an intensely private matter and were quite unwilling to share their thoughts (something I encountered when making calls for Kerry and for Deval Patrick in the last few years).

2. I’ve found few supporters of any type in the 60+ age range (or willing to talk on the phone, for that matter), but under that age women are just as likely as men to support Obama.

3. There are a lot more Republicans here than the “blue state” reputation suggests. Even so, most of the independents I’ve called are breaking Democratic this year; only one told me he was running with McCain.

4. I spoke with at least two Edwards supporters who are now voting for Obama.

5. I spoke with not a single person who affirmed that he or she was supporting Clinton. I have been dialing numbers of totally unidentified voters.

Phonebanking can be arduous, but I actually get a kick out of knocking off a sheet or two of numbers, especially if somewhere in the list I managed to talk to someone in any serious way about the election. It doesn’t need to be someone who’s going with my candidate, but just a person who actually cares, shows some enthusiasm for the privilege we Americans have in being able to choose our leaders, and recognizes that we volunteers are fellow citizens who love our country and our democratic way of life. (Please remember that next time you get a campaign call!).

I’ve given my share to campaigns, from local to national, and normally I assume the money’s going towards something tangible like lawn signs, or phone calls, or campaign literature. But after spending this past week in the South Carolina trenches, I see that the money I’ve given to the Obama For America campaign has gone to something much, much more significant.

My contribution has, potentially, helped change the politics of an entire state. A few nights before the election, I chatted briefly with leaders of the state’s Democratic Party who were realizing that a new day was dawning for them. But more important than partisan politics was the profound feeling of vitality and power that we witnessed among the local volunteers we were supporting at our staging location on Saturday. Here was a group of residents who had bucked the local pastor, worked together to bring out the vote, and won — no, routed, the opposition. It is a moment that I can imagine them revisiting months or years from now when they assemble future campaigns for mayor, state representatives, judges, and U.S. senators. They’ve now seen what it takes to canvass a neighborhood and get them to vote. And they know they can succeed.

The politics of power brokers is over in South Carolina.

But it cost money to make this all happen. While the campaign did not spring for “consulting fees” for pastors and mayors to spend on “walking-around money,” putting organizers on the ground and in the community can be even more expensive. To find, win over, and develop local leaders requires dozens of one-to-ones and house meetings over the course of many months. Nicole Young, the organizer for Richland County, did an amazing job because she had started almost a year in advance of the primary date.

But unlike buying off the power brokers, building up a wide and deep grassroots generates what economists would call “positive externalities.” The ‘roots will be there for the next major issue or candidate to come down the state or local queue. Once people find their voices, their leaders had better learn to start listening.

Donate now to Obama For America (and help my friend Sozi reach his $18,000 goal)

Change is hard; change is painful. Those who benefit from the way things are have every interest to delay those who long for change. But eventually the waters that build up behind the dam cannot be contained. The status quo breaks: not by trickles, but in a flood.

This past Saturday, we were privileged to witness a flood that swept away the walls that have held back so many people in South Carolina.

If you want to know what business as usual in South Carolina meant, read this article in the Wall Street Journal from last week. (Free version). It profiles the precinct we were assigned on Saturday, where business as usual means paying off the power broker with “walking around money” and “consulting fees” to tell their followers how to vote.

In less privileged communities, it makes sense to band together and show solidarity in the face of stronger outside forces. But this banding together can lead to captivity and passivity among the community in following their anointed leaders. Over time, the very leaders who had fought so hard for their constituents slowly become a privileged class within the community. Self-interest conflates with group interest, giving birth to fiefdoms. (This happens regardless of whether the leaders are “traditional” or “progressive,” as I found in my undergraduate research on Boston’s Chinatown. And I would argue that the entire Democratic Party has been held captive this way ever since Reagan beat it into a corner.)

The Bluff Road community lies just outside the city limits of Columbia, SC. It is a predominantly black, working-class neighborhood, and it’s where we were assigned on the Jan 26 primary. It also happens to be home turf for State Senator Darrell Jackson, pastor of 11,000-strong Bible Way Church of Atlas Road, who the Wall Street Journal reports as being on the Clinton campaign’s payroll to the tune of over $135,000 since February.

On our side, by contrast, was Nicole Young, a recent USC graduate who deferred law school to hit local churches, barber shops, and beauty salons to uncover support for Senator Obama. The task, as the WSJ article makes clear, was not easy, but Nicole is both dedicated and passionate. (She was ultimately responsible for turning out the vote in all of Richland County). Most of all, she had a talent for spotting local leaders who wanted to follow their hears and were ready for change.

One of those leaders was Vernelle Graham, who Nicole had signed up for the campaign. Vernelle would be the local staging director; Rachel, her canvassing coordinator. Together, they had three days to pull together a team of volunteers and a game plan for turning out the local vote.

Vernelle doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but a number of volunteers who became canvassing captains did. They and Vernelle defied the stereotype of Obama supporters as starry-eyed naifs. “I wanted to show my grandchildren what it means to be involved,” several of them kept telling me on Saturday when I asked why they’d gotten involved in the campaign.

It became clear to us as we made our GOTV (Get out the Vote) calls that Pastor Jackson was out of touch with his parishioners, at least as far as Presidential politics were concerned. Months of hard work by Nicole and other staff and volunteers had paid off: the residents of the Bluff Road neighborhood had gotten the message. Many of them, we found out during our calls, were hooked by Sen. Obama’s observation that money spent on schools is money saved on prisons. In addition to the church where Jackson preaches and Bluff Road Park where the residents cast their ballots, another major landmark of the Bluff Road neighborhood is the Richland County Detention Center.

Election day came, and Vernelle, our other local leaders, a crowd of students from UNC-Asheville, and exuberant out-of-staters from as far as Baltimore flooded the nearby streets to urge the hundreds of supporters that the campaign had painstakingly identified over the past few months to get out and vote. Meanwhile, Pastor Jackson apparently spent his six-figure consulting fee on a few lawn chairs and refreshments for a “visibility” crew just outside 200 feet of the polling site. We were too focused on getting real voters to show up at the polls to bother countering that tactic until later in the day. Pastor Jackson himself apparently showed up at the polls and milled around for a bit, reminding folks by presence, if not words, where he stood. Our local leaders rolled their eyes when they heard about this final effort.

(We had so many volunteers that later in the morning, we did finally dispatch dozens of them to the polling site and rather overwhelmed the Hillary supporters, who abandoned their post sometime that afternoon. I had been concerned that so many of our visibility crew were white and out-of-state, but Vernelle assured us that, in fact, black citizens of South Carolina needed to see that Obama’s support crossed the lines of race, class, and age. And so there was much shouting at Bluff Road Park well into twilight.)

The final results for our precinct:
Obama : 688
Clinton: 191
Edwards : 26
All the hard work of meeting people face-to-face and developing local leaders had paid off, while the “consulting fees” did not.

Later that night, Sen. Obama emerged to his cheering supporters to U2′s “A Beautiful Day,” a shift from the campaign’s earlier preference for “City of Blinding Lights.” It seems appropriate that a song about the day after the Biblical flood would usher in a new era for South Carolina politics:

See the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out
It was a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away.

And anyone who saw the convention hall floor that night knows that all the colors were right out there, together.