Politics

Maybe this is chauvinist, but there’s nothing like hearing your wife’s profession being attacked on national television by small-minded, small-hearted vermin to get your blood boiling. Community organizing is a lot like being a mayor, except that the pay is worse and the issues are harder. Why? Because organizing picks up where government leaves off.

Community organizers work among churches, synagogues, blue-collar unions, veterans, the homeless. They fight for the least among us, because not everyone is born to power or amasses great wealth.

The rich and powerful don’t need organizers: they are heard loud and clear in our society.

Community organizers get out the vote. And in this election, at least, Republicans seem to be fine with brushing off the people who work tirelessly to get them elected. Because they don’t need organizers: the paid help can do it for them.

Here’s a true story passed along several months ago by a friend:

Yesterday, I got a call from a McCain fundraiser. I am still on McCain’s mailing list/calling list because I donated to his 2000 campaign, back when I leaned farther right and he leaned farther left (or at least I perceived him to be more left leaning)… [T]he young man who called said thank you for your past donation, your support of the Republicans. We all know we can’t rely on the Democrats to do anything right and certainly can’t count on Barack Obama. McCain’s our man. Won’t you give McCain some money? The rant on the Dems was not obnoxious but pretty negative. So too the rant on Obama.

So I decided to be polite but firmly said that I had switched my affiliation to Democratic and that I was behind Barack Obama 100 percent. Pretty much just that.

Here’s the kicker: The guy on the other end of the line, the McCain fundraiser, said that he agreed with me, that he was supporting Barack too, and that “this was just my job.” He ended by saying “See you at the polls.”

So go on, taunt the community organizers. It’s a lousy economy right now: I’m sure McCain can go pick up a few more cheap telemarketers to go do all the hard work.

I’ve been of many minds about this week’s New Yorker cover — I wrote the piece below yesterday but held back from publishing it because, well, on the face of it, it’s not exactly racist, and it is satire after all. But in some ways the furor is itself worth considering, and so I put this out there in, perhaps, the same spirit as the New Yorker put out their cover:

***

On the night of Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina, thousands of us who gathered at the victory rally spontaneously erupted in the chant, “Race doesn’t matter!” This wasn’t a profession of faith so much as a willing suspension of disbelief: South Carolina’s January primary also marked the place and time when race did start to matter in the Presidential campaign.

Race matters, as the conflation of “white” with “American” illustrates. But in critiquing that attitude, Barry Blitt’s cover illustration for this week’s New Yorker commits the same error of judgment that a white man who uses the N-word among black friends would commit if he spoke in the same way among strangers. It’s the kind of faux passé that the privileged have the luxury of committing, and therefore the responsibility not to.

Privilege underlies the even deeper problem of the cover, which is the way it bounces its satire off a deep contempt for Michael Moore’s “stupid white men.” Moore, at least, could profess to be of the group he mocks; not so for the New Yorker. Thus the magazine does Obama few favors, instead cementing the perception that his campaign is fueled by limousine liberalism. But it also does itself a serious disfavor, demonstrating not just disdain for but also ignorance of these other Americans. Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon; I doubt the staff of the New Yorker know anyone who thinks Obama is Muslim. Obama calls for understanding over condemnation, and I hope his supporters – especially the privileged ones – will consider what kinds of attitudinal sacrifices such a politics would entail.

Sure, the Internet has given Barack Obama’s presidential campaign an incredible fundraising edge. But smart use of technology only partially explains the breathtaking numbers (over $260M raised, over 1.5M individual donors). Obama’s online fundraising strategy is possible only because of the Federal Election Campaign Act — ironically, the very legislation that pundits claim he now threatens with his decision to opt out of federal public campaign financing.

In 1974, Congress amended FECA to limit the total amount that individuals can contribute to individual candidates. One of the goals behind this cap was to somewhat equalize citizens’ voices by muffling the wealthiest (and therefore “loudest”) individuals. In reality, the cap remained high enough ($1,000 in 1974, $2,300 today) that while the filthy-rich could no longer buy the vote outright, the merely wealthy still had an outsized impact on elections. In 2000, of donors who contributed $200 or more to any given political contribution, those who gave more than $999 made up only 44% of contributors but constituted over 86% of the total dollars taken in.

Then Howard Dean came along and upended this cozy arrangement. The progressive Netroots helped Dean raise over $30M from small (under $200) donations during the 2004 Democratic primaries — just $4.4M shy of what Gore raised for the entire 2000 race. Suddenly, small donors became a viable way to fund a major campaign. And even though Dean was far more successful than his peers that year at galvanizing small-donor support — they made up 60% of his individual fundraising — both major parties’ 2004 nominees relied far more on small contributions than in 2000 (See chart).

Law matters, because without caps on the amount of hard money any one person could give to a candidate, neither Dean’s nor Obama’s army of small donors could keep up with the astonishingly deep pockets of the American mega-rich. Technology matters too, of course, because it is the mature Internet — one that citizens trust with their credit cards — that makes small-donor fundraising efficient enough to pursue as a serious fundraising strategy. But it took 30 years before fundraising technology realized FECA’s goal of (somewhat) leveling the playing field across campaign donors.

Policy — even if it’s no policy at all — always tilts the playing-field in one direction or another. Capping campaign contributions dampens the voices of the very rich; conversely, removing them would reduce the relative power of the small donor. Banning cash contributions altogether would favor those with time rather than money to give. Our laws define fair play: we can’t ban campaign money because it’s a Constitutionally protected form of free speech, but we don’t want it to be too influential, either.

For any given policy landscape, there’s a set of technologies and tactics that best advances the players’ strategic goals. It would seem that the Obama campaign has struck one such optimal combination, fusing Dean’s Netroots with old-fashioned grassroots. But lest Democrats feel too smug about striking that sweet spot, they might do well to recognize the Howard Dean of the 2008 Republican field: Mike Huckabee muscled his way to third place with half of his contributions coming from small donors. Broad-based, Internet-enabled fundraising has no ideological bias, only a small nudge for those with wide grassroots appeal.

What got me most excited to support Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race was payback for the backlash she received in Bill’s 1992 campaign. She was castigated for allegedly disrespecting homemakers with this comment,

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.

and then forced to quell the ensuing furor by participating in Family Circle magazine’s potential First Ladies’ bake-off. A cookie bake-off: are you kidding me? No, and sadly, the magazine’s readers have correctly predicted the results of the last four elections.

No surprise then that this year, two of the three recipes submitted so far turn out to be plagiarized. Just look at the contestants’ credentials: a former President, a multimillionaire heiress, and a self-made corporate lawyer. Does anyone really expect that they bake cookies, much less have a favorite recipe? Clearly no one was surprised that the lone man, Bill, swiped his recipe, which helps explain why Mrs. McCain is getting all the heat for her purloined cookies.

what century is this again?

Oh, and aren’t we having a national obesity epidemic? Cookie recipes?????

An open letter to Hillary Clinton:

Senator Clinton, I have admired you since 1992 when I saw you stand up to bullies who believed that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, baking cookies. When you ran for the US Senate in my home state of New York I knew your time had come, someone who will proudly represent the Empire State and show us that a wife can in every way be her husband’s equal, even his superior. And so I proudly cast my ballot for you then, and I have been so proud of your Senate career ever since.

And, as we pray for Senator Kennedy’s health, it should gives us pause to remember that the Senate is the heart of our federal democracy. And I look forward to all the work that you will continue to do for all Americans and all the world from the most important representative body in our nation. May we all one day look back and speak of our true “Lioness of the Senate.” (And remember that it’s the lioness that does the hard work in a pride!)

You have been an inspiration to us all. I am proud of what you have accomplished.

The insane proposals by John McCain and Hillary Clinton to provide a “gas tax holiday” has shaken me out of media-induced stupor: there are real issues and real values at stake in this election. Jeremiah Wright, “snipergate,” and all the rest of that is just soporific to keep us from facing hard realities. Shame on me for forgetting.

You want to talk issues and facts? Here are issues and facts: on this issue of gas pricing, Barack Obama is the only Presidential candidate who is showing real leadership on energy. McCain and Clinton can talk a good game, but standing up to the pressure to pander is the first test of political courage. Cutting the gas tax would not only be a prelude to an even more ruinous carbon policy, but it also continues to play into the false notion that federal taxes are what keep working-class people down in this country.

On the New York Times comment page in response to the paper’s editorial opposing the McCain-Clinton proposal, David Keppel, Bloomington, Indiana writes:

At a rally in Bloomington, Indiana tonight, Barack Obama talked about the importance of telling the truth — and he used the gas tax as an example. We must learn to conserve. Technological innovation — in clean energy — is important, but social innovation is even more important. That’s why the election is not just what Senator Clinton calls “a hiring decision”; it is about inspring a nation to live differently.

Bravo, Barack. Finally, I’m wide awake again to the issues that matter, not the garbage that doesn’t.

And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. “
…
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

– Genesis 19:17, 24-26 (KJV)

If the Obama campaign entails a fairy tale, then my own bit of magical thinking involves the conviction that if we could only collectively suspend our disbelief for just long enough, if we can just have faith that something new can transcend what was, then we can cross the chasm that divides our nation. But like all magical thinking, there’s also a catch: to walk on thin air we must, all of us, believe it together. Open our eyes, and the magic breaks. The hopes that buoy us halfway across proves more fatal than staying exactly where we are.

Rationally, of course, I don’t quite believe this story. All politics are in the system, and all our politicians merely players. But I also believe in mankind’s occasional capacity to transcend itself and its own institutions. I’ve always considered JFK a rather bad President by the merits, and yet his overall power to inspire was clearly greater than the sum of his policies and actions.

Presented with the opportunity to move forward and leave behind our place of damnation, how many of us would nonetheless do as Lot’s wife did — whether out of fear, doubt, perhaps even mere nostalgia? How many would look back?

This Presidential campaign isn’t a battle between black and white: it is, as Obama himself observed, about the past versus the future. And the forces of the past — whether in the guise of Hillary Clinton or Jeremiah Wright — keep shouting, “Look back! Look back! You are doomed by the weight of the heavy hand of history.”

Perhaps we are. But I will keep walking this chasm, my wide-open eyes firmly forward.

(Cross-posted to Off the Bus)

At about 7:45pm last night, at the eastern edge of Hunting Park in northern North Philadelphia, I knocked on a voter’s door with a last-minute reminder to get down to the polls only three blocks over. “You mean the voting is still open?” the woman asked. Yes, I reassured her, she still had 15 minutes to cast her ballot. “Oh dang, I didn’t know that!” After many fruitless door-knocks, I was excited to put a vote in the bag for Obama.

Then a girl shouted from inside the house, “Yeah go vote for Hillary!”

I had a sudden flashback to the moment in 2004 when I realized that our Boston phonebank was mobilizing Republicans in Ohio because we were working off bad lists. Somewhere along the way, Obama’s famed field operations had tripped up.

The first warning for me that something was amiss came on Monday morning at the North Philadelphia Obama for PA field office, where Black Philadelphia blends into Latino Philadelphia. Campaign organizers gave us walklists for the local neighborhood to drop doorhangers. These lists, they assured us, were confirmed Obama supporters. Looking at the number of Latino names, I rejoiced: finally we were making inroads to Clinton’s core demographic. It took only a few addresses on the list sporting Hillary signs to disabuse me of that optimism. Despite the campaign being on the ground in force for six full weeks leading up to election day, we were still cold-calling the day before.

Apparently, North Philly was understaffed, and had been since early on. On Primary day I did my last canvass with two locals who complained that, despite signing up to volunteer many weeks ago, they were never activated. Meanwhile, phonebank and canvass lists piled up, even as places like West Philly saw so many volunteers that they redistributed to SW Philly.

The failure to ID voters over the six weeks’ reprieve between primaries had measurable impacts on turnout operations in North Philly: not only did we risk mobilizing Clinton supporters, but we were drastically less efficient when we were chasing all voters everywhere in the neighborhood. Sure, we had done something similar in South Carolina, where the campaign strategists decided with just over a week left to target all African-Americans, whether they were positively ID’ed or not. But the SC campaign had only done this after polls confirmed that such voters would break very decidedly for Obama. If that was the assumption in Philadelphia, it was a bad one, because across the doors I’d knocked, there was also strong support for Hillary among a sizable minority of black voters.

As the smallest cog in a campaign’s machinery, I can’t really evaluate the overall strategy, although having seen the inner workings of Obama’s South Carolina operations, I have some hunches. It may well be that the statisticians and other campaign pros in the HQ “boiler room” saw patterns or gaps emerging that they needed to exploit or plug up. Indeed, sometime around the 5pm mark, the “last call” for operational redeployment, word apparently came down from central HQ to the North Philly office to redeploy canvassing teams out to the north North Philly satellite, where the organizer was in near-panic over the amount of turf still left to cover. That’s how I ended with the virgin walklist that put me out past Hunting Park.

Not that I saw a single Clinton volunteer covering any of the same turf, either. If Clinton had a ground campaign in Philly doing anything more effective than holding up signs, it must have been underground. Yet her supporters came out in sufficient numbers even without a solid ground push to cut meaningfully into Obama’s share of Philadelphia voters.

It could well be that intense GOTV efforts are overrated in effectiveness. Indeed, after threatening to go cast her ballot for Hillary, the woman I spoke with in the last few minutes of voting yesterday instead headed over to the local store to buy some drinks. I didn’t see her at the polls later.

Today, with three different partners, I hit 10 “turfs” (bundles of voter addresses) in North Philadelphia. At about 100 addresses per turf, I estimate I hit about 500 voters with Obama door-hangers reminding them that tomorrow is election day and where their local polling location is.

GOTV — Get Out the Vote — is as brass-tacks as politics gets. The key to winning this battle is a combination of massive manpower and operational efficiency: preferably, you not only throw more people at the problem of reminding (cajoling, pleading with) voters to vote, but also get more work out of them in the precious few hours of voting in a day. (Pennsylvanians get a few more hours than the average American: 13, between 7am and 8pm).

Door-hangers are how you get to voters when you know they’re not home, as you’d expect on a Monday. Though many of the households we lit-dropped today had someone home, usually because they work night shifts or, as they day turned to dusk, people came home.

The section of North Philly we covered had an interesting mix of old-school public housing and new mixed-income developments. One project we covered was a throwback to the bad old days of public housing, an 11-story concrete monster where the stairwells stuck to your shoes for reasons you’d rather not guess. There were low-rises too, many with open front doors where we could blow through and hit every apartment with efficient alacrity.

There were also some nice redeveloped homes, including some that took the place of the infamous projects where Bill Cosby grew up. The residents there were as likely to be Latino (generally, Puerto Rican) as Black, and most were friendly. True to demographics, though, many were also Hillary supporters. (The less-friendly Hillary supporters, whom we encountered later in the day, lived in the rougher parts of the neighborhood).

Perhaps with these newer residents, the face of North Philadelphia will change once again, as it has before. One of the old Baptist churches in the neighborhood still bears the name of the Jewish congregation that erected the building in 1911. Perhaps in the coming decades it will morph once again into Catholic or Pentacostal.

Youth remain the most enthusiastic supporters of Obama — I persuaded (I think) many older teens who lamented being too young to vote to show up tomorrow and put in some hours volunteering. Younger kids just like saying the name “Obama.” (I’ve often joked that the power of Obama’s name is in melding the three most primal sounds humans can make - “O Ba (father) Ma (mother)”.)

I certainly hope they will show up, as so many of the voters on our lists were newly-enrolled, often the most difficult to turn out, even a campaign as large and well-organized as Obama for Pennsylvania can run low on volunteers. At the end of this evening, we still had a good pile of turfs yet unturned — first priority for us tomorrow morning at 7am. A great war journalist might pull a great story out of the front-line experience of American democracy. But a media obsessed with glitter, scandal, and pablum never notice the grassroots, and perhaps that is a blessing.

I’ve landed in latte-sipping, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, um… scratch that. This afternoon my friend Baratunde and I canvassed southwest Philadelphia.

This is friendly territory for Obama, and if the strategists are right, the key to a a victory on Tuesday (however defined) will turn on the success of the ground game in ensuring that the supporters we identified today actually do vote. The neighborhood we canvassed was predominantly African-American and poorer, although individual houses and sometimes entire blocks seemed better-maintained than neighbors’. A surprising number of them were home (maybe about one-third) this Sunday afternoon, and they were very strongly pro-Obama. There were undecideds and Clinton supporters, to be sure, but the ratio was very high.

Although in some ways this part of southwest Philly is quite obviously different from Vermont, there were some similar features as well. A lot of doorbells didn’t work, and residents seemed to like keeping their doors open. Unfortunately it reminded me of Vermont in another way too: some of the places seemed possibly abandoned, and I saw at least one foreclosure notice, which had been affixed to the storm door.