Obama Gets It. Sadly, Hillary Fails To Understand Political Activism & How Movements Succeed

[KittyWampus]

Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on a legendary organizer, Saul Alinsky. But her understanding of grassroots activism and political movements is solely intellectual. Sadly, she and her husband drank the Power Kool-aid years ago and ended up forgetting that political power yields the most fruit when leaders give it back to the people to do for themselves.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, spent three years as a community organizer in Chicago. Because he has first hand experience in what it takes to get people not just active but EDUCATED AND TRAINED IN POLITICAL ACTIVISM, he is the candidate who has succeeded in the Democratic primary and the one who can help reinvigorate the Democratic Party after decades of malign neglect by the DNC and party leadership.

Where Clinton runs an autocratic, top-down, old school campaign that relies on endorsements from elected Democrats and expects them to do the heavy lifting, Obama's camp went across the country and organized groups of dedicated grassroots activists who were then trained how to be effective.

THIS is why he has been successful.

In South Carolina, Obama's victory was due largely to this grassroots organizing approach. The South Carolina campaign was so well organized they conducted two GOTV "dry runs" on the two previous Saturdays before the primary, practicing every step of the Election Day operation to make sure that all staff and volunteers understood their responsibilities.

On Election Day, the campaign had 15,000 volunteers in South Carolina, according to Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign field director. Turnout nearly doubled since 2004. Moreover, Democratic voters in the primary exceeded Republican turnout by 97,000 voters. As a result, Bird says, "South Carolina is in play in November if Barack is the nominee," challenging the conventional wisdom that a Democrat can't win in the state.'

Obama is not just training people for his primary run. After this POTUS race is over, the Obama campaign will be leaving a network of trained activists in South Carolina and other states.

"We have been digging in here since last April, which is unprecedented in a presidential campaign," Bird commented. "South Carolina does not have a tradition of grassroots organizing, but what we will leave behind are hundreds of trained organizers and volunteers who will now run for school board, city council, the state legislature," Bird predicted. "They will transform this state."

This is how the Republican Conservative movement grew to prominence after Barry Goldwater's defeat in the 60's. They started on the local level and got people involved. Training them on what to say and how to say it... and then had them run for dog catcher.

Temo Figueroa, the son and nephew of UFW activists, and a UCLA graduate, worked as a union organizer before joining the Obama campaign as its national field director. According to Figueroa, most presidential campaigns take volunteers off the street and put them to work immediately on the "grunt" work of the campaign -- making phone calls, handing out leaflets, or walking door to door.

The Obama campaign, he says, is different. Before it sent its volunteers into the fields, he explained, the campaign required them to go through several days of intense four-day training sessions called "Camp Obama." The sessions were led by Ganz and other experienced organizers, including Mike Kruglik, one of Obama's organizing mentors in Chicago. Potential field organizers were given an overview of the history of grassroots organizing techniques and the key lessons of campaigns that have succeeded and failed.

Like Bird in South Carolina, Wicks is looking past the February primary to potential long-term impacts of the campaign. "We're training a new kind of political campaign organizer that speaks to who Barack is," she observes two weeks before the election. "We're trying to create community organizers out of our activists. There's so much energy and enthusiasm. It's just a matter of providing the infrastructure, the technology, the training, and the tools, and they feel part of a larger movement."