An Ocean of Heart

An ocean of heart. An ocean, with waves cresting toward November 4.

I am not one who has ever before been involved in electoral politics. I've often pooh-poohed it, and argued that the real work of democracy actually happens day-to-day in neighborhoods and communities, not every four years in isolated polling booths. But I felt impelled to get involved this time: I attended "Camp Obama" in Brooklyn in mid-September, and went to the western suburbs of Philadelphia for the final two weeks of the campaign. These reflections are an effort to communicate some of what I saw and felt during that remarkable campaign. What the campaign did was to organize neighborhood and community work into a vast network, in which all could feel part of a larger whole. And it worked! We became a community—even if only virtually—a reality that became all the more clear on the days of and after the election.

Indeed, it was the organization that was so amazing. As David Carr noted in the New York Times ("Obama's Personal LinkedIn," Monday, Nov. 10, B1, B6), the Obama campaign managed to combine social networking with local organizing to create an astonishingly powerful network. It was that combination of decentralization and discipline that was both so powerful and so unusual. It was as if the strategists yoked anarchist/ decentralist processes to conventional electoral politics—and, somehow, the hybrid not only functioned, it flourished.

It started with official voter registration records. From these came the ever-present (and oft-changing) call sheets that listed names, telephone numbers, addresses, and demographic information (age, sex, and party ID, if known). These could be printed out daily at campaign offices for use by canvassers and phone-bankers; but (and here was surely an important innovation), they could also be accessed through the website (my. barackobama.com), complete with "scripts" for talking to voters, and instructions for immediate reporting of the results. During the "identification and persuasion" stages that were ending the week before the election, the sheets contained scales from "strong Obama" through "undecided" to "strong McCain," with Nader, Barr, and others beyond that, so that callers could mark where the person stood. There were also spaces to indicate what issues were most salient to the undecided. Similar sheets were used for the door-to-door canvassing that had taken place in the weeks and months prior to the election, on evenings and weekends. And every night, the information from those sheets (whether gathered in campaign offices or in private homes) was fed back into the computer, so that campaign offices had continuing records of people's political leanings, and could keep in touch with new and/or undecided voters. This would fully pay off in the final days before November 4.

A few images from PA that one would have to multiply thousands of times in order to get a sense of what this campaign created and nurtured: Some of the players: Sam, who could almost always be found sitting slumped over his computer (often with a cell phone in one hand), who ran the office with the steadiness, good humor, unflappability, and smarts of Barack Obama himself. Marian, who took time off from her studies of Chinese to run the volunteer part of the operation with focus and gentle discipline, and who kept up her energy with periodic infusions of chocolate. Andrew, who took off the first semester of his junior year at Tufts to work on the campaign, and was ready and willing to go anywhere and do anything. Matt, "organizer extraordinaire," smart and driven, ready and able, problem solver. Katelyn, who came virtually every day from Bryn Mawr. Chris, who somehow managed to continue his junior year in high school while spending hours every day at the office, and organizing much of the tech end of the operation. Most days—even when it was cold and rainy—he came to the office in shorts and flip-flops; but on Election Day he looked quite spiffy in slacks and a button-down shirt.

Stu and Livie and Linda, who came from...