The following piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here.
Saturday evening around 6, I walk into The Ambassador, a bar on Geary Street in San Francisco, to introduce myself to the Obama folk there and to check out the San Francisco kick-off of Generation Obama (GO). The invitation on the Barack Obama web site reads, "Join us for the Generation Obama Kick-Off in San Francisco. Chris Young from the Obama campaign will join us to speak about GO SF after a conference call with Senator Obama. Generation Obama/GO is a national grassroots arm of the Obama campaign...." In hopes that someone from the national campaign will attend the event and inform me of the Obama campaign's organization and intentions for my state, I forego what I hope will be only the first hour of a Giants-Brewers game. My husband has field-level tickets for my birthday, and I'm planning to meet him at SBC Park. I know that Chris Young may be a no-show after speaking with an Obama volunteer, Susan Pfeifer, earlier in the day at the Obama table at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market.
Indeed, Chris Young "has been called down to southern California." I'm not disappointed, however, because Brent Messenger, a focused young guy fashionably turned-out in narrow jeans and a pin-striped suit jacket, takes his place. "I work for Buffy Wicks," he says, shaking my hand. (Buffy Wicks is the Western Regional Field Director for the Obama campaign.) Quickly, Mr. Messenger returns to a conversation about the United Farm Workers -- something about the UFW "starting the most comprehensive strategy ever," which the Obama Campaign is adopting. I've come into this conversation in medias res; my immediate reaction is surprise -- I haven't heard mention of the United Farm Workers in years.
Over the next two hours, I'm able to snatch pieces of Mr. Messenger's time (he's a busy man, with more important people than me to talk to) and, in the process, I get an overview of the Obama campaign's plans for California. Brent Messenger is the first paid Obama operative I've met and, in his role as one of the chief California organizers, he says several things that get me thinking. First, however, while waiting for opportunities to speak with him, I talk with several of the 25 Obama folk along the bar. Over the course of the evening, three men, in three different conversations, are quick to tell me that they are really for Kucinich. All, however, are setting out to work for Obama, so I conclude that realism has won out over idealism with them. One gentleman, a congressional district organizer, says "the race will be over if he waits three more weeks." He is exasperated by the slowness, as he perceives it, with which the Obama campaign has committed money to primary efforts in California. "We need fiscal input and phone banks. Where's the office in San Francisco? Clinton has an office." He goes on to say that he needs money to keep volunteers working in the part of the district that is his responsibility; without money ("you can't expect people to use their own cell phones"), volunteers will disappear.
A little after 7, Brent Messenger breaks away from his one-on-ones and talks to the group of 25 as a whole. He says a bit about himself: that he's been with the campaign for six months, that he'd been an organizer with MoveOn.org, that he'd just done Camp Obama both in San Francisco and Burbank. "Now it's time to take ownership of this campaign on a deeper level," Messenger says. He goes on to explain how the state of California is broken down into congressional districts, and how the Obama campaign will take those CDs and break them down further into sections, precincts, neighborhoods, and, "God-willing," blocks. This is an overview, he says, of the strategy to win the Democratic primary in California. "No campaign has ever run a campaign like this," Brent Messenger says. "This is truly ground-breaking."
"Don't pay attention to the polls," Messenger says, with a dismissive gesture. "They're talking to my mom and dad -- not people like some in the room who may not have voted in all the last elections. Don't buy that hype," he says. "We're kicking it off right now." He mentions the 12,000 people at the Obama rally in Oakland earlier in the year, and how 6,000 of them have signed up to be volunteers. He mentions the Obama house parties. He mentions the Obama campaign's San Francisco office, which is opening next week. He commends the people here in the bar for being "committed to change," and I realize that informally he has just formally launched San Francisco GO. I wonder if the announcement about the San Francisco office will calm the qualms of the organizer I heard earlier.
Before I leave, I get a final moment alone with Brent Messenger. He tells me, "Nobody has ever attempted to run a legitimate field campaign in California." He seems not so much fired-up as quietly determined. In him I sense a reservoir of discipline and resolve. Again he mentions the organization of the United Farm Workers as a template (my word) for the Obama campaign in California.
Taxiing to the ballpark, I mull over two things I've learned about the California Obama campaign. First, the video for the Obama House Parties, which I had just seen in the bar, talks about Barack Obama's graduation from Columbia University but doesn't mention the fact that he attended Occidental College first and later transferred. Since Occidental is in California, I see this as a missed opportunity. Possibly an East Coast elite shaped the content of the video, but Barack Obama himself, despite his graduation from Columbia and Harvard, is not such an elite. Secondly, and more importantly, I worry about this enthusiasm for the United Farm Workers.
I think I know from whence this connection with the United Farm Workers has come. Earlier in the day, in my conversation with Susan Pfeifer at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, I had asked her if she had gone to Camp Obama. Indeed she had, and she had found it inspiring (her word). She told me all about Marshall Ganz at San Francisco Camp Obama. The name rang a bell with me, but only faintly, so she gave me the Ganz life story, about how he had quit Harvard with only a semester to go in order to work for Cesar Chavez and Bobby Kennedy; how Ganz had returned to Harvard many years later to get his degree; and how Ganz is now a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Marshall Ganz, teaching field organizing and community organization at Camp Obama, made a strong impression on Susan Pfeifer. Clearly, Ganz has made an impression on Brent Messenger, too.
Since I was living in Berkeley during the late 60s, I remember Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta well. I went to many a rally for the farm workers and put many a bill into a mason jar for the cause. I chivvied my parents back in Tennessee to quit buying grapes, and, eventually, they did. At the time of the table grapes boycott, Brent Messenger had probably not yet been born. Therefore, he may not fully appreciate how much time it took for the organization and spread of that message about grape-picking to result in a successful boycott. It took years. Barack Obama does not have years. Here in California he has five months. Moreover, the UFW was unable to sustain and build on the success of their hard-won solidarity around the grape pickers. Betrayals, lawsuits, violence, and loss of membership followed. Therefore, I will be interested to see where the invocation of the ghost of the United Farm Workers leads the Obama Campaign. Is there a secret about community organizing to be unearthed from the history of the UFW? Or is this a summoning forth of the spirit of dreamy romanticism?
The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here.