1. 26 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 12/13/0 8
If you are young and hungry to change the world,
no place is better than Washington. Other capitals
were grafted onto rivers and ports, indebted to the
commerce, industry, and history that preceded
them. Washington was hacked out of swamps and
farms for the sole purpose of doing politics. n And
although politics tends to get a bad rap around
election time, even politics as usual is, at heart, an
Corine Hegland■■
Politics
awesome endeavor. It is the remarkable arena for reconciling the cacophonous voic-
es of “the people,” whoever they may be, without resorting to guns. “We dicker and
compromise, and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a
tedious amount of talk, we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without get-
ting anybody’s head bashed in. That’s politics,” Robert Heinlein, the great American
science fiction writer, once observed.
As Washington prepares for the arrival of President-elect Obama, many of its deni-
zens are speculating about what changes his mailing list of 13 million names will
make in the political arena. Obama has said little on the subject, although his cam-
paign’s post-election task force has called for his supporters to organize “House Par-
ties for Change” this weekend to talk about what they would like to do next.
Some of Washington’s interest is professional: Obama’s list reaches into every con-
gressional district in the land, and the Obama campaign has nearly $30 million left,
before paying taxes and outstanding expenses.
Other speculation is merely professional envy. Everybody here speaks for some
portion of the American people; the more people you have, the more doors open
as you go about trying to make change. Thousands of groups—including AARP; the
AIDS Research Alliance of America; the Alliance for Justice; the American Associa-
The success of the Obama
campaign is a sign that civic
participation is on the rise again
after decades of decline. And the
community-organizer-elect
understands how to tap into it.
BeyondHis
E-mailList

2. 12/13/0 8 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 27
tion of Airport Executives; the American Federation of Teachers;
the American Frozen Food Institute; the American Liver Founda-
tion; and the American Quarter Horse Association—are already
pursuing Washington agendas to fix America, and that’s barely a
portion of the first letter in the alphabet. What, those collections
of voices wonder, will the new guy do?
Most of the speculation, though, tends to ignore what Obama
did, and so misses what he is about to do. Obama did not build
a list of 13 million names—including 3 million donors, 2 million
volunteers, and 1 million get-out-the-vote troops—by asking peo-
ple to write letters or e-mails to Washington. Instead, he deployed
a small army of field, regional, and state organizers to meet with
local—and, in the case of environmental and other such affinity
groups, virtual—supporters. He asked them to talk to one another
and to their neighbors about why they supported him, and about
what they could do to help him get elected. His campaign deftly
wielded technology as an adjunct to these face-to-face meetings,
pushing information out and inviting recipients to connect not
with campaign headquarters, but with their neighbors.
Obama, in other words, built an old-fashioned movement in
an old-fashioned way. What he told his supporters, and what his
supporters told Chicago then, or Washington now, wasn’t nearly
as important as what they told one another. He provided a struc-
ture, set the tone, and validated their work. They formed their
own communities, and in post-election surveys and interviews,
they said they wanted those communities to continue.
And that is what Obama appears to be doing with his 13 mil-
lion names. Last weekend, his state organizers huddled in Chi-
cago for a meeting; earlier this week, his field organizers began
getting phone calls: Would you be interested in possibly coming
back to work? Not for Obama, exactly—the president-elect will
soon be responsible for the free world, two small children, and
one puppy; he won’t have time to lead a dedicated movement—
but for what you started, an association of communities that share
Obama’s vision?
OFA 2.0, which is the initiative’s working title (adapted from
Obama for America, the campaign committee), is still taking
form: Funding is undecided, specifics are scarce, and focus will
be shaped in part by this weekend’s house parties. “No struc-
tural decisions have been made,” said campaign spokesman Ben
LaBolt. “The campaign has assembled a team of organizers from
battleground states to work with our volunteers and allies on the
next steps for the organization.” But the idea, apparently, is to
provide paid staff support for communities organizing not just
around Obama’s legislative agenda but also around state and
local initiatives. Its vision is no less than a “national, grassroots-
driven renewal of civic engagement,” according to an account
that a California Obama organizer posted to his blog, which
sounds very audacious—until you realize that both grassroots
and national community organizing groups have spent the past
few years quietly building the infrastructure for renewal.
Community Values
Last week, several thousand joyful community leaders from 30
or so states piled into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton for
a boisterous conference titled “Realizing the Promise: A Forum
on Community, Faith, & Democracy.” Melody Barnes, who will
lead Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, and Valerie Jarrett, his
longtime friend and newly appointed White House senior advis-
er, both attended, a nod that conference organizers frankly admit
they would “never” have gotten in the past. The other attend-
n ELECTION NIGHT: Barack
Obama’s victory was not
just the end of a political
campaign; it was the
culmination of a two-year,
grassroots-community-
organizing effort.
getty images/Anthony Jacobs

3. 28 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 12/13/0 8
ees even had some debate about just what to do with the pair.
“Typically, when we have politicians up [to a meeting], it is ex-
tremely scripted, pressing for commitments on particular things,”
explained Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for
Community Change, which co-sponsored the conference with the
Gamaliel Foundation, the group that many years ago hired the
young Obama as a community organizer. In this case, the groups
made a conscious decision to let Jarrett and Barnes simply speak.
It was, after all, only a month after the election, and the Obama
team still seems to “get it” on a host of issues.
More important, community organizers are working out what,
exactly, you do when you suddenly get your long-demanded seat
at the table. “Community organizing grew up in a period in which
poor people and people of color were disregarded by policy mak-
ers. As a result, it adopted a tone of confrontation,” Bhargava
said. If Obama isn’t going to ignore the poor, then the “tactics
and tone have to shift dramatically to engage in a constructive
back and forth about how to solve the country’s problems.”
The local groups that the CCC and the
Gamaliel Foundation work with were not
part of the Obama campaign; their non-
profit status precludes partisan politics.
Many of them, however, are eager to reach
the Obama volunteers and have developed
local networks that are likely to connect with
OFA 2.0 in one form or another.
For nearly 30 years, Republicans have kept
their multifaceted campaign networks alive
through churches, religious groups, the Na-
tional Rifle Association, and anti-abortion
groups. Democrats have had no comparable
infrastructure, except perhaps the shrink-
ing labor movement. The community-or-
ganizing model that Gamaliel and the CCC
teach was born amid the rough-and-tumble
machine politics of 1930s Chicago, where
getting involved in elections could only lead
to corruption, and so decades passed before
community organizers saw much point in pursuing elec-
toral politics. As a result of this divide, Democrats devel-
oped a curiously fractured body of supporters, with sparse
social ties among their constituent bases.
“Community organizing and electoral politics used
to have one-night stands, but they’d never talk about it
in the morning,” Bhargava said. “Today, they’re talking
they might get hitched. If we can [combine] the best of
community-organizing relationships and commitment
to issues with the scale and urgency of electoral politics,
there could be a resurgence of citizen engagement in a
transformative and sustained way.”
Consider, for example, the Rev. Milton Wells, who made
a 14-hour bus trip from Kalamazoo, Mich., to attend the
Promise gathering. In addition to pastoring Open Door
Ministries, an affiliate of the Church of God in Christ,
Wells coordinates Kalamazoo’s prisoner re-entry pro-
gram. He also helps to lead a youth-violence-prevention
program, the county’s poverty reduction initiative, a local
interfaith advocacy group, and a neighborhood associa-
tion. He is the type of man who attends city council meet-
ings and gets called upon to do most anything anyone
wants done, and he is so much larger than life that addressing
him as anything but “Reverend” or “Sir” seems unthinkable.
“We’re here,” he said, “just to ensure that our voices are heard
and some promises that were made are kept.” Wells expects Obama
to fix jobs, health care, and the rights of immigrants; he, himself,
will be returning to work in Kalamazoo. “I’m a firm believer that
we have to participate in our miracle,” he said. “What I have to
do with my communities is to continue to keep them engaged. It
wasn’t enough to get them to the polls to vote; now, we have to do
our part, and the elected officials have to do their part.”
If you are struck that a black pastor from Kalamazoo, where just
4 percent of the population is foreign-born, would include immi-
gration reform among his top three priorities, then you are sens-
ing the political change recognized and shaped by the Obama
campaign and by community organizers. Democratic supporters
are traditionally sorted into constituent groups, each of which
is presumed to have parochial interests—the black community,
the Hispanic community, labor, youth, urban college-educated
whites, and so on.
From the start of his campaign, however,
Obama clearly articulated a very different
framework, one that transcended and uni-
fied constituent interests. “Alongside our
famous individualism, there’s another ingre-
dient in the American saga, a belief that we
are all connected as one people,” he said in
his 2004 convention speech. “It’s what allows
us to pursue our individual dreams yet still
come together as a single American family:
‘E pluribus unum’—out of many, one.”
TheCCCtooktheepluribusunumframe-
work and turned it into the Campaign for
Community Values, which it launched with
the December 2007 Heartland Presidential
Forum attended by four Democratic presi-
dential candidates, including Obama. More
than 80 values forums have followed across
the country.
Community organizing and■■
electoral politics were always
separate endeavors, but
they may come together in the
Obama era.
Barn-raising cooperation■■
runs every bit as deep in the
American psyche as does
boot-strap individualism.
But keeping this■■ new
ground game active and
inspired is a difficult challenge.
Civic Renewal■■
Obama’s Ohio primary campaign featured One Million for Change,
a successful push to knock on 1 million doors before March 4.
Buckeye State Canvasser■■
gettyimages/EricThayer

4. 12/13/0 8 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 29
“The conservative movement was very good at talking about
individualism, and there are strains there that everybody can
respond to,” said Gabe Gonzalez, the campaign’s director. “But
community values has strains that everybody can respond to, too.
If you want to engage in deep structural change, it is no longer
possible to engage simply at the level of issues. You have to en-
gage in values.”
The community values campaign’s priorities are health care;
immigration; and worker justice, which encompasses job cre-
ation, fair wages, and worker rights. So, for example, the CCC
and Health Care for America Now, a large advocacy coalition of
grassroots and professional groups that some CCC affiliates are
involved in, talk about health care not in terms of individual
rights but in the context of community benefits. “All of us benefit
from healthy communities, where we all have access to afford-
able, quality health care from a provider of our choice, at the
time we need it, at a cost we can afford,” the coalition’s mission
statement declares.
Similarly, the group doesn’t talk about the legality or individual
rights of immigrants; it instead discusses the community-level im-
pact of a broken immigration system. Some time ago, Gonzalez
was speaking to white union members in southern Illinois, who
would not generally be considered sympathetic to immigrants.
“You have to understand,” Gonzalez told them, “these people live
in fear that men with guns are going to knock on their door one
night and take them away. Many years ago, it was union men who
lived in fear of that knock.”
One of the old-timers stirred. “It wasn’t,” the union veteran
said, “all that many years ago.”
A Community History
Obama’s appeal to community, in addition to individual, val-
ues, has a strong historical basis; the “socialist” charges lobbed at
him are remarkable from a long-term perspective. Barn-raising
cooperation runs every bit as deep in the American psyche as
does bootstrap individualism; more than 150 years ago, Alexis de
Tocqueville was astounded by Americans’ propensity to join to-
gether in common causes.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions con-
stantly form associations,” he wrote in the 1830s, continuing to
detail his amazement at the anti-alcohol associations, for exam-
ple. “The first time I heard in the United States that a hundred
thousand men had bound themselves publicly to abstain from
spirituous liquors, it appeared to me more like a joke than a seri-
ous engagement, and I did not at once perceive why these tem-
perate citizens could not content themselves with drinking water
by their own firesides.”
The century-long temperance movement is usually offered as a
cautionary tale, its leaders having lost popular support after their
national victory and witnessed the amendment’s repeal just 13
years later. But prohibition was only one of many policies that
grew out of the membership-based associations of the 19th and
20th centuries. Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and
sociology at Harvard University, has traced the roots of much of
American social policy back to those federated social groups.
Before Social Security came pensions for Union Civil War veter-
ans, with generous definitions for “Union” and “veteran.” Before
welfare came mothers’ pensions for needy widows, settlement
houses, and a federal Children’s Bureau, called into existence by
women’s groups whose members couldn’t yet vote. Labor fought
for workplace safety, minimum wages, five-day workweeks, eight-
hour workdays, and unemployment insurance, and later put
its muscle toward getting the New Deal through Congress. The
American Legion drafted, lobbied for, and helped implement
the GI Bill.
Then, sometime around the mid-1960s, the associations
changed. Young Americans stopped joining the old groups, start-
ing a decline in civic engagement that Robert Putnam, another
Harvard professor, eventually described as the “bowling alone”
phenomenon—a reference to the rise in individual bowlers and
the decline in bowling leagues.
Young people of that era had reasons for avoiding their par-
ents’ associations, many of which were racist, sexist, or reliant
upon the volunteer time of women who didn’t work outside the
home, but the groups they created were markedly different from
their predecessors. The old stalwarts—the Elks, the American
Legion, the United Methodist Women, the Veterans of Foreign
Wars, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the like—
were based on social memberships that tended to ignore class
divisions and to embrace broad agendas.
The new associations, on the other hand, tended to be issue-
specific and were usually aimed at Washington. The change be-
gan with the civil-rights movement, according to Skocpol, where
impatient, leadership-based groups such as the Southern Chris-
tian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordi-
nating Committee outpaced the more sedate membership-based
NAACP, and then spread into the women’s movement, the envi-
ronmental movement, the anti-war movement, and the citizens
movements. The result, Skocpol observed, is “a new civic America
largely run by advocates and managers without members, and
marked by yawning gaps between immediate involvements and
larger undertakings.”
A few years ago, though, the pendulum began to swing back,
as a new generation of young people was drawn into communi-
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all
dispositions constantly form associations.
”—Alexis de Tocqueville
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5. 30 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 12/13/0 8
ty and political work. “Political participation patterns for youth
went down for 30 years and then suddenly, around 2001, it looks
like a reverse checkmark, which has gone constantly up for the
last several years,” said Tom Sander, Putnam’s research director
at the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, an initia-
tive aimed at increasing civic trust between groups. “Some people
think it’s Obama. We think Obama was an ideal candidate to seize
upon this, but the youth interest in politics was dry kindling wait-
ing to be lit.”
Skocpol agreed: “Young people had started to get more in-
volved, but this campaign was a real jump. The long-term tradi-
tion of American civic organization is based upon a federated
model with big national centers but also lots of local activity; I
think that with the new technology, the Obama campaign man-
aged to invent a new model of that.” Both research and experi-
ence shows that the key to getting people involved in politics and
community activism is to ask them, she said. Political leaders who
validate that asking, who say, “We need to take social responsibil-
ity,” take it to a new level.
The Michigan Experience
Andrew Virden, a field organizer for Obama, came into the
campaign in the usual way: Friends told him about the rising
politician; he took a look and was smitten. The Minnesota na-
tive had never done politics before, but he waited six hours in
line to see Obama speak and then signed up for e-mails from
the campaign. One of those e-mails invited supporters to apply
for an organizing fellowship; he did, and in June 2008, Virden
and another fellow were dropped into Marquette, Mich., a small
college town on the conservative Upper Peninsula of Michigan
that is not accustomed to having its own
presidential campaign staff—much less
two.
Previous campaigns deployed one field
organizer to cover the entire Upper Pen-
insula, said Jack LaSalle, the former chair
of the Marquette County Democrats; the Obama cam-
paign sent 10 in all, much to LaSalle’s delight. He man-
aged a successful statehouse campaign this year, and the
Obama staff and volunteers were generous with their
support for down-ticket candidates.
“Everybody thinks that by purchasing media, they can
overlook the field campaign,” LaSalle said. “It’s had the
long-term effect of cheapening the political process, be-
cause to the extent there’s no participation or activity in
the precinct, people participate less. And participation
matters because the tools we see used in the campaign
are not strictly campaign tools any more than they are la-
bor-organizing or community-organizing tools: They are
how human beings organize to work with each other.”
Virden wound up spending five months in the UP,
learning as he went along. “It was interesting,” he said. In
the beginning, “we weren’t given a list of people to talk to
or call. We were told our job was to meet with people and
sit down over coffee to talk about why you’re involved with
Barack Obama, why they are interested in Barack Obama,
and who they might know or who might help. The point
of the one-on-one was to get a house meeting,” he said,
“and the point of the house meeting was to get the host
to gather friends and family in their home and have an
audience where you say, ‘I’m with the Obama campaign and this is
what we’re doing. Are you interested in helping?’ ”
So, for example, after Judy Stock signed up to get an Obama
yard sign at the Dickinson County Fair, Virden called to ask if she
wanted to get involved in the campaign.
“No,” she said. “I just want a sign.”
“We’re having an organizational meeting,” Virden replied. “If
you came to that, I could give you the sign there.”
Stock didn’t much want to go. She believed in Obama, hav-
ing read both of his books and reviewed his website before ask-
ing for the sign, but she is not a joiner. She and her husband,
Doug, used to go to the Elks Lodge after work, where Doug was
the Exalted Ruler from 1990 to 1992, but now that they’re older,
they like coming home after work, and the lodge can get awfully
smoky. The Stocks own a balloon store in Iron Mountain, a town
of 8,000, and Judy is shy outside of work.
On the other hand, she knew the woman hosting the meeting,
and she figured that showing up might be the only way to get her
yard sign. She went, and was dismayed to hear Virden ask every-
body to give their name and reason for attending.
“It’s a good thing I was at the end of the line,” she said. “I had time
to get my thoughts together: I don’t like to draw attention to my-
self.” Afterward, Virden handed her the sign and a sheet of phone
numbers: Would she like to try making some calls for Obama?
She practiced the calls in her kitchen before dialing. “I made a
couple of calls, which wasn’t bad, so I made a couple more calls,”
she said. “It was interesting: I found a lot of people wanted to
talk to me. If they had questions, I answered if I could; and if I
couldn’t, we tried to find the answers.”
Then Virden asked Stock if she wanted to knock on doors.
She didn’t, but she agreed to walk with
him as he knocked on doors one Satur-
day morning. “He did most of the talk-
ing at first, then he said, ‘OK, you can
try this,’ ” she said. “Once you get past
the first one, it’s OK. I met a lot of dif-
The decades-long temperance movement is a classic
example of American grassroots organizing techniques
that led to a national legislative change.
Temperance Movement■■
gettyimages/TopicalPressAgency
n NationalJournal.com
Read more about the intersection of politics and
the Web at NationalJournal.com/webpolitics.

6. 12/13/0 8 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 31
ferent people, heard a lot of good stories, and bad stories too.
I lost a pants size. Andrew said that was cool—he was very cool.
He got me fired up. I don’t know if I could have done it without
his motivation.”
In October, with the Michigan vote secure, the campaign sent
Virden to Indiana. By that time, he had built a Michigan volunteer
base that didn’t need him anymore but misses him just the same.
“We are not in an area where we are really very organized,”
said Millie Hofer, a retired nurse in Menominee County who
joined the Obama campaign after a friend gave Virden her name.
“Andrew, when he came, he pulled us together. He was like a
leader for us, and I don’t think we have the leadership right now,
which is kind of sad.”
Like Stock, Hofer had never before knocked on doors to ask
people about candidates or issues. “I was never asked,” she said.
“The only small comparison: We have every year a festival, and the
Democratic Party had a booth there to sell ice cream and pop for
fundraising. I worked in that booth during the days when they had
the festival.”
Hofer’s top priority is universal health care. Having grown up
in Germany and worked as a nurse in Michigan, she has seen first-
hand the benefits of a universal system and the dangers of limited
access to care. It’s what she talked about when she knocked on
doors for Obama, and she would like to help him achieve it, but
she doesn’t know how. “I would not know which avenue to pursue
in the area where I live,” she said. “The only contact I always had
was with the local Democratic Party. They are very nice people,
but there was never a way to reach out any further.”
Both Hofer and Stock say they miss the people and the en-
ergy from the campaign and would like to stay involved some-
how. They get regular e-mails and updates from the Obama team,
which is nice, and they saw the invitation to hold a House Party
for Change this weekend, but neither county is organizing one:
December wasn’t a good month for the volunteers, but they have
all promised to stay in touch.
“All-volunteer organizations need to be nurtured by a staff per-
son,” LaSalle noted.
Virden is attending a house party in Minneapolis, where he
now resides; he thinks he would like to work for Obama, either in
or out of Washington.
Going Forward
Back in Washington, at the Renewing the Promise Forum, Na-
tional Public Radio analyst Juan Williams inadvertently outlined
the challenge that OFA 2.0 faces. He asked a panel discussing the
economic crisis for the “one thing” that community leaders in the
audience could do back home.
“We’re going to need massive doses of public works and infra-
structure, and we need to give money to people who are going
to spend it right now,” replied Lawrence Mishel, president of the
Economic Policy Institute,
Janice Johnson, chair of the Virginia Organizing Project, an-
swered, “We need to really get on the train and be sure that we
have a comprehensive health care plan that is set up according to
the guidelines in Health Care for America Now.”
“We need to stop prioritizing banks, bankers, and institutions
that believe in private profits but ask the public to pick up the bill
when things don’t go right,” responded the Rev. Kevin Turman,
president of the Gamaliel Foundation Council of Presidents.
“The second thing is, I think we need a Marshall Plan for our
people and for our neighborhoods.”
Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO,
declared, “We must ensure that we share in this prosperity, and
the way we could do that is workers in this country should have
the right to freely form and join unions.”
So, when asked what community leaders could do, Mishel,
Johnson, Turman, and Baker instead all immediately identified
things that Washington could do. Nobody suggested getting Mil-
lie Hofer out knocking on doors again to explain universal health
care. Nobody said it would be useful to invite Judy Stock to an
economic-revitalization meeting.
Granted, the presence of two Obama White House advisers
probably skewed the responses somewhat. All four of these activ-
ists are keenly aware of the power of the ground game, and they
have been working with Gamaliel; the CCC; funders; and local,
state, virtual, and national groups to build a new civic infrastruc-
ture that can carry them all forward.
But all of this is still new, and people are feeling their way for-
ward. “My personal opinion is that organizations may be overrely-
ing on the perceived change that comes from a leadership shift,”
said Bill Vandenberg, director of the Open Society Institute’s De-
mocracy and Power Fund. “But I increasingly see national organi-
zations realizing that they cannot be as useful advancing policy in
D.C. if they’ve got nothing on the ground, and I see local groups
realizing that it’s not enough to work locally, because their issues
intersect at the federal level as well.”
The future of Obama’s movement, in other words, doesn’t rely
on Obama, or even on whatever becomes of OFA 2.0. The future
of his movement will be determined by the many people who un-
derstand what it accomplished. If you want to change the world,
go to Washington; if you want to change Washington, you might
want to go next door and knock. n
chegland@nationaljournal.com
“Alongside our famous individualism,
there’s another ingredient in the American
saga, a belief that we are all
connected as one people.
”—Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention
gettyimages/SpencerPlatt