Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

One of the most striking things about the Obama campaign has been, from the beginning, its strong commitment to not just play lip service to the "ground game", aka grassroots community organizing. It has been the source of much of his strength, and is really the reason he was able to knock off the Clinton coalition in the primaries, and is the force behind the GOTV movement he intends to ride to the presidency. As someone who has believed in a cornerstone rather than pinnacle approach to change, this was one of the things that brought me into Barack's fold early on.

Zack Exley has a much linked to post on The Huffington Post in which he goes behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden campaign, to see just what being an Obama volunteer means. What he found is a well organized, and more importantly, well motivated team of volunteers bringing members of their community into the movement. What is most telling for me is the level of commitment the campaign invested into training these people, and not wasting their time. That has been a failure of so called "grassroots movements" of the past. Not this time.

Fantastic quote:

Then, at the end of our meeting, my neighborhood team leader, Jennifer Robinson, totally unprompted, told me: "I'm a different person than I was six weeks ago." I asked her to elaborate later. She said, "Now, I'm really asking: how can I be most effective in my community? I've realized that these things I've been doing as a volunteer organizer—well, I'm really good at them, I have a passion for this. I want to continue to find ways to actively make this place, my community, a better place. There's so much more than a regular job in this—and once you've had this, it's hard to go back to a regular job. I'm asking now: Can I look for permanent work as an organizer in service of my community? And that's a question I had not asked myself before the campaign. It never occurred to me that I could even ask that question."

For those like me who are rife with Kennedy comparisons, this is could have been a personal respose to "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country".