I am truly in awe of the level of organization and the superiority of campaign financing of the Obama campaign and the Democratic/Progressive side of this struggle this year.
I live in New York City which is a shoe in for Obama so sadly there's not much to do physically right here. But last night, I went to a Moveon.org call party, in which we called self identified progressive people (ie Moveon members) in Cleveland, asking them to help with get out the vote efforts on the ground there, like calls and canvassing.
I was pretty much in awe at the level of organization that the Obama campaign and its allies like Moveon have achieved. The hosts were a retired couple in Middle Village, Queens, and the callers were all volunteers, like me, whom Moveon had contacted by email to ask if we wanted to attend a call party. The group was as diverse as you would expect in Queens -- which demographers consider to be perhaps the most ethnically diverse county in the United States.
Our host, I'll call her R---, was a retired grade school teacher, who, thanks to her years of experience teaching first graders, made the computerized calling list system incredibly easy to understand. A young "hipster" type couple who had done this several times before mentioned how impressed they were at how volunteer feedback from prior call parties had streamlined and improved the system. They also mentioned how impressed they were as prior hosts of call parties how Moveon managed to organize conference calls with hundreds or even thousands of hosts.
We each went through several sheets of computerized calling lists, and although the yield seemed low (I got about 4 people to volunteer out of maybe 50 calls), as I'll explain below, the collective impact was enormous. Moreover, many people who could not volunteer said they were definitely going to vote or had voted for Obama.
The call system also had us report back to a computerized system on each call to make sure we don't double call (and annoy) anyone and so that the names will be passed on to Moveon volunteers in Ohio who will actually deploy these volunteers in voter canvassing efforts on the ground.
Again, I was pretty awed by the organizational effort and use of technology.
I especially think we need to take a moment to think deeply about how much gratitude we owe our party chairman, the good Doctor, Howard Dean, who pioneered the use of distributed technology, especially the internet, to bring people together, to gather small donations into a massive progressive war chest, and to
re-launch the Democrats as a 50 State Party!
This morning, I found this email from last night's host R---. I think it perfectly captures how the Obama campaign, progressive organizations and the Democratic Party have managed to harness our tiny individual efforts into a gigantic national effort:
Dear fellow activist,
It was such a pleasure to meet each of you tonight that I wish I could write individual notes instead of this group one. My husband and I were both so impressed by what good, sincere, unselfish and patriotic people we were honored to have under our roof this evening. Thank you not only for what you did for Obama but for what you did for us all.
I thought you would like to know that
we collectively gathered 19 Cleveland volunteers - a number that may not sound like much until you visualize each one going out and connecting in person with several dozen of their neighbors, etc. That's how grassroots works and that's how Obama works!
And just so you can see how your efforts really add up, the MoveOn site shows a running tally of parties thrown nationwide tonight.
Are you ready for this? 234,501 and still counting! If each one identified 19 volunteers, as you did you're looking at 4,455,519 contacted MoveOn members!
When my head clears from these dizzying numbers,
I get so moved by what we Americans can do when we work united, and I know we will never forget the memory of having been part of this historic effort. In whatever way you acknowledge a higher power, may I urge you to ask that these efforts will bear fruit next Tuesday.
Before I sign off, it occurs to me that you might have time to make just a few more calls from home on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, am or pm.
If so, log onto
http://pol.moveon.org/obama/teams/ and find out if you can give one more push.
Gratefully,
R--- and J---
Yes we can !
PS: The party total has now reached 237,948 !
<end quote>
So if R---'s back of the envelope calculation is right, it's possible that 4 million additional people will each be calling and knocking on doors to get out the vote -- just from what happened last night! And if each of those 4 million people gets out 2 or three voters, think of the multiplier effect.
And we will be calling tonight, and tomorrow night and the night after that!
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