The Editor's Note:
Editors' Note: The decision to do these stories with undercover reporters using pseudonyms was made because we feel this is an important story, one the public needs to hear. It's also one that would have been exceedingly difficult to tell using traditional methods. It is the story of two campaigns in a make-or-break primary where messages are tightly controlled. All asterisked names have been changed to protect the privacy of people who did not know they were being reported on. For more on this, please see the Editor's Letter.
Now, Obama. [url=http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/ ... -volunteer]Linkage[/ur]My first task as a Hillary Clinton volunteer was to get past the campaign's dead-bolted front door. I began with a hearty knock, the kind you hear when a political canvasser is on your stoop. No answer. I dropped to two knees and peered into the space between the door and the thin rug. No lights. I put my ear to the door, and dialed the general number. Ring. Ring. Ring. "Hi, you've reached the Philadelphia office of Pennsylvanians for Hillary, our office is located at five two zero, North Delaware Avenue. ... "
At 9:20 a.m., I'd been at it for 25 minutes, walking the halls, making sure the door with the blue Hillary Clinton for President sign was actually the Hillary Clinton for President office. It was.
I sat on the floor and waited, hoping to fulfill what seemed like political responsibility, but what was also, I confess, journalistic curiosity: It was the first day of my assignment going undercover as a campaign volunteer.
When my editors put me up to this, I wanted to tackle some big questions: Would we Philadelphians truly be the "deciders" of a presidential primary? How does national politics operate on a local level? And who are these legendary Clintons, who draw both fanatical love and hate? I wanted to know these things in a truthful way, not through the spin of some campaign flack. But by 9:30 a.m., just a week after this office opened, my desire for knowing became much simpler: Where the hell were these people?
Ten minutes later, Marc*, a recent college grad and paid field organizer, showed up and took a seat across from me on the floor. "Maybe they're in a meeting in the back?" he said. Seven other staffers eventually trickled in. "The mayor's office would like a memo, detailing all of the appearances we'd like Mayor Nutter to do," a young guy in a gray blazer said into a cell phone. "You know, like what black radio stations to go on, what neighborhoods to appear in. Like two pages, OK?" We all stood in a circle around the door, staring at it. No one asked who I was. Someone eventually showed up with a key. "We gave out 20 of them yesterday," he said to no one in particular. "Where'd they all go?"
Once inside, I was asked to sign a volunteer log. My editor and I had done a random Google search for an Italian surname and came up with Vinci. Tom Vinci. I was handed a contribution form (donation: $0), and a piece of paper that asked if I would pledge to vote for Hillary Clinton (no).
I had no guilt about not pledging. I was about to give Hillary Clinton my time — and that was valuable enough. Even though Clinton's projected to win Pennsylvania, this city is not her turf: Polls suggest that Obama will remain competitive in the state because of Philadelphia. It was obvious that part of Clinton's strategy should be to draw away as many local votes as possible.
By the time my experiment ended, I volunteered 29 total hours between March 13 and April 3, a three-week span crucial for recruiting volunteers and defining the campaign's message in the city. It wasn't glamorous: Those hours were spent phone banking, making lawn signs and preparing venues for Chelsea Clinton's visibility events. Tom Vinci may not be real, but the votes he culled for the candidate are.
A campaign staffer took the forms. "Have a seat," she said. "What's your threshold of grunt work today?"
"Whatever," I said. "Bring it on."
She vanished into a room and came back with a black Nextel cell phone. I was to write down messages that came in the night before to the answering service.
The first was a hang-up. The second was someone who wanted to know if there was a field office in Pittsburgh. (Not yet.) The third was a hang-up. This was easy.
Things picked up by the eighth message. Just hours before, former U.S. Representative and Clinton fundraiser Geraldine Ferraro quit the campaign after she said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." An older man with a craggy voice wanted to tell someone that he found her departure preposterous. The answering machine listened.
"Obama's people bullied us at the caucus here," he said about an unspecified state. "People were scared, crying here, because Obama's people were taking over. ... What [Ferraro] said was nothing, they make everything racist." Click.
The 16th came from a woman obviously calling from downstairs. She was trying to get into the building the night before for the first Philly 4 Hillary meeting, but the door was locked. "Um, yes, we're downstairs, trying to get in to the meeting tonight," she said, calmly. "Can someone come in to open the door? Thank you."
Next was a call from a woman who heard a radio host call Clinton a whore on-air. "I just wanted you to know that," she said, sounding stunned. Next, a call from someone who said she was a "big donor" and couldn't get anyone to answer the phone in Philadelphia.
No. 19 was the locked-out woman again, sounding a bit more desperate: "Hello? We're still downstairs. Can someone come open the door? Hello? We're here for the meeting." Click.
A few more hang-ups. More Ferraro ranting. Another person called to propose a great "photo-op": Hillary Clinton paying a visit to the caller's hometown in ... Clinton County. "It'd be great!" she says.
And finally, the 23rd call:
"Hello? We're standing outside. Is someone there? Is the meeting here? Hellooo? Helloooooooooo?"
The modern-day Hillary Clinton campaign was born in the 1990s, a product of several events that began just before her husband won the presidency. These were years of harsh scrutiny for Hillary: first at the hands of Republicans during the election, then from Congress during her health-care reform push, then from the media during the Lewinsky scandal, and then from two salacious biographers.
Around the same time, MSNBC and Fox News began to change the way politicians delivered their message to voters. These big, detached cable stations replaced the ground-up, ultra-local style that was dominant in the decades before. Who the local ward leader supported or newspaper endorsed gave way to what the campaign manager said on CNN that afternoon.
Bill Clinton captured this idea perfectly in 1993. In their 2006 book The Way to Win, ABC News political director Mark Halperin and The Politico editor John F. Harris wrote that the president "teased reporters" soon after shutting down walk-in access to the press secretary's office: "You know why I can stiff you on the press conferences?" he quipped. "Because Larry King liberated me by giving me to the American people directly."
This strategy helped Bill win the White House, and has helped Hillary in the years since.
During her races to become a New York senator, Hillary embraced the focused, tight messages that cable stations allowed her to broadcast. She and her influential consultants managed the public's perception of her from the campaigns' highest levels, ensuring that the candidate remained likeable, and more importantly, electable, to everyday Joes like you and me. The tactics were executed in television studios and carefully scripted campaign stops across the country.
This was the opposite of the grassroots, Howard Deaniac-style race, where fervent just-out-of-college staffers and volunteers helped the candidate set the campaign's message and tone. In that same book, Halperin and Harris spent 80 pages vetting Hillary Clinton's chances in the political and media arenas should she run for president. "She would have no difficulty attracting first-rate policy staffers, Iowa [the first election-year caucus] field operatives, or advance men and women. ... She would never have a shortage of volunteers," they wrote. In six chapters, it's the only mention of what role Hillary's field operations would play in the future race. This was no mistake on the author's part: It's just not Hillary's style.
This became evident before I finished my first week at the headquarters. We volunteers were on our own as the staffers struggled to learn the city, get the computers online, and essentially wait for more staffers to show up. No one paid us much mind.
No one paid us mind, that is, until Clinton's supporters circulated an e-mail on Friday afternoon heralding the arrival of Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's political talk show Hardball. He was coming, the e-mail said, for an "off the record peek at our fast-growing outreach program in Pennsylvania.
"Our volunteer coordinator ... is spending a great deal of time recruiting volunteers to help out in the office on Sunday morning (we are asking folks to arrive 11 a.m.) so we can show Chris Matthews how much grassroots support we have here in Philly. ... It is important that we show Chris Matthews that there are a ton of young people and students supporting Hillary here in Philadelphia."
I drove to the office that Sunday, passing dozens of Obama supporters on Chestnut Street. I met an elderly couple, George* and Peggy*, in the elevator headed to the second floor.
"Are you going to Hillary Clinton's offices?" George asked.
"Yep."
"We heard Chris Matthews is going to be there!" said Peggy.
We walked in together and immediately got hit with the news: Matthews canceled; he wasn't coming. Upset, George and Peggy milled about the front of the room.
The office was packed with nearly 30 volunteers. There was the awkward chatter of mass-phone banking: the sound of a dozen people all repeating the same message — "I'm a local volunteer ... Hillary has spent the past 35 years fighting for American families ... real solutions to tackle the tough issues ... " at different intervals.
People wrote letters to the editor at computer terminals. One woman's missive: "I have traveled extensively around the globe and everyone I met asks, 'What happened to the U.S? We hope Sen. Hillary Clinton becomes the next president.'"
A few feet away, George and Peggy appeared defeated. "I guess that's that," said George. He took his wife's hand, and they left.
Two facts: Phone banking is volunteer hell. The Clinton campaign loves phone banking.
There was a sign, scrawled in marker on one of the walls, that read: "Make calls all the time." This was not a motto. It was an expectation.
So I wasn't surprised when Jonathan*, a volunteer team leader, gave me a cheery hello and handed me a black Nextel one Tuesday. I sat next to two college freshmen — James* and Kathy*, in town from New York to help the cause — and reviewed that day's pitch to the Republicans and Independent voters. (To make our calls, we dialed into a private service that rings the numbers for us. We just stayed on the line as the calls came in.)
At the end of each call, we pressed "star" and the corresponding number so the computer could tag each response. When one young man yelled "OBAMAAAAA" into the phone, I pressed "star, 4": definitely Obama. When one older woman said, "I wouldn't vote for her in a million years. The Clintons are hussies," I pressed "star, 5": not supporting Hillary or Republican. It was tedious.
I took a break and asked my two scarf-clad, bug-eye-sunglassed friends how their day was going.
"I just got one woman," said Kathy, looking aghast, "who called Hillary a bitch."
Kathy is a literature major in New York, and she actually drove to Philly for a party later that night. She fits into one of three dominant demographics of Hillary supporters I met: 1) the young college female, generally not from Philadelphia; 2) the middle-age to elderly woman, very likely a local; and 3) the awkward middle-aged man. Kathy stood out, though, because she was able to offer what seemed like a very powerful reason for supporting a candidate that "95 percent" of her college friends do not:
"I volunteered for Deval Patrick" — the Massachusetts governor who ran a reform-oriented campaign during the 2006 election — "because his message was amazing: how he was going to change the way things worked and all. It's one and a half years later and I don't see him doing anything. I don't see the reforms he promised.
"We were rabid volunteers," she said. "We went all out for him, the same way Obama's people are now. I just don't buy that mass rhetoric anymore. It's a letdown. Reform is complicated."
The one unifying sentiment among all Hillary volunteers, besides the obvious, is their disdain for Obama supporters, whom they see as both delusional and impossibly peppy. Clintonites don't hate them per se, they just think they're not smart enough to think on their own.
There's also an undercurrent of envy. Obama supporters were everywhere in Philadelphia, and in March and the first days of April, we were not. Tales came in from friends of friends: Obama's people get to organize their own rallies; they have local offices all over the city. This, of course, is the character of their campaign, and is the opposite of Clinton's 1990s-style campaign setup.
It was frustrating, and soon led to a semi-revolt at a Wednesday night Philly 4 Hillary meeting. A hodgepodge group arrived to talk about voter registration — the primary registration deadline was five days away — and meet a paid organizer.
The staffer talked about the importance of signing people up to vote. The volunteers said they'd heard enough of this, and wanted to actually do so.
"The other candidate's people are knocking at my door," said an older South Philadelphia woman who eventually just set up her own voter registration effort outside her local ShopRite. "When do we do that?"
We got our chance several days later. This is when I realized that most Hillary supporters I've actually met in this city have two main motivating factors: They're either supposed to support Hillary, or they're horrified of the alternative.
The former is easy to spot, and usually comes in the form of union support. In early April, Hillary made a speech at the Center City Sheraton to the AFL-CIO. About 75 people packed three corners at 17th and Race streets, and went ballistic when Hillary's motorcade arrived. Secret Service officers popped out of her SUV (including the hatchback) and led her to one of the corners for a quick handshake and smile before she was whisked into hotel's back door.
It was high-energy, and the staff tried to keep it going by asking us to rally on a nearby corner. Two Laborers slapped hands and hugged. "That's a day's work," they said to each other, and left, along with almost every other member. About 12 people, many of them staffers, remained.
The others, those who are motivated by fear, are harder to come across. On one of the first big weekends of canvassing, I asked to go into West Philly. "We avoid places," a staffer said, "where there are security concerns."
I was instead assigned to a team in the Northeast's Lawndale section, just a few blocks away from J.C. Melrose Country Club. It's a peaceful Latino and white community of working-class to upper-working-class people. There was no convincing to do, because everyone was already voting for "us." Josephine*, an older woman, and Mike*, a thirtysomething, spent most of the afternoon handing Hillary fliers to people who bought Clinton's cable-news campaign wholesale.
Of the 57 houses we scoured, the highlight was Vincent*, a Hellerman Street resident. "I'm not too sure of this, what's his name, Hussein Osama ... Obama," he said with a straight face, showing no indication he'd just confused a Saudi-born terrorist with a Hawaiian-born politician. "There's no way I'll vote for him. I think he's a poser."
Otherwise, one other person timidly said she was leaning Obama, but took a Hillary placard anyway. Two teenagers yelled, "Hillary Clinton can give me a blowjob" from their window on Robb Street. Everyone was just eager to get back to their Sunday afternoon.
This gave the three of us plenty of time to talk.
"Look, if you're going to go this far, and you're going to put all this money in, and you're going to get all these people's hopes up, why just quit?" Josephine said after we all admitted that Clinton's chances of getting the nomination are bleak. "If that were me, I'd take it all the way. Until I went down in flames."
Mike agreed. "Now that Bush will be gone soon, the bloggers need a new target," he said. "It's her. She's always been a target."
I tried to deflect the conversation to Obama's fervent volunteers. "You know, I see those kids all over my neighborhood," he said as we walked up the steps to the next house, "and the more I see them, well, I really think they're brainwashed."
The rally at Broad Street and Ridge Avenue was supposed to start at 4 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, I sat on the Divine Lorraine's abandoned steps and called headquarters, asking where everyone was.
"They left already," a staffer said over the phone. "They should be there."
There were commuters, homeless men and store owners milling about. I thought I'd have seen someone hopping around with a hand-painted "Honk for Hillary" sign. The only remotely political thing happening was the five or six members of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), asking people if they wanted to register for the general election.
Finally, at 5 p.m., I spotted a volunteer captain standing on the center island between Ridge and Fairmount avenues. He quickly looked around and returned the way he came, going north on Broad Street.
I followed him a few blocks to Cobre, a Latin-themed restaurant where Chelsea Clinton was scheduled to make an appearance that night. "Sorry," he said when I caught up, "we got held up at the last stop." He asked if I'd like to help. "You can be captain of this section, and we'll go down to Ridge." He gave me a handful of fliers.
That left me with Lara*, a spunky twentysomething who the Obama campaign would love to have in their corner. Everyone who dared pass her got a flier.
"Chelsea's going to be here tonight," she said to a guy on a bike.
"Who?" he asked.
I gradually learned more about why the other volunteers were delayed. "Actually," Lara said, "we were kind of late because we saw all the bombed-out houses and we were scared to park [the volunteer captain's] really nice car near them."
She studied my face. "We were scared." At Broad and Ridge.
This was the same week Hillary Clinton took criticism for her "Tulza tale," where she told crowds that snipers fired at her after landing on the tarmac during a 1996 trip to Bosnia, when, instead, videos show a small girl reading her a poem. (She said she "misspoke" about the snipers.) There's a metaphor here, somewhere.
Things picked up. About 15 volunteers arrived (a Philadelphia attorney said he came because "my friend is a staffer and he said the camp was having trouble organizing") and rallied rush-hour drivers, eliciting car-horn beeps and cheers. George Perez, a staffer in U.S. Rep. Bob Brady's office and surrogate for the city's Democratic Party, arrived, followed by a car full of men from the painter's union. I helped rig a 4- by 10-foot sign in the restaurant. Chelsea Clinton would be here in 30 minutes.
No one heard when it began, but we soon realized there was a background noise. We stopped to listen: It was a static-riddled voice, like someone was speaking into a megaphone.
... words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage ...
It was coming from the brownstone next to Cobre.
... it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup ...
On what looked like the fourth floor, someone had attached a small speaker to the building, and pointed it toward us. The voice picked up.
... the press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization ...
"Is that God?" asked an older volunteer.
"No," I said, standing near the brownstone, "that's Obama."
Someone was blasting Obama's speech on race, delivered nine days before at the National Constitution Center, on repeat. The brownstone door opened, and out came a guy who looked like a young Clint Eastwood. He had on wraparound sunglasses and a houndstooth fedora. He sat on the stoop, gazed into the distance, and unrolled a dish towel-size flag that read:
FLOC
Hasta la victoria
"Caesar Chavez, siiiiiiiiii," he droned, looking at no one.
FLOC, incidentally, is an acronym for the late Caesar Chavez's Farm Labor Organizing Committee.
"What's going on?" asked one of the staffers. We explained. "My god," she said, "I can't fucking stand Obama people."
This one person's show managed to draw attention away from Chelsea Clinton's event, which took hours to organize. It's simple, grassroots, startup ideas like this that have poked holes in the Clintons' carefully crafted messages. Matt Drudge and his rudimentary Web site became the place to find out all of the salacious details of the Lewinsky scandal. And Barack Obama's hordes of followers are doing it today, spreading the word about their candidate through social networking sites (as of this writing, Obama's Facebook fan page has 769,845 members; Clinton's has 146,306). It's obvious here in Philadelphia: By the time the Clinton campaign's one office was regularly holding rallies and canvassing the city, Obama's campaign was already doing that at nearly a dozen volunteer-heavy, neighborhood-based sites.
A white SUV pulled up, and Chelsea popped out, in jeans and a blazer. She exchanged words with someone near the curb, waved, and walked right in to Cobre to begin speaking. "My mother has been great in that determination and that stubbornness and passion," she said. "It really inspires me. ... " She fielded questions and stayed on point. The crowd swooned.
She never once mentioned the blaring speech, the one that distracted everyone — local party operatives, staffers, volunteers and myself. I wondered if she even heard it.
The elevator doors slide open into what feels like an adult kindergarten class. Campaign staffers pinball around the room like dizzied Duck Duck Goose contestants, stopping only to answer questions or direct traffic while volunteers leap for ringing phones, pound away at laptops, and huddle around tables covered with mounds of charted maps and voter scrolls. The carpet is a sea of crumpled paper and Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups, and the walls are plastered with magic marker Obama portraits and finger-painted campaign banners — the artwork of college students who have descended on the office en masse. There's a crowd in the kitchen chomping down on soft pretzels and tuna-fish hoagies, and the scene at the merchandise table resembles something you'd see on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Plus, everyone's wearing name tags.
Standing there, taking it all in, I half expect someone to recruit me for dodgeball, but instead I'm nearly stampeded by a group of large women bearing armfuls of Obama lawn signs. The leader of the pack accidentally spears me with her metal posts. "Sorry now, honey," she shouts before the elevator doors close in front of her.
I figured the place would be busy, but it's a Monday morning in early March, six full weeks before the primary, and there must be a hundred people here. The line at the volunteer registration table is 10 deep.
A volunteer coordinator named Megan* works the room. "Hey there," she smiles, obviously busy but still cheerful. "Yeah, we got plenty for you to do, let's get you signed up."
My goals were simple when I walked into the Barack Obama for President State Headquarters, which occupies the top floor of a red-brick office building at 1500 Sansom St.
Much has been written about how Obama's campaign represents the future of presidential politics. By marrying the classic neighborhood grassroots tactics of Obama's community organizing days with simple online social networking tools, the Obama operation has, as Rolling Stone put it, "evolved into the mother of all get-out-the-vote campaigns." It's succeeded in registering and wooing into action millions of previously disengaged and disenchanted voters. And though Hillary's promised to fight on to the Democratic Convention in Denver — and from there, who knows, maybe Inauguration Day — and Obama's been busy prissily bowling for blue-collar votes in places like Altoona, there's no denying Philly's importance in determining how well this approach to electoral politics will work. If Obama has any chance of winning Pennsylvania, or even of getting within a few margin points of victory — results which would effectively end Hillary's death dance — he must offset Clinton's support in western Pennsylvania by winning Philly in a landslide (especially now, after his remarks about how working-class whites are "bitter"). And we're talking about a Rendell-for-Guv-2006-style landslide; Obama's got to turn out his base's base next Tuesday. I wanted an inside look at the Obama machine, wanted to see how the campaign of the future fared here in Philly.
I also wanted an up-close-in-action glimpse of this idea of "empowered democracy," the supposedly self-transformational precept pumping through the bloodlines of Obama's candidacy. (Remember, he's not just asking you to believe in his ability to bring about change, he's asking you to believe in yours.) The candidate has promised that his is a truly bottom-up campaign driven by the creative energies of volunteers rather than Washington wags. I wanted to see how Philadelphians handled their newfound empowerment.
I signed up to volunteer under a fake name — back in January, I covered the New Hampshire primary for this newspaper, and any time I flashed my reporter credentials in a campaign office, I was quickly shown the door. I wanted a more honest look at things. A friend said the name I chose, Mike Kelly, made me sound like a detective in a bad cop flick. Whatever.
There's an empty seat at the registration table, so Megan puts me right to work. Megan's not a paid staffer but she volunteers here often, serving as a liaison between volunteers and employees, many of whom have been hop-scotching from one primary to another for months. They're a bleary-eyed bunch, the campaign trail having stretched on much longer than originally expected, and they all seem to be suffering from the same head cold, which Megan has now caught herself.
"Everyone must sign in," she explains between sniffles. "Try and get their e-mail addresses. That's very important."
Indeed, the sign-in sheets serve as the foundation blocks of the Obama campaign — simple, effective tools that have been used to construct an unparalleled community of online supporters, one that dwarfs even the social-networking successes of the Howard Dean campaign four years ago. The e-mail addresses collected at every mega-rally and town hall meeting, at every canvassing site across the city, by every door-to-door volunteer, are brought back to one of Obama's eight Philadelphia field offices and religiously entered into their Pennsylvania database. This allows the campaign to flood potential supporters with personalized e-mail updates, donation solicitations and volunteer requests.
In my four weeks of volunteering, I would enter about 800 names into the database. On average, I'd receive three e-mails a day from the campaign. (Plus, about four phone calls a week.)
Here's a typical missive, advertising an "organizing fellowship":
"If you apply and are selected," it explains, "you'll be trained in the basic organizing principles that this campaign and our movement for change are built on. You will be assigned to a community where you'll organize supporters. Assignments will begin in June, and you'll be required to work a minimum of six weeks over the summer."
The database also helped the campaign identify tens of thousands of unregistered supporters and registered Independents or Republicans who had expressed interest in the candidate by attending a campaign event or clicking on the Obama Web site.
"All of our efforts right now revolve around new registrations," explained Megan two weeks before the March 24 deadline for new registrants. Volunteers were working around the clock, she explained, mailing, e-mailing and telephoning names culled from the database. She handed me a stack of registration forms. "A lot of people are coming in asking for forms for them and their friends," she says, "but try not to give out more than five to a person. We've had such a rush on registration that we can't keep up with demand."
The Obama campaign had an army of Philadelphia ground troops organizing on its behalf way before it became clear that Pennsylvania would be a decisive battleground. Independent groups, such as Philadelphia for Obama and Students for Barack Obama, were busy planning campaign events and voter registration drives as early as last spring.
Upon arriving in Philly, the campaign sought to organize the separate factions into a cohesive grassroots force. Volunteers could work out of the central office or in their own neighborhoods. Maps on the office wall showed where the campaign had spread.
To advertise the March 1 opening of Obama's Philadelphia headquarters, the campaign posted a notice on mybarackobama.com, the campaign's popular social-networking site. Three hundred people poured into the office that first Saturday morning, and were asked to line up under whichever of the 19 maps posted corresponded with their neighborhood.
Emma Tramble, a 46-year-old senior business analyst, lives on Larchwood Avenue, so she stood under the sign reading: "West Philly, south of Market." (This is Tramble's real name — I spoke with her by phone after my own volunteering, and identified myself as a reporter.) Tramble had already led canvassing efforts in Delaware's low-income neighborhoods during the run-up to Super Tuesday, and also organized a series of highly successful voter registration drives on the campus of the Community College of Philadelphia. So, the campaign had her assist with a registration training seminar for all the new volunteers and then, a few days later, asked her to lead a training seminar in Plymouth Meeting for 100 campaign field organizers who would be dispersed throughout Pennsylvania.
"These people had done it in other states," says Tramble, "but Pennsylvania's voter registration process can be tricky, so we trained the trainers in how to do it."
Nine other people lined up next to Tramble that first day at the office. The campaign would supply them with resources and an experienced field organizer, but empowered Tramble and the others to lead the grassroots efforts in their own neighborhood. The group met at Tramble's house to figure out leadership positions — a faith-based coordinator, a volunteer coordinator, a data entry coordinator, a canvassing coordinator, etc. — and within weeks, the West Philly, south of Market team expanded by the dozens. By March 24, the group registered 1,800 new Democratic voters.
"What struck me most," says Tramble, who has taken a hiatus from her analyst job to volunteer full time, "were the people in their 50s and 60s who felt so disaffected that they've never voted in their lives."
With the primary only days away, the campaign has now flooded the neighborhood offices with field organizers, which is fine with Tramble, who, freed from dealing with the day-to-day operational responsibilities, has turned her attention to senior citizen voter advocacy efforts and the organizing of a recent Barack Obama prayer service at Malcolm X Park at 52nd and Pine.
"They gave us a degree of ownership," says Tramble of the campaign, "and we went full steam ahead with it."
The mybarackobama.com social-networking site has also gone a long way to providing supporters with a sense of campaign ownership. Hundreds of independently organized events are listed weekly on the site. But if Emma Tramble's story shows the great potential of the empowerment strategy, some of these events, like the March 15 "Obama Walk for Change," raise some questions about its effectiveness.
The listing for the event sounded promising: "Meet in the center of Washington Square and demonstrate support with a walk for change through the city of brotherly love. Bring signs, banners, precinct organization info, pens, clipboards, sneakers, and most importantly HOPE. 1.4 mile walk starts at 10:00 a.m. Rain, Snow, or Shine."
The event was posted by a supporter named Gary Carter.
Come Saturday, three women decked out in their morning power-walking gear and I stood shivering in the middle of Washington Square, wondering where the hell everyone was. Then an energetic recent college graduate named Evan* arrived. "I Googled the organizer's name," he said, waving his arms in excitement. "He's a Hall of Fame baseball player."
(I couldn't track down the actual Gary Carter who organized the event, but I'm all but certain it was not the former New York Mets catcher Gary "the Kid" Carter who swatted 324 career home runs and who now manages the Orange County Flyers of the Golden Baseball League.)
We decided to give it a few more minutes before throwing in the towel. A man arrived with a sign reading, "You don't need advice from your momma to vote for Obama." Our sad little group shuffled down Market Street, taking a pit break when one of the women needed to change her baby's diaper, and again when Evan's girlfriend lost an earring.
At City Hall we encountered a large group of anti-Scientology protesters decked out in orange wigs and rubber masks. Evan was beside himself with delight, asking them if they wanted to combine forces with us.
"I don't know if Obama would really want to be affiliated with us," said one of the protesters, removing her pink plastic pig nose for a moment, and speaking slowly to emphasize the obviousness of the remark.
"Well, do you have any extra signage?" responded Evan, not to be deterred.
"But it's all Scientology-related," said the girl.
"Bye-bye, then," yelled Evan. "Go Ob-a-a-a-a-ma."
Other events, of course, are much more effective. Later that day, there was a neighborhood sweep-up event organized by Obama Works, a grassroots public service organization inspired by Obama's community activism background. The event was held at the trash-strewn Chew Park at 19th and Washington. Brooms and garbage bags and plastic gloves were supplied and there was a voter registration table. More than two hundred people showed up, and the park was swept clean.
Besides the Center City headquarters, there are Obama offices in Chinatown, South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, Southwest Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Northwest Philadelphia and Northeast Philadelphia. I scribbled down the address of the South Philadelphia office, located in a nicely remodeled storefront along the 1600 block of South Broad Street, and began volunteering there nights and weekends.
Just a few minutes into my first steering committee meeting at the South Philly office, I realize that it's at these satellite offices where the notion of empowered leadership is tested most. Despite the Obama campaign's record-breaking fundraising, there seems to be an ever-growing shortage of campaign buttons. A measure has been put to the committee to raise funds for a button-making machine. But there's a competing measure to just buy buttons from an independent manufacturer. A one-time purchase of 1,000 buttons will cost $350, while a button-making machine will run $250, not including the cost of materials. The measure is debated for 15 minutes, with the button machine faction winning the final vote. (More control over the product, of course.)
Bobby*, one of the campaign's South Philadelphia field organizers, tries to steer the meeting to some more pressing business. He's from Pittsburgh, if I remember correctly, but he lived in Philly before getting involved with the campaign last year. It's immediately obvious why he's landed in the South Philly office. With his hoodie and scruffy jeans, he looks like he could just as easily be peddling fish at the Italian Market. But his laid-back dress belies his determined nature. He's been working 15-hour days, and has the unenviable job of trying to cut into Clinton's South Philly blue-collar base.
Bobby's got a tough road to hoe, if my experiences registering voters outside the Snyder Avenue ShopRite the previous weekend are any indication. It was the height of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, and upon seeing my Obama pin, most whites just shook their heads and brushed past. Some cursed under their breath. An old lady told me I should be ashamed. And a guy in a Phillies hat held the hand of his young child as he put his finger in my face and calmly told me, "If you think the niggers got attitudes now, wait till they get the White House."
Still, there's good news tonight.
"Last Saturday alone, we registered 1,300 voters in South Philadelphia and a total of 22,000 citywide," Bobby says.
Now, the emphasis becomes door-to-door canvassing — identifying our solid Obama supporters and those still leaning on the fence.
I showed up at the office the next Saturday morning and was assigned to canvass the Point Breeze neighborhood around 21st and Tasker streets. It's black and poor and there's a mural on a park wall bearing the names of more than 30 young people killed in gang violence. Aside from one woman who for some reason was convinced that Obama's a Muslim for not letting some pushy dude outside Di Bruno Bros. take his photo, all of the people I talked to here were Obama supporters. Most were enthusiastic in their support, but some less so — like the middle-aged man in a tank top who took a long look at his trash-strewn street of crumbling homes before sighing, "I guess so."
A few days after hitting Point Breeze, I canvassed the mostly white neighborhood around 10th and Dickinson streets. I was interested to see if the recent polls, which showed Obama gaining with white male voters, would play out here. I talked with 30 white voters: 20 politely shut the door in my face, a few couching their Hillary support by saying, "And it's not because he's black." Of the 10 who said they supported Obama, six were women who said they couldn't trust Hillary. The four men all agreed that Obama "was better for the unions."
I should mention here that I grew up in one of the blue-collar communities whose support the candidates are scrambling for; I was raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a fireman and a secretary, graduated from college, and chose a career in reporting rather than civil service. But I live in a South Philly row home and still maintain most of the sensibilities of my upbringing. As part of this story, I was curious to find how many working-class white men I'd meet volunteering for Obama. I didn't find any. There were plenty of working-class blacks — the backbone of the Center City office was a cadre of lovely working-class black women from North Philly and Mount Airy — but in a month of volunteering I can't recall meeting any union card-carrying, Eagles-loving white dudes. That doesn't mean they're not out there, somewhere (Obama has won several powerful state union endorsements). Maybe they're embarrassed — like the one guy on East Passyunk Avenue who yelled from the window of his pickup truck for a lawn sign.
"It's not for me," he said. "My girlfriend loves him."
On my final day volunteering at the South Philly office, Bobby surprises me with a ticket for an event that night at the Convention Center, where Obama is delivering a motivational speech to some of his Philadelphia volunteers. I'm excited. After a month of entering data, answering phones and knocking on doors, I, like the rest of the 1,500 folks who scored tickets and eagerly filed through the metal detectors, want to hear from the candidate himself. I had bonded with these people through work. Felt a kinship. We wondered what assurances Obama could offer us that all of our efforts would not be for naught.
We were happy to have participated in our share of history, but we didn't want another narrow 3- or 4-point defeat, like in Texas. We wanted to end this thing, right here in Philly.
"This is like one long football game that never ends," Jose from West Philly tells me while waiting in line. "And I can't watch no more fucking CNN."
I land a fourth-row seat. Obama is running late, coming directly from the last leg of his bus tour through the state, and the crowd is getting restless.
Tramble addresses the room, speaking to her team's successful organizing efforts. "It was so funny being onstage," she would tell me afterward. "All I had to do was say the word 'Philadelphia' and the crowd would go crazy cheering."
The cheering turns into a deafening roar in the final moments before the candidate takes the stage. Even the seats are shaking. I have a clear view and am watching the door waiting for Obama to emerge. But then Tommy* sits down in front of me. Tommy's an Obama volunteer from Northwest Philly who I first met at a bar in New Hampshire while covering that primary. He's a ward leader or a block captain, I can't remember which, and the twentysomething son of a cop or carpenter or something like that. He's the only white blue-collar male volunteer I've met this whole time, and he's about 6-foot-4 and standing directly in front of me. I can't see shit. When Obama takes the stage, Tommy goes wild. I stand on my toes but it's worthless, so I just stare at the back of Tommy's head, straining to listen.
Obama's tired and his voice is raspy as he proceeds through bits of his stump speech. My thoughts drift back to the bar in Concord, N.H., where I first met Tommy. It was the closest place open after a late-night Obama rally the night before election day, and the joint was packed, so the meathead bouncer at the door was having fun messing with the out-of-state Obama supporters. He swayed on his stool and smiled like a drunken sailor on shore leave when he noticed the Obama press pass hanging around my neck. He then made a big production of inspecting my driver's license with a flashlight, bending it and folding it to the bemusement of some knuckleheads standing behind him. He pulled my license away at the last moment, holding it out of reach while asking me who I was voting for. "I bet you're voting for that B-a-a-a-r-a-a-a-c-c-k guy," he said, drawing out the syllables like some kind of a slur, the peanut gallery losing it.
And now I have the same feeling in my gut, staring at Tommy's head and listening to Obama speak, as I did trying to get in to that bar: I'm close, but some blue-collar white guy stands in my way. And I guess that's how I feel about the campaign, too.
"So join me now, Philadelphia," shouts Obama, frenzying the crowd, "and let's go change the world together."
Maybe, I think to myself. Or maybe we'll just get really close to changing it.
