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I too was a community organizer through much of the 70s and 80s in the projects (north side -- Cabrini Green) in Chicago. I have run up on a very interesting comparative analysis of the methods the Obama campaign uses at Camp Obama, and the most typical kind of methodologies employed by community organizers. I intend to reprint it in this Wednesday's Black Agenda Report, possibly with my own comments added.
You did Camp Obama? Is Jacqueline Woodard still in charge there? She is another old friend of mine from Chicago. If you see her, tell her I still love her. Heck, I've got her email. I should hit her myself, shouldn't I?
A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago's electoral landscape-and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama.
In the final, climactic buildup to November's general election, with George Bush gaining ground on Bill Clinton in Illinois and the once-unstoppable campaign of senatorial candidate Carol Moseley Braun embroiled in allegations about her mother's Medicare liability, one of the most important local stories managed to go virtually unreported: The number of new voter registrations before the election hit an all-time high. And the majority of those new voters were black. More than 150,000 new African-American voters were added to the city's rolls. In fact, for the first time in Chicago's history-including the heyday of Harold Washington-voter registrations in the 19 predominantly black wards outnumbered those in the city's 19 predominantly white ethnic wards, 676,000 to 526,000.
The election, to some degree, turned on these totals: Braun and Clinton had almost unanimous support among blacks. But just as important, if less obvious, are the implications black votership could have for future city and state elections: For the first time in ten years, more than half a million blacks went to the polls in Chicago. And with gubernatorial and mayoral elections coming up in the next two years, it served notice to every¬one from Jim Edgar to Richard M. Daley that an African-American voting bloc would be a force to be reckoned with in those races.
None of this, of course, was accidental. The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. "It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics," says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side's 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.
At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old African-American lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama.
I'm pleased that Saul Alinsky has been cited by Obama as one of his influences in community organizing.
I read Alinsky's book "Rules For Radicals" as a teenager back in the 70s, and it still resonates for me.
i love it that he worked with alinsky. alinsky's a radical from way back; of course that's another reason obama is going to have to skirt the communist/marxist meme. and it's interesting that hillary clinton wrote her senior thesis on alinsky and then the thesis was suppressed lest she be associated with him in the white house.
i am so happy about my candidate. he impresses me more every day. yay.
Years later, President Clinton helped deliver Barack Obama's first political defeat.
Chickens.
Roost.
In addition, it will help to undermine the specious lie that there is a generational gap between Obama's younger followers and the so-called Civil Rights Movement of older blacks. The truth is that this split is not between older blacks who saw themselves as community-based activists during the heyday of Civil Rights Movement. The split is between those born mainly after this critical period and an older group of blacks that I have labeled as being "second line inheritors" of the legacy of the Ciil Rights Movement.
It is my contention that older blacks who put themselves on the line during the Civil Rights Movement have, in the main, never had a problem with Obama running for president. Many of them may not have thought he could win but they were not resistant or opposed to his candidacy. The "second line inheritors", who have mistakenly been misidentified and over-identified as the faces of the Civil Rights Movement, are the ones opposed to Obama's candidacy because it threatens their relationships with the centers of established institutional powers.
What is little understood or noted is that these "second line inheritors" have expropriated the political capital that the black electorate created partially as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and they have used it principally to benefit themselves, not the black community. It is their refusal to make a place for younger blacks that is a problem. Those of us who have retained an allegiance to the principles and beliefs of our activists days and the Civil Rights Movement have never had a problem creating and reserving some space for those who we knew would come later.
Or to be more accurate, I have been just as likely (if not more likely) to criticize it as to be ok with it.
But when I read Dreams from my Father, -- the description of his experiences organizing -- I saw in Barack Obama someone who brought something into organizing that I have not really seen from the Alinsky-style organizers I've run into: deep deep heart and rare capacity for reflection and real connection.
IMO one danger in Alinsky's organizing model is that organizers can start to interact with people -- even the ones they are organizing -- as objects to be moved around for the goal of building power. When it happens like this, it's not really explicit, in my experience, it's just sort of an ethos that feels a certain ways and affects the ability to be human with each other.
Also, there is a possibility of a lie built into at least some kinds of Alinsky-style organizing: organizers really move things but leaders are out front in public -- in some circumstances this can function as a form of tokenism. Another way to not be human with and to each other.
So I've been wary of the Alinsky roots of Senator Obama's organizing history. I am less wary given the specific and deeply human ethos he himself brings to it.
I agree with you completely about the Alinsky model. In my hometown during the 1970s we often clashed with folks who were affiliated with Tom Hayden and the Alinsky model. We felt that they lacked any undergirding principles and events over the past 30 years or so have supported those assumptions.
It has been at the foundation of his calling for crossover voters. It was routinely sneered at by the MSM and Political Professionals....
And for quite a while it was routinely sneered at by a lot of the "progressive" blogosphere, even those who should have understood it -- in fact, even now there's a lot of antipathy to Obama's transpartisan appeal, and a lot of people who still don't get the impact of the engagement of youth (and everybody else). It's a very interesting collective blind spot.
jon
There is profound difference between armchair progressives and progressives who are actively involved in a cause or causes. Too many folks who are considered progressives have not tested their ideas, concepts and theories down on the ground. Far too much of what is considered progressive in the blogosphere is just cliched conventional wisdom but from the left side of the aisle.