PRESENT AT CREATION--How an Upside Down Campaign Won the Nomination
Barack Obama kicked off his long-shot presidential campaign with a memorable announcement at the Old State Capital on a frigid March day. A few short months later Dave Kamper, was present at the birth of a remarkable grass roots campaign that defied conventional wisdom.
I almost never post a whole entry from another blog. But this, from Daily Kos, was so riveting and informative that I had to share it with you. All day Sunday the Daily Kos was posting deep analytical entries from their top contributors examining every possible angle of How Hillary Lost.
Then came a first time ever diary from an Obama volunteer who had been active almost from the beginning. Dave Kamper was a county coordinator in Sangamon County, home of the Illinois state capital at Springfield. He identifies himself as a union organizer who was recently elected to the County Board.
His entry turned all of the others on their heads. He explained how Obama won.
Read on!
The Obama campaign a year ago: a not-remotely-insider's perspective
by Dave Kamper
I was a County Coordinator for the Obama campaign in the summer of 2007, down here in Springfield, Illinois. I never sat in on any strategy meetings. I never played a role in any key decisions. I was just a foot soldier, but reading all the front-page assessments by the Daily Kos team made me think back to what things were like a year ago, and what they may say about how Obama won.
Here, then, a few thoughts:
- Targeting. We were told this right from the beginning. I remember my contacts with the campaign saying, as early as May, 2007, that the only way Obama could win was by "competing in all 50 states". That wasn't idle chit-chat. The campaign personnel I met (no one high-up, but people who'd been in the room with the higher-ups) all conveyed very clearly the impression that the only way Obama could beat Clinton for the nomination was to be prepared to fight in every state, all the way. That is, we were clearly given the impression that this was all going to be about delegates, not "momentum".
In retrospect, it had to be that way for Obama. During the English Civil War, the one of the leaders of the Parliamentarians declared, "we can beat the King 99 times and he is still King, but if he beat us but once we will be hanged". From my perspective as a foot soldier in the Obama campaign, they instinctively understood the parallel - Hillary Clinton is a giant in the Democratic Party, and there was not enough "momentum" in the world to force her out of the race. Obama had to win it the hard way - state by state, delegate by delegate.
- The field operation. Our first organized trips to Iowa in the summer of 2007 were comical. Training of volunteers was minimal at best. Promises to pair Illinois people up with Iowans for door-knocking went unfulfilled. Long-planned sojurns to one Iowa county were switched suddenly to another location with little advance warning.
At the time, I thought this boded ill for Obama, but as I think back on it, I realize what was missing from all of it was any kind of rigidity. They were making mistakes, to be sure, but no one was defending their structure, their ground plan, or their techniques as perfect or even very good. There was a willingness to hear feedback, even from relative outsiders like me. A lot of the sudden changes in plan can be seen perhaps more clearly as experimentation. And, frankly, June 2007 was a good time for experimenting; they had plenty of time to get the kinks out before Caucus Day.
- The democracy of the movement. I don't want to make too much of this. There was a lot of concern about message control and keeping people on task, even then. But there was also a lot of openness to innovation. People were using my.barackobama.com to create new Obama support groups - many of them fizzled and did nothing, but some got people involved.
Even here in Illinois, the Obama campaign did not feel constrained by the existing party structure. They created events to reach out to new people. The vast majority of people from Springfield who went to Iowa for Obama had never been involved in the local party at all, yet somehow the campaign found these people AND put them to work. The campaign was fanatical from the start about lists - once they had a name, they held onto that name and never let go. Never once did the campaign ever instruct its County Coordinators to run things by the local powers-that-be, or to rely upon existing (weak) party machines to something. This is what building a movement looked like at the ground level. Chaotic, to be sure, but empowering. If Obama had waited until December, 2007, to do this, he would have been destroyed. They started early, though, so by December they had a machine.
Perhaps most interesting, especially compared to what I seem to be hearing about other campaigns, was the fundraising was NOT overly stressed. People were giving money, but when the campaign communicated to us County Coordinators, it was always about volunteers, not about money. I think they understood quite clearly the principle of "sweat equity" - that if people put their time into something, the money will follow. Many of the people who first volunteered in June or July didn't donate until 2008, but they did donate.
All of this speaks to something which we don't ever see, but which we recognize the symptoms of: planning. Sometime, VERY early in the Obama campaign, some group of campaign leaders made a plan. Perhaps it was written down (how I'd love to see the document), perhaps it was just a meeting of the minds. But it was a plan, a plan they began to implement in earnest in April and May 2007, just 2 months into the campaign, and which they nourished and strengthened all the way down the line. From my vantage point as a County Coordinator, I saw some of those aspects of the plan first-hand:
- prepare for a 50-state primary season
- let the field operation evolve organically based on experience
- give the activist base fertile soil with which to create their own flowering contributions to the campaign
Those seem to me to be essential components of Obama's victory. I always wanted him to win, but I have to admit, one year ago, I didn't feel very confident. Only in retrospect is it clear that he and his team knew what they were doing, and had a fully-fledged plan to win the nomination.