Organizing for Obama at Ikea

Obama for America took its newly reconstituted campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA), out for a test drive this weekend, asking its 13 million person email list to gather support for Obama's budget.

More than 1,100 canvasses were scheduled in 50 states on Saturday, and I attended one in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. There are few places in the country where Obama's support is stronger than in Ft. Greene--a vibrant, multi-ethnic, racially and socio-economically mixed neighborhood with tree-lined streets, old brownstones and a spacious park in the middle. On a sunny afternoon, about two dozen OFA volunteers gathered on the edge of the park, across from a farmer's market selling Apple Cider and fresh pies.

"We're here to send a message to Washington that the country is still activated," said Geoff Berman, a theater director and volunteer coordinator for OFA who spent nine weeks in southeast Missouri last fall for Obama. The ostensible purpose of the day was to get people to sign forms pledging their support for Obama's budget, which would then be passed on to members of Congress. More importantly, it was an opportunity for OFA to get the rust off, keep its volunteers active (and hopefully recruit more) and see how voters in communities across the country were responding to Obama's agenda. "The organization itself is taking shape and we don't want it to take shape in a vacuum," Berman (no relation) said. "The Obama campaign and Administration want to learn from everything we do." OFA, a subset of the Democratic National Committee, is gearing up to hire field organizers across the country who will constitute the next phase of the DNC's modified 50-state strategy.

Transferring the energy from Obama's campaign into a full-time, year-round, grassroots organization will be no easy task. "It's a pioneering effort," Berman says. "No president has tried to coordinate grassroots and community energy like this before." He added: "The question is not whether we get as many people to volunteer as we did a week before the election. The question is how many people were doing something like this four, eight or ten years ago?" Asking people to sign a form is a relatively inconsequential task, but OFA wants to prep its network for the legislative battles and elections in 2010 and 2012 that lay ahead.

At the canvass, I tagged along with three enthusiastic OFA volunteers in their early thirties from Ft. Greene and nearby Bedford-Stuvyesant: Tremis Skeete, a graphic designer originally from the Virgin Islands; Erica Steverson, a business analyst at the cosmetic giant L'Oreal; and her friend Shanise King, a marketing director at L'Oreal. (Picture below)

The three friends had given money to Obama, attended a raucous election night party in Ft. Greene and traveled down to Washington for the inauguration but they'd never volunteered their time before. "I'm definitely looking to get more active now that he's elected," Erica said.

Fearing that Ft. Greene might be a little too mellow on a Saturday afternoon, we headed over to the newly built Ikea in Red Hook, an old port area in Brooklyn that has been developing rapidly (so much so that the cast of MTV's "Real World Brooklyn" are housed there). Though Swedish in origin, few places now embody the hustle and bustle of urban and suburban life like Ikea, attracting a widely divergent cross section of America.

Shanise, Erica and Tremis gathered at the underground entrance to the store, next to the massive and mostly full parking lot. "Do you support President Obama? Will you support his bold plan for energy, health care and education?" they asked customers as they entered and exited. The responses varied:

"Yes, but I'm on the escalator."

"I don't have my glasses."

"I support him, I voted for him, but I don't want to sign any more forms."

A bunch of people thought they were being asking for money, so the crew made it clear they only wanted people's names, signatures and email addresses. No money involved. "It sends a message to President Obama that we still support you," Shanise (a natural saleswoman) told a young couple. "It would be great if we could get a million names!"

After an hour, the group had gathered 26 signatures in support of Obama's budget; 17 by Shanise, 8 by Erica and 1 by Tremis (though in fairness he was sent to get food for the girls). A modest number, but they were feeling good about the responses. "It's all about keeping the momentum going," Shanise said. No one had yelled at them about AIG or the bailout or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For a change of scenery we headed over to the nearby grocery store Fairway, where the three encountered considerably less enthusiasm. The customers were mostly Obama supporters, but few wanted to sign the budget pledge. Among the responses:

"Obama personally knows I support him. Trust me. I could call him right now."

"I voted for him, I gave him money, I'm a supporter. But I don't want to give out my email address."

"A this stage, I'm really disappointed with him. He loaded up the budget with earmarks and blamed it all on the Republicans!"

After thirty minutes, Erica had collected ten forms and Shanice only six. They were ready to head back. "I thought people would be more enthusiastic about Obama," Erica said. "They're suffering from Obama fatigue," Tremis responded. "The side effect is they don't want to hear about it anymore."

Erica and Tremis had attended an OFA meeting a month ago in downtown Brooklyn and admitted they were less than impressed. The gathering seemed disorganized and populated only by expats from the campaign. They were concerned that Obama's new organization would be too closely tied to the old guard of the Democratic Party and not progressive enough. But they decided to give it another shot. Despite the at times mixed reception, even in overwhelmingly Democratic Brooklyn, the group felt good about the day's efforts.

"I was impressed by the number of people who wanted to sign up and were willing to give up their time," Shanise said. "For me, is an inspiring experience. I'll definitely do it again."

"Definitely," Erica concurred.

As Obama the community organizer might say, change happens one day at a time.

Comments (10)

1. Signing an oath, any kind of oath, and particularly a loyalty oath to anyone or anything, is just about the opposite of being active, as it cedes one's critical faculties in the name of, well, loyalty.

   Support what one clearly understands as right, reject what one sees wrong, and by all means retain the ability to think, to study, assess & act ... not merely sign a paper.

   Posted by sloper at 03/23/2009 @ 09:49am

2. Strikes me as a different shade of the Hitler Youth.....

   Posted by Happy at 03/23/2009 @ 10:30am

3. Thank goodness THE ONE is still campaigning. Repeal the 25th amendment. President for life.

   Posted by JohnGalt09 at 03/23/2009 @ 12:43pm

4. Am I the only one that this scares?????

   Posted by btesh at 03/23/2009 @ 1:27pm

5. I have been a Democrat forever, but I am not about to let some party hack tell me how to vote. I would like to wait, at least, six months before the next election for the campaigns to begin.

   Posted by P. J. Casey at 03/23/2009 @ 1:49pm

6. What a truly asinine idea. How many of these citizens know what's in the budget they are being asked to endorse. Heck, most of the Congress probably doesn't know what's in it.

   None of them including Obama seem willing to admit that they knew the exemption for AIG was in the stimulus bill and that's far smaller than the budget.

   This is leftist participatory democracy run amuck and shows what a terrible idea it is. Let's stick with our constitutional republic and it's representative form of govt.

   Posted by antisocialist at 03/23/2009 @ 1:50pm

7. You people who are so frightened of petitions might please just move to China and leave the rest of us in peace.

   Nonetheless, if I were presented with this petition, I would refuse to sign, because I'm not sure that I support the Obama's financial plan. Like Paul Krugman, I'm skeptical that it will work.

   In my opinion, Obama needs to have these banks audited immediately, not give them yet another chance to dump their stinking assets on others, above all on us, the taxpayers. These bankers have been given way too many second chances already. Let's stop the shell game, lift the shells, and look at what's underneath. I know it will be bad news. The stock market indicators will probably plunge yet again. We'll have another "crisis of confidence." And then, at long last, it will be over, and the global economy will begin its long recovery on the secure footing of openness (or glasnost, if you will).

   Of course, we also need to re-impose regulatory oversight on the banking industry. I'd be happy if we banned every kind of funny-money paper invented since 1969.

   Pay no heed to the people who bleat incessantly about the need to "restore confidence" in our banks. I would have much greater confidence in government officials who recognized that some top bankers are incompetent scoundrels who need to be fired, now. The health of the economy relies on our confidence that good work will always be rewarded, not in our confidence that money will always generate money.

   Now, if the petition were to offer my support for our new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, then sure, I'd sign - in a heartbeat. After all, I signed a petition in support of her BEFORE her appointment.

   Let me sign to support something COURAGEOUS that Obama has done, not something that I find questionable.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 03/24/2009 @ 06:44am

8. I'm not concerned that the OFA is a nefarious organization trying to maintain a one-party dictatorship, as several commenters on this thread have already insinuated. You have to HAVE a one-party dictatorship, one that backs up its petitions with threats of punishment, before these petitions become instruments of control. Otherwise, they are as harmless as the pieces of paper they are printed upon.

   I am concerned, however, that the OFA campaign isn't very bright about how it is testing the opinion of the US-American public. It would do much better to use questionnaires to find out what we really think, either positive or negative, about a variety of issues. This would be so much more informative than a "yes" or "no" to the vague and general question "Do you support the president?"

   Well, yes, I do support the president generally, but I'm angry at him right now, and I'd like you do know why. Moreover, it would be a very good thing if you would tell the PRESIDENT why.

   I hope there are some savvy OFA volunteers who engage a few people in deep and detailed conversations about their reasons for signing or not signing the petition. And I hope they are taking notes.

   My greatest concern is that the OFA petition will yield a deceptively high "yes" quota that inflates the real popular support for President Obama, without indicating in what ways this support is conditional -- as it should be. A result like this would generate nothing but pride, and would set the president up for a fall.

   Posted by JakobFabian at 03/24/2009 @ 07:10am

9. Unlike Jakob, I am very concerned that the OFA campaign is a nefarious organization. It's not trying to maintain a one-party dictatorship, not yet at least. The problem is that organizing something like this is so ripe for abuse. Even if our current leaders don't have any nefarious intentions, who can predict the future? Protect your freedom and liberty, don't hope on the good intentions of your elected leaders to do it for you. That has always been a recipe for disaster.

   Posted by captmike at 03/24/2009 @ 08:31am

10. The folks scared of this apparently are nervous about grass roots democracy. Talking to citizens about issues and asking them to support a particular platform is about as unthreateningly democratic as it gets. If you don't want to sign, don't sign. Members of Congress will hear from all of the corporate interests what they don't like about the President's budget. Having citizens voluntarily counter that is surely positive (unless you're paranoid or want to return to the old Bush policies).

    Posted by tmginnova at 03/26/2009 @ 08:53am