Community Organizers Discuss Obama's Role as an Activist.

Barack Obama often says that the best education he got wasn't at Harvard but on the streets of the South Side of Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer for three years. His formative experience as an organizer has seemed to carry through to his campaign, which has hired more organizers and invested more in grassroots activity than any campaign in recent memory. At campaign events, Obama will often recount his experience as a community organizer, working long hours for paltry pay and little recognition, before bringing a few of the local organizers from his campaign onstage to thank them and allow them to bask in the audience's applause. This summer the campaign has recruited 3,600 Obama Fellows, volunteers deployed around the country who will spend six weeks getting trained in organizing and working with grassroots supporters. Joy Cushman, who runs the fellows program, calls it the biggest organizing training in history.

So what does it mean that we might have a President who was a community organizer? How do organizers view the Obama campaign, and what would this resurgence in grassroots organizing mean for an Obama presidency? On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, The Nation reached out to five community organizers from across the country to discuss these and other issues. Washington editor Christopher Hayes conducted the interviews, of which an edited transcript follows. Angelica Salas is executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Anton Gunn has served as the South Carolina political director for the Obama campaign and as executive director of South Carolina Fair Share. He's currently running for State Representative. Ana Garcia-Ashley is co-director of the Civil Rights of Immigrants department of the Gamaliel Foundation. Arnie Graf has been an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation. Deepak Bhargava is executive director of the Center for Community Change.

I guess I should start with the most basic question, which is: what is community organizing? I think at some point the Obama campaign realized that people probably had no idea what the heck "community organizer" meant. So how do you guys explain what you do?

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