Autumn Marathon

Obama’s Ground Game & Mine

Focusing on “Me, Inc.” and a job hunt are inherently self-centered exercises. You are quite literally selling yourself.  To counterbalance this, I spend one workday per week volunteering for a couple of different causes. Yesterday, I drove to Philadelphia to help out in one of Barack Obama’s campaign offices. Much has been written about the Obama “ground game” - here is my  perspective as an ordinary volunteer.

The campaign does an impressive job of using information technology to identify and mobilize potential volunteers. Less than two weeks ago, I indicated on the main barackobama.com website that I would be willing to volunteer in a “nearby battleground state.” Within three or four days, someone called me from the campaign, confirmed that I was indeed a NY resident and asked when and for how long I would be available to go to Pennsylvania. After a couple days, I called back with my specific availability and was told that my information would be passed to field organizers in the Philadelphia area. If I did not hear from one of them within a couple days, I could call back. The call came the next day: my visits were organized, help finding lodging was offered, directions sent.

I arrived in the South Philadelphia field office at about 11am Friday. By 1115, I had been trained and given a long list of phone numbers to call. The main task for the day was to recruit other volunteers to canvass in the neighborhood over the weekend and to get out the vote on the weekend before election day. The events and my tasks were explained succinctly, I received a script to help with the calls, a phone and was introduced to staff and full-time volunteers who could ask questions. Other volunteers were making similar calls, offering to explain Obama’s policies to undecided voters and walking around the neighborhood canvasing.

Over the next seven hours, I made around 170 phone calls. The lists from the campaign database were generally quite accurate - the people I reached were mainly supporters who had either donated or volunteered in the past. On a few occasions, I reached people who had been called already by other volunteers, but given how difficult it is to keep databases updated in ordinary business - there were not too many of these. After I finished my calls, I was asked to tally the total number of calls, number of contacts made, volunteers recruited, etc. I read later that the Obama field organizers in different states engage in friendly competition over who is contacting a higher percentage of voters - so this kind of record keeping is clearly very important.

I have done some work on political campaigns in the past and this was the most impressive effort I have seen yet. The permanent staff and full-time volunteers are young, courteous, smart and efficient. Technology - cell phones, wireless networks, laptops and software - is used to great advantage, but not to the exclusion of volunteers who are not comfortable with technology. Among the volunteers working with me were several elderly people and neighborhood high-school kids: the requirements were 1) support Obama; 2) be able to talk and 3) know how to use a phone. I have come away from past volunteer experiences with a sense that much of my time and effort was wasted. In this case, high-volume phone calling is tiring and ennervating, but I was busy from the time I dropped in until I was ready to leave in the evening.

In addition to providing a sense of accomplishment and connecting me to cause(s) besides myself, volunteer work, I believe, helps “Me, Inc.” in a few ways; the really obvious ones being extending my network of contacts and helping to fill in the resume “blanks” during a period of unemployment. Dialing for Obama was a kind of activity that I had not done for work for many years, but was very much a kind of sales.   Working initially from the script, I later found myself improvising and paying more and more attention to the concerns and issues expressed by the call recipients.