by Dr. Aaron Schultz
The
media and the net have focused on Obama's background as a community
organizer, and his community organizer approach to campaigning. His
is supposed to be a "bottom up" instead of a "top
down" approach. One newspaper
argued that "regardless of the outcome . . . the Obama
campaign will leave behind a new generation of trained community
activists." In fact Marshall Ganz, the designer of Obama's
organizing approach states
that "We're training a whole bunch of new leaders."
What
Obama is doing has little to do with the core tradition of community
organizing that he was trained in himself. His approach
is unlikely to "leave . . . a cadre of activists behind"
that can generate power outside of the context of Obama's machine.
Traditional
organizing seeks to create local groups whose direction is determined
by local leaders. Leaders elicit stories about the desires of
many potential members, creating a broad network of relationships
based in common goals. Obama's approach is essentially the
opposite. Leaders go out in the community to tell people
their stories in an effort to bring them over to Obama.
Let
me stress that my point, here, is not to critique the Obama campaign.
In fact, I'm generally an Obama supporter, although not a
particularly strong one. Efforts to mobilize voters are
probably necessarily quite different from efforts to create strong
local organizations. But in part because few people in the
media seem to really understand the distinction between these, many
stories blur this distinction in problematic ways. And the
distinction is critical, because the campaign model, in its very
structure, is directly opposed to the goals of community organizing
in crucial ways.
Much
has been made in the media about Obama's background in community
organizing and the ways it has influenced his campaigns. To its
credit, the Obama campaign has generally acknowledged that it is not
engaged in community organizing in any pure form. As his
national campaign field director wrote:
This campaign is about a
new campaign focused on exploiting the "enthusiasm gap" we
enjoy over other candidates by marrying traditional field organizing
training with the community organizing tactics Obama learned as a
young man on the south side of Chicago.
However,
while the media generally acknowledges this language of an admixture
of campaign and community organizing, it doesn't make the distinction
between them clear. There is a tendency, therefore, to treat
what Obama is doing as if it were actual community organizing, as if
it were an effort to generate a bottom up, volunteer-led effort in a
broad sense.
Bottom
Up Leadership?
In
a narrow sense, Obama's effort does seem to give a range of
flexibility to local volunteer leaders. They seem to be given
wide leeway in how they will organize themselves, and how they will
approach their task of reaching voters. As one organizer
in Texas said
, "Our job is not to run in here to tell you how it's going
to be . . . . This is your campaign. Not our campaign."
In
other ways, however, the campaign looks much like any other campaign.
Volunteers are given mostly pre-programmed scripts to use
during canvassing, and are given pretty clear instructions about how
to engage the voters they meet.
Furthermore,
and perhaps most importantly, they are given Obama's policy positions
to disseminate as part of their effort. In other words, as one
would expect, volunteers have the power to decide how to campaign,
but not what they will be campaigning for. They are campaigning
for a person who can make his own independent decisions, not for an
established issue. In fact, there have been moments in the
campaign when volunteers let their own unique perspectives show too
much (the Che Guevara poster) and needed to be tamped down.
Of
course, some level of common "voice" is necessary in any
collective effort. But within the campaign context, pressure to
conform to a candidate's given vision, or, paradoxically, lack of
specific vision in many cases, seems much more intense. This is
obvious, but I'll come back to it later.
Obama's
Key Organizing Technique: Telling Personal Conversion Stories
To
design his campaign organizing strategy, Obama seems to have turned
to long-time organizer and Harvard lecturer Marshall Ganz, who
participated in the civil rights movement and was a key organizer
with Ceasar Chavez, among other efforts.
In
trainings for key leaders, Zack Exley reports,
Ganz exhorts participants to "inspire" voters.
It literally means to
breathe life into each other . . . . And we can do that by
telling our stories to each other. That's what Barack did for
us when he told his story. And that's what we can do for others
when we tell them our stories.
A
key goal of the training, Exley noted, was to "learn how to tell
our own stories," or, as Ganz said, to "put into words why
you're called and why we've been called, to change the way the
world works."
Participants
worked on telling their story about how they came to support Obama in
the correct way, using "materials and worksheets" that gave
"structure and flow to the story telling process." The
aim was to be able to "tell their 'story of self' in less than
two minutes." Or 30 seconds if a person is phone
canvassing. Or a "couple key ideas" if someone is
canvassing.
Throughout
their training materials, this idea of telling one's personal reasons
for supporting Obama remains central. There is also reference
to policy, and to Obama's policy statements, but these take a back
seat to the storytelling.
Field
Organizer Kim Mack told
a group of volunteers in California, for example that "potential
voters would no doubt confront them with policy questions. Mack's
direction: "Don't go there. Refer them to Obama's Web site,
which includes enough material to sate any wonk."
In
a reply to an earlier post on Open Left, lorij
reported an experience with Obama canvassers:
Two Camp Obama trained
volunteers, the foot soldiers of this "movement"
were at my front door yesterday. They "loved" Obama
and wanted to make sure that I would vote for the man who is
transforming politics from all the bitter fighting of the past. They
urged me to read his book but couldn't give me one reason why they
thought his positions would be preferable to anyone else's. In
fact, the best they could do is point me to his website if I was
really that interested in issues.
Given
what I have read about the training volunteers in Obama's campaign
get, it seems likely that this approach is reflective of his
volunteers more broadly.
An
"Evangelical" Approach
This
use of personal stories to try to help others come over to our point
of view is a classic tool, as well, of efforts to convert people to a
new religion. In evangelical circles, one develops the same
kind of "conversion" story, and there are numerous websites
giving detailed instructions for how it is supposed to be structured.
Interestingly, the recommendation is generally to keep these to
a couple of minutes, just as Ganz recommends.
Let
me emphasize that I'm not accusing the Obama campaign of being some
kind of "cult" as others have That accusation seems
ridiculous to me. Instead, the Obama campaign is trying to do
what all campaigns do, one way or another: to get people to believe
in a particular person.
Ganz
makes this resemblance to religion explicit. "Where does
hope come from?" Ganz asked
at a training. His answer? "Faith . . . .
That's why faith movements and social movements have so much to
do with each other."
The
goal is to get beyond mere intellectual agreement with a candidate
and activate a deeper emotional connection. Ganz noted
that:
There is a kind of
suspicion of emotion that goes pretty deep-that emotion is dangerous
and uncontrollable. . . . [But] what moves us to action is not
neck up; it's the heart. That's sort of where we can get the
courage to take risks.
The
Harvard
Citizen reports that "this is all rooted in Ganz's academic
work on motivation, narrative and action, which draws on psychology,
literature and case studies of successful activist movements. The
more particular the story, the more listeners are likely to be drawn
in, identify with their own experience and want to get drawn in."
Jonathan
Tilove reports
that Ganz believes that "Hope . . . is not empty optimism,
but the prerequisite for creative social action." However,
as I note below, there is reason to be concerned about an approach
that separates policy from faith, and that focuses on an individual
instead a specific social change that one is fighting for.
In
fact, in the "Motivation,
Story, and Celebration" (PDF) unit of his online organizing
course, Ganz argues that there are two relatively discrete ways of
knowing-relatively unemotional analysis and more affective
storytelling. Analysis in a collective is concluded through
deliberation. The affective side of knowing is conducted
collectively through storytelling. In this course, Ganz
explicitly relates his vision of storytelling to religious
"testimony." Of course, these two always
overlap in reality-but one or the other is emphasized more at any
particular moment. (This relates to some of what Glenn
W. Smith has been mulling over elsewhere on this blog.)
In
Obama's campaign, as far as I can tell, storytelling is placed far
above critical deliberation. And this makes sense in the
context of a campaign. Deliberation is useful only in the realm
of strategy-how to get Obama elected. There is little place for
deliberation about what Obama should think or say.
In
fact, you don't really want to focus too much on the specifics of
policy, because people can easily disagree on the specifics. It's
on commitment, "faith" in the person as a relatively
non-specific symbol of our collective desires on which we can
"agree." A "we" is easier to achieve as
long as "we" don't worry too much about what "we"
want in any detail.
Perhaps
there will be deliberation about this after the campaign. But
these volunteers will not have been educated in how to do
this, or encouraged to develop the habits of engaging in deliberation
as a constant part of their efforts to engage in the public sphere.
(With
respect to Paul Rosenberg's thoughtful posts about the relationship
between Obama and early 20th century forms of progressivism, this
aspect of his approach seems to put Obama much more firmly on the
populist and not the pragmatic, intellectual progressive side.)
Community
Organizing: It's Not About Telling, It's About Listening
One
of the core techniques of organizing is the "one-on-one"
interview. Leaders sit down with members of the community-often
their own church or community organization-and have about a 45 minute
dialogue with them about their lives. The aim is threefold.
First,
one-on-ones seek to uncover what people's "passions" are,
what issues seem to engage them the most. By knowing someone's
passions, you know what kinds of issues you are most likely to get
them involved in for the long haul.
The
second goal is to create a relationship. After having a
dialogue like this with someone, you really feel like you have
connection with them. This is someone who may not see you as a
friend, but at least sees you as an honest acquaintance. This
is someone you can call up a couple of months later and ask to get
involved in an issue, and they wouldn't think it was strange.
The
third goal is to try to hook them into some public action. One
way I have heard it put is that a one-on-one is meant to help people
make their private pain public. Something that bothers you or
really engages you inside, because of something in your history, can
become a driving force for more collective change.
I
will return to a discussion of one-on-ones later in this series. A
couple of key points seem relevant, here.
First,
they are not attempts to recruit anyone and everyone. You are
trying to find out not only what a person's passions are, but if they
seem to have the kind of energy to make it worth recruiting them. If
they don't, you may try to get them to a big rally, but you will
probably look elsewhere for a core leader.
Second,
you are not trying to manipulate people. You offer them an
opportunity to participate in some campaign based on what you have
learned they care about. If they do, great, if they don't,
well, you don't have time to spend trying desperately to convince
them. These are ideals, of course, but in my experience, they
are pretty accurate.
Of
course, people who participate also learn a common language for
engaging in collective action. So there is some "conversion"
happening, here. But it is conversion into a way of acting
together, not to commitment to a particular person.
Note
the difference from the Obama approach. In the community
organizing model, leaders go out to listen, in detail, to what other
people have to say in an informal, mostly unstructured setting. In
the Obama approach, people go out and tell people carefully scripted
stories about why they have become Obama supporters. Even when
Obama leaders listen to each other's stories, these stories are
relatively circumscribed as to their topic, and are quite brief.
They are unlikely, by themselves, to generate the kinds of
relational connections that the one-on-one process is designed to
create.
The
Obama approach is designed to tell people how to think-here is a
story of how to convert-even if they may construct the details of
their own story differently, and what to think-Obama is really cool.
The
Obama approach is about telling while the organizing approach
is about listening.
Self-Reinforcing
Scripts
Telling
a script about a candidate that someone else has given you will
probably eventually become just empty words. It may reinforce
your commitment to the candidate to a limited extent, but probably
won't be that powerful.
On
the other hand, it seems likely, to me at least, that retelling and
retelling your own conversion story will have a much more intensive
effect. You are constantly telling a story about yourself,
about who you are and how you think and what you care about. Telling
this story, with emotion (manufactured at times or not) would seem to
be a powerful tool for magnifying commitment among canvassers. As
Ganz notes in his organizing course, "the significance of the
experience [of moving from despair to hope is] itself strengthened by
the telling of it."
In
the beginning it was a narrative you made up, a narrative that could
have been different had you constructed it at a different time, even
at a different moment, choosing 3 minutes of speech, or so, from the
vast complexity of your own life. But as you tell it again and
again and again to others, it seems likely that it will increasingly
become a more core reality of your self. We know that long-term
memory is usually fairly plastic, consisting more of general outlines
of what has happened than of detailed specifics. It seems
likely that retelling one's story is likely to reduce the plasticity
of one's story of one's self, and therefore to reduce the chance one
will change one's mind.
Further,
telling stories to others is a form of public commitment-making. It
is probably harder to change one's mind about something when one has
emphatically stressed one's commitment to others in such a public and
emotional fashion than if one has simply made a private decision, or
even if one has more casually mentioned one's decision to a few
others. The key, here, is not that you have just made a
pragmatic decision to support a candidate, but that you have declared
your "faith" in them and related this to "who"
you are by drawing on critical moments of your own personal history.
The
Centrality of Deliberation in Community Organizing
The
deliberation in community organizing groups may not always look like
the ideal middle-class model of reasoned discourse, often including
much more affective reference to personal stories. In contrast
with Obama's campaign organizing approach, however, deliberation is
nonetheless critical to organizing. In community organizing,
then, the two aspects of Ganz's ways of knowing-"critical
deliberation on experience" and "storytelling of
experience"-come together.
Usually
a relatively small subset of the organization's members is engaged in
deliberation over the long-term. In the ideal, they come
together informed by their one-on-one interviews with their
constituents, armed with information about what the mass of members
cares about. In drawing on this data, these key leaders argue
about what would be the right issue to engage in, looking to a wide
range of considerations. This is deliberation in which a range
of relatively equal leaders contend about how their community should
be improved.
The
key issue in organizing is usually not about "who" to
support, but about "what" needs to happen to produce social
change. Even when it is about "who," a key
consideration is about how electing a particular person can empower
the group to accomplish its ends. There is no "faith"
in individuals. On the contrary, there is "faith"
that politicians, especially, cannot be depended upon in the absence
of the capacity to subject them to collective pressure.
Thus,
the telling of one's conversion story is likely not only to be an
effective tool for converting others. It is also likely to help
maintain and deepen the commitment of one's core leaders, building up
their defenses against the predictable attacks, gaffes, and other
vicissitudes of any campaign and of the post-election world.
"No
Permanent Enemies, No Permanent Friends"
Again,
community organizers simply don't focus on commitment to individuals.
They have had too many experiences with apparently wonderful
people that get elected and then start acting like politicians always
have to act. Community organizers, unlike campaign organizers,
often stress that they have "no permanent enemies, and no
permanent friends." Yes, again it is true that they may
try to get someone elected, to the extent they can. But this
doesn't guarantee their support in the future. They elect
someone not because they think this person will necessarily do what
they want, but because they think this person can at least be
influenced to move in a direction that the organization wants.
THAT
IS THE BEST YOU WILL EVER BE ABLE TO GUARANTEE FROM A POLITICIAN.
Once
a person gets elected, they become a "target" just like
everyone else in the power structure.
It
is this second step that campaign supporters, like Obama's, are not
prepared in their campaign training to take. They are equipped
to support Obama, but they are not equipped to pressure him, or
others, on specific issues in any coherent and structured collective
manner.
Community
organizing groups, then, tend to focus on specific issues, particular
social changes that they would like to see happen, even as they
remain pragmatically flexible about the specific forms these changes
eventually will take. Then they engage with (and if necessary
fight) whoever they can best get to who can make the change they
want.
The
Limits of Commitment to a Person Instead of a Program
The
campaign organizing model Obama is using is designed to get him
elected.
The
problem with supporting a person as your end goal is that you
must essentially trust (have "faith") that that
individual's decisions will match your own beliefs and desires.
Because you are electing a politician, someone who has actually
made it quite clear that he is aiming to find reasonable compromises
between a range of different groups, your commitment cannot be to his
policy statements. These are really just "placeholders"
for the kinds of decisions he would like to make.
Once
he gets into office, he will be buffeted by a myriad of different
pressures and influences. That's the definition of being
a politician. If you don't compromise and bend, you won't get
anything done, and you won't get elected next time. This is not
necessarily a bad thing. Someone who won't think much or change
their mind, an ideologue, or just a close-minded narcissist like GW,
isn't really someone you want as president anyway.
Committing
to a person, then, involves commitment to their character, to their
ways of making decisions. It involves trusting that the person
will end up doing "the right thing."
In
community organizing, in contrast, "power" resides in the
organization. For example, the name of the organization I work
with, CHANGE, carries the reputation of the history of the group. It
is not any individual that powerful people respect, but instead the
power of the at least somewhat democratic collective. Every
individual member, therefore, is expendable. And the benefits
or failings of any individual will not be enough either to make the
organization powerful, or doom it to insignificance.
The
Definition of "Nonpartisan"
From
the perspective of community organizing, Obama is not really
"nonpartisan." He is a democrat, enmeshed in all of
the pragmatic possibilities and limitations that position entails.
This natural partisanship, however, is threatened by the
possibility that he may be TOO open to multiple perspectives. This
brings into question his commitment to particular social values and
policy directions usually linked to the partisanship of a party. It
might, in fact, as others
on this blog have noted, be better for Obama to be MORE partisan.
Community
organizing groups are truly nonpartisan. They are not linked to
a specific party, or to the tensions and realities that this
positioning entails. They fight, in general, for issues. At
best, their focus is on a commitment to a set of shared values, and,
in contrast to Obama, those who do not share these values are NOT
INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN INTERNAL DELIBERATION. When leaders
of these groups talk with people who don't agree with them, they are
very clear that they have emerged out of the relatively safe space of
their organizations into a public realm where concessions and
negotiation are based as much if not more on power than on reason or
even emotion. It is almost always the case, in fact, that the
organization's capacity to make its power felt is what gave it a
place at this public table in the first place.
In
other words, being "nonpartisan" in terms of one's
political allegiance in the context of community organizing, means
that one actually is quite "partisan" in terms of one's
commitment to a set of values. This different kind of
commitment involves a shrinking of who can be part of an
organization's "we." Some people are not now, and may
never, be part of this "we." (It can make sense to
bring in very conservative democrats to a party, but it doesn't make
so much sense to bring these people into your deliberations within an
organizing group.)
This
necessary defining of "us" and "them" is easier
to avoid if one focuses on a person as a "symbol" of one's
collective hopes. Our "we" is less constrained by
pesky commitments to particular substantive commitments.
Action
Training and Leadership
It
is true that both community organizers and Obama's campaign
volunteers learn to act, and to act strategically to achieve their
goals. However, all of the campaign action is oriented around
voting. There is no training about how to influence people once
they are elected. Thus the campaign volunteers acquire no
direct skills for actively influencing their candidate after the
election except through whatever mechanisms Obama may create for them
once he is president.
Because
they have been given no effective skills for independent action,
Obama will clearly maintain a tight control over the volunteer
community he has created. People who become disappointed may
leave. But they have not acquired any capacity for acting
independently as a collective, at least not in any effective and
coherent manner, after they leave.
In
fact, the only non-Obama activity I have heard Obama volunteers
getting involved in was a service activity, not an effort to organize
against power. Mike Newall, for example, reported
on "a neighborhood sweep-up event organized by Obama Works,
a grassroots public service organization inspired by Obama's
community activism background." As I have noted earlier in
this series, this service approach is actually diametrically opposed
to the organizing approach, siphoning off energy that might actually
generate social change. So there is an extent to which Obama
(or his leaders) may, in some cases at least, be mis-educating
volunteers about the nature of effective social action in America
(maybe because they don't understand what organizing is).
It's
Not Community Organizing
To
summarize, Obama's organization is not training community organizers.
It is training what seem to be quite effective campaign
workers.
And
I'm not critiquing his campaign effort particularly. Is there
anything wrong with this clearly effective campaign strategy? I'm
not sure. Certainly one could raise concerns about the focus on
the affective rather than on analysis and policy. But the fact
is that most campaigns probably win with this kind of focus. In
any case, I'm not an expert on campaigning. Others may have
more to say.
The
truth is, it seems pretty unlikely that one could simultaneously
train people to be effective community organizers and effective
campaigners on the Obama model. As should be clear from the
discussion above, these seem like quite different activities.
On
the other hand, it might be possible to create an effective campaign
strategy that integrated more community organizing skills, a strategy
that was less "top-down" in its policy and value thinking.
In
any case, you could be much clearer with volunteers about what you
are and are not training them to do. And you could tell them
something about what you aren't teaching them, so that they
know what they need to learn. And you might even give them a
taste of what these other skills and perspectives look and feel like.
And
it seems problematic to represent the Obama campaign as truly
"bottom-up," because it seems to be bottom-up only in terms
of campaign strategy, not in terms of policy dialogue or engagement.
To this extent, the Obama campaign is much less different from
standard campaigns than the rhetoric may imply.
******************************
UPDATE
A
student who attended Camp Obama sent me the following email and gave
me permission to put it up:
A
lot of what you say in your piece on OpenLeft is a fair analysis of
the way the campaign has played out in practice, but it is also
somewhat unfair in its depiction of Ganz's model and the goals of
Camp Obama. Telling the "Story of Self" conversion
experience is only the first of a three-step process. The
second is to find an authentic "Story of Us" based on
shared goals and experiences (not to tell your audience what those
shared goals are), and the third is to tell a "Story of Now"
to motivate action to achieve those goals. The one-on-one
interviews central to community organizing that you discuss in your
piece are a prominent part of the Camp Obama training.
So,
I would say that the reality of the fact that we're working on a
campaign has prevented us in the short run from engaging in community
organizing at the same time, and you do a good job of talking about
that. But those of us who are volunteers in the campaign and
understand the distinction really have been given the tools to, at a
later date, start engaging in more authentic community organizing
around issues rather than a person.
See
this Word
Document for a description of what Ganz means by a "Story of
Us" and a "Story of Now." It's not clear to me
that this is that different than the testimony I was talking about,
above--in fact in the videos from Camp Obama. Also see the audio and
video about camp Obama on this
web-page where Ganz directly relates the "Story of Us"
to religious communities.
See
episode 7 of the Camp Obama web-page
where Ganz does a nice job of teaching a particular version of
one-on-ones. I saw this website in my research, but frankly
forgot all about it before I posted (I printed everything out and
forgot to look at what I didn't print). A limitation of quick
blog writing.
The
one-on-ones seem to have been focused on internal team-building, so
they are apparently serving some function at least to core Obama
volunteers. Do Obama volunteers do this as an ongoing practice?
Ganz is clear in his explanation that the one-on-ones are
focused on "why I/you like Obama and what "resources"
"you" can bring to the campaign, and an avoidance of any
discussion of policy. But they could potentially generate the
kinds of connections necessary for building more long-term power.
The
fact that they at least learned how to do "one-on-ones"
does give some indication that the Obama "organizing"
trainings may move more towards actual skills for social action and
the creation of durable collective power in the future. I
didn't write about the Obama Fellows program because I could find no
information about it, but this gives me hope that the fellows will
get more of an organizing background. They will still be doing
campaigning, probably still under the "telling your conversion
story" model. But if their efforts focus on recruiting
leaders and core volunteers, they may actually be acting more like
traditional "organizers." Of course, what happens
after the campaign will probably be most telling.
It's
important to remember that they are still recruiting someone not to
work on an issue, but to support a person. How can a transition
happen?
I'm
also happy to hear that a respected organizer like Ganz didn't just
do the "testimony" approach.
Note:
given limited time, I have scoured the Internet as best I could. I
have not read everything I found, but tried to read everything that
seemed relevant. I welcome comments and corrections.
Dr.
Aaron Schultz is associate professor and chair of the Department of
Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of
Wisconsin at Milwaukee. His web site is
http://www.educationaction.org/,
and his occasionally updated diary, where this essay first appeared,
is at Openleft.com.