Chicago: Reports from the Campaign Trail
In the last two weeks before the election, new volunteers are pouring into campaign offices and hitting the ground for both campaigns. These volunteers are following the electoral map and polls and placing themselves in the regions where they believe they are most needed.
I recently spoke to Teddy Ky-Nam Miller, a recent law school graduate, who has been volunteering in the Obama Campaign Headquarters in Chicago, Ill. and is now heading down to Florida for the homestretch.
Who are you, where are you and how long have you been there/plan to be there?
Teddy Ky-Nam Miller. Intern in the field and policy departments. I’ve been at campaign HQ in Chicago since late August and I’ll be working in Florida for the campaign through the election.
What led you to join the Obama campaign?
My unyielding man-crush on Obama. Serious, I’ve got a passion for progressive politics, and Obama brings the entire package. He’s got the experience of having grown up on both sides of the wealth divide, playing on the streets of Indonesia as a child and exchanging ideas with the nation’s brightest minds in the halls of Harvard Law school. I hope and believe that he’s going to be the catalyst for a new era in progressive politics so we can finally catch up w/more advanced democracies.
How did you make that happen?
My sister’s best friend from college knew about my Obamania from Facebook postings. When an internship became available in the field dept, she contacted me. I was on my second-to-last night in Maui, on a post-bar trip with Bonnie, my GF. I decided in an instant to make my way out to Chicago to help out however I could with the field dept, which is a giant army of an operation reaching millions of voters.
How has your personal, education and professional background affected your work for the campaign?
I had some limited campaign and field experience, having worked as a field organizer for Move On PAC in Cincinnati during the 2004 elections. As a recently minted lawyer fresh from a summer spent analyzing legal doctrine for the CA Bar, I was ready to tackle any tasks the campaign could throw at me.
The Obama campaign generally works in a fairly bottom-up fashion. While there is a command structure and a coherent set of departments and region, there is also a fluid meritocracy where bright minds/ideas naturally rise to the top.
In six weeks, I helped manage the training and deployment of almost 3000 deputy field organizers, set up a national phone bank that reached thousands upon thousands of volunteers who are now being sent to battleground states, and vetted scores of people before they could be officially associated with the campaign. Now, with just over two weeks left before the election, I’m headed down to Tampa, FL to staff a legal center set up to serve as a conduit for any shenanigans the GOP might engage in during the remaining election season.
What was your most surprising discovery since working for the campaign?
Turns out Chicago deep dish pizza isn’t as good as Zachary’s of Berkeley!
Describe a typical day for you:
Every day presents new challenges, but typically I wake up, go to Bikram yoga (so much healthier than my last campaign which was a lardy mix of dunkin donuts and driving), walk 15 minutes down Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile, and arrive at the downtown Chicago office tower where the campaign is headquartered.
In the office, 400 paid and unpaid staff share 33,000 square feet on two floors. There are lovely receptionists who greet you beneath a giant Obama banner. Through glass doors and by buzzing computer servers, I walk by lines of young, focused campaign staff working intently on their laptops (the vast majority of which are, surprise! Macs!).
I spend the next 9-12 hours going over excel spreadsheets, communicating with campaign staff in the lower-48 states, and helping out with the little fires that spring up all the time in the fast and demanding world of field organizing.
There’s a sporadic amount of carousing amongst the campaign staff, but you’ll typically see people working at all hours of the night on their projects. Everybody involved in the campaign is very focused on getting Senator Obama elected POTUS, so there is no lack of focus in HQ.
I go home listening to This American Life and Fresh Air on the iPod, chat with Bonnie on iChat, and watch the new lineup of HBO shows that law school has prevented me from seeing these past few years. Then I sleep soundly for 6-7 hours and do it all over again.
To what extent has being on the inside of this historic presidential campaign changed your outlook on politics?
I’ve always been fairly optimistic about American politics and where it is headed. Despite the dreadful past 8 years, I’ve always had a long-range notion that America’s best days are ahead of us. Working on the Obama campaign has made it abundantly clear that the changes I have been waiting for my entire life are about to be unleashed on the American political system.
My belief that the American political system will bend back towards our better angels is tied to my belief that the democrats will begin serving their core constituents: hard working American families. We’ve been in the wilderness too long, but now the left is getting organized and on message enough to make progressives proud of our liberal principles.
Obama will be useful in changing the expectations (both global and domestic) of what American gov’t can do, but it’s still up to the grassroots to create a fertile environment for change.
What are the top three nuggets of wisdom you’ve gained from your time there that you would like to share with your friends and family?
1. Signs and bumper stickers don’t mean squat compared to resources spent making sure people vote.
2. Read www.fivethirtyeight.com for the most up-to-date and accurate polling.
3. Watch The Daily Show/Colbert for news analysis that far outclasses broadcast & cable news.
This campaign has generated incredible momentum from the beginning. What do you think will happen to all this energy and engagement after the campaign?
That depends on how the thousands upon thousands of people who have been trained as leaders decide what to do next. Obama’s candidacy was always based on massive grassroots support, but after two years there is sure to be a moment of exhalation and re-grouping after such a prolonged efforts.
Two months of down time between our election victory and inauguration day ought to be enough. Obama will hopefully ask much more of the American people than they have been asked in a generation. Obama’s background as a community organizer, where he got his career started, will lend special focus to the idea that we should all be doing more to re-weave the social fabric of our country which has been devastated by neo-liberal economic ideology.
But harnessing this massive grassroots support need not be dependent on some signal or decision by our dear leader. Even in the unlikely event that we lose this campaign, this fervent embrace of democracy has been brewing and growing for years. You look back to the Deaniacs of 2003-04 and those same cast of characters have organized, raised money, volunteered, and expanded their ranks to literally millions of Obama supporters.
In my mind, this is just the beginning. Gaining the white house, owning all three houses in Washington (hopefully with a filibuster-proof majority in Congress) will allow us to systematically dismantle the obstacles to 100% participation on election day. By making voting universal (like Italy and Australia where 95% of electorate regularly votes), we will create the proper incentives for local leaders to respond to constituent needs, while also making it demographically impossible for the GOP to ever be in power again (in their current diabolical incarnation).
While the level of organizing and coordination this campaign has engineered is unprecedented, this is just a dress rehearsal for the truly monumental task of guiding our way out of the unmitigated disaster Bush has left us. So this is just the beginning of far larger projects – winning back the trust of the American people in their government, regaining our leadership role in the world, stabilizing our economy, and addressing the suicidal neglect of global warming.
Obama is going to ask a lot of the American people, and the American people are going to rise to the occasion.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers?
Jamie Wong = www.thebomb.com!
–Jamie Wong
