a belated thank you

emailed to Southside, South End, and West End volunteers on December 23.

Dear volunteers and friends,

You are my Obama family and this note of thanks is long overdue. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you for welcoming me into your city and neighborhoods. Thank you for offering me beds to sleep on, for lending me your cars, for buying me food, and for offering me caffeine. Thank you for opening your houses to strangers whom you have never met, for trusting me, and for sticking with the cause. Thank you for yelling at the TV with us during the debates, for crying with us during the speeches, for organizing thousands of door hangers, for knocking on more doors than you can count, for toting your children with you when you worked, and for making the South Side office the cool place to be. And most of all, thank you for opening your hearts, giving so much of your time to this movement, and never, ever losing hope.

We all worked long and hard for this victory, and every single one of you deserves to be reveling in this moment. So, congratulations! We could never have done this without you.

On Election Night, President-Elect Barack Obama reminded the nation, "This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change." I said something similar a few nights later at our post-election gathering: This fight is not over. On the contrary, it is just beginning.

Hopefully, in the days after the election, you received two important emails from the campaign:

• The first email invited you to complete a volunteer survey about your experience with the campaign. If you have not taken the time to complete it, please do so now. National campaign staff are taking survey responses very seriously as they plan our next steps.


• The second email asked you to host or attend a "Change is Coming" house party last weekend: December 13th and 14th. At these meetings, which happened nationwide, volunteers, staff, and supporters discussed what THEY wanted to see happen next, now that the campaign is over and Barack prepares to take office. If you did not attend one of these meetings, worry not! There are many opportunities to talk about next steps in the survey above, or email your thoughts to me: I would be more than happy to pass them along.

Up next: Code name 'OFA 2.0'

While the campaign is over, the movement for change and renewal has just begun. The opportunity to make a real difference in not only our government's domestic and international policy but the American psyche has always existed. We have always been able to fight for equality for all Americans, demand the end of an unjust war, organize for a healthcare system that works for patients and not insurance company CEOs, and call for a second look at our government's spending priorities.

But now, and for the next four years, we've got a guy on the inside.

Staff from all levels of the campaign have been working diligently since November 5th (I know? Can you believe it? I slept…..) to build an organization that will channel the amazing energy we have found in ourselves and nourished in our neighbors into the coming years. Right now, we're calling it "Obama For America, 2.0". We don't know what it will eventually be called, what legal presence it will have, or what the organization will look like. But we do know this:

Our victory proved that grassroots organizing works at any scale, big or small. Volunteers on the ground have always been and will continue to be the most important part and the driving force of this movement. Remember those neighborhood teams? Those house meetings? They're not going anywhere.

While every iteration of OFA 2.0 will be different, much like the campaign's appearance and methodology differed state to state, across the country we will focus on:

• Electing progressive candidates to every office, local to national


• Lobbying current elected officials to promote items on Barack's legislative agenda, such as universal healthcare, a worker-centered resolution to our economic crisis, and repairing our public school system.


• Local service, volunteerism, and civic engagement.

So, what can I do now?

Ah hah! I thought you might ask. Look forward to more news and emails about OFA 2.0 in the coming weeks and months, but don't be afraid to start organizing now. We are facing some of the biggest crises this nation has ever seen, and we're all going to need to chip in if we're going to make it through.

What you can do right now:

• Visit change.gov, the official website of President-Elect Obama. On the site, you can participate in discussions on healthcare and civic service, read about the most important items on Barack's agenda, and learn about ways you can get involved.


• Plan or participate in a service project before Inauguration Day. Congress has transformed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, this year January 19th, the day before the Inauguration, into a national day of community service. To honor Dr. King's legacy, the President-elect and Vice President-elect and their families will participate in activities dedicated to serving others. Wherever you are on January 19th, I urge you to volunteer and serve.


• Start to organize now. There is no need to wait for the official OFA 2.0 roll-out or even for the Inauguration. Host a house meeting. Invite all the wonderful volunteers you met over the last few months. Talk about ways you can change your neighborhood and change Pittsburgh. Write letters to your Representatives and Senators urging them to work quickly to implement Barack's agenda as well as the issues that are most important to you.Volunteer at your local school or food bank. Interested in seeing how some Pittsburgh volunteers are working to keep the movement alive? Check out http://www.pittsburghhopes.org.

Thank you.

Thank you for moving our country forward. Thank you for being a part of something amazing. And thank you for being a part of my life. I had a wonderful time in Pittsburgh, and already miss you all.

If you need anything or have any questions, do not hesitate to email me.

Happy holidays,
~Matt Cohen-Price
your Southside/South End/West End Field Organizer
matt.cohen-price@obamaalumni.com

Whoa, it's been a while

Hey guys.

So, in what little (no) free time I've had since July 28, I've felt pretty guilty about not writing to you all.

This one will be brief. PA is insane.

My sad attempt at relating the last two months and next 32 days of my life will come in a couple of brief bullet points.


1.
The other night, I got an extra large black chai tea from the coffee shop down the street from my office. After a second glance at the counter, I bought a packet of Emergen-C as well, poured the orange-flavored fizzy powder into my sugar-less tea, and drank it. It was disgusting. Add a shot of whiskey, and you have my life in a beverage.

2.
It ain't much, but check out this unedited slideshow of two recent events - the grand office opening and debate watch party at our recently opened Pittsburgh South Side for Obama Field Office. I'm one of the two field organizers working out of the office. The second is a few pictures from a project I've been working on since the summer - putting together a community mural in the turf I organized during the summer - the Hill District. Also, re that event, find this slideshow on the PA Obama website. The pictures are way better (from our regional Media folks). It's posted on the pabarackobama.com website.

3.
There's a great article on http://www.fivethirtyeight.com (the best polling website ever and completely addicting) today - its a comparison between Obama and McCain field operations. Find it here. It's about Missouri, but it's a similar story here.

4.
While their field operation might not seem like much right now, that doesn't mean we can just sit tight and read polls: when you read about McCain giving up Michigan, remember where they are sending those staffers. Here. PA. Western PA. Why? Because of this article. "How to Win Pennsylvania"? Allegheny County. Pittsburgh. The South Hills, in fact. Oh wait, that's my turf. Shit.

Here are some excerpts from the article:


Since this year's Pennsylvania primaries, many people have been schooled on the mechanics of how Democrats win this state. Call it the "Rendell rule": Stack up high numbers in the Philly collar counties, hold the losses to a minimum in the other 60, and try to win Allegheny for good measure.

...

Pennsylvanians don't see McCain in the "failed Bush policies" category by which Democrats try to define him. Instead, they see a war hero, a brand that resonates in the blue-collar areas where their unions are trying to persuade them otherwise.

"He is a guy you can depend on," said Tom Miller, 54, of Lancaster, a registered Democrat who is very comfortable voting for McCain. "He has had no problem bucking his own party and he does not ask me to make sacrifices that he isn't willing to make."

Add the stereotypes that some voters hold about black candidates and Obama dilutes the Rendell rule.

So, where can McCain offset traditional Democrat voting blocs?

In Allegheny, Bucks and Chester counties, where a large number of those voters live.

To win Allegheny, McCain must win the entire South Hills area minus Mt. Lebanon. He also must win the new suburban areas around the airport, as well as the Mon Valley, where poorer working white voters live. He can easily sweep the North Hills as well as the small river towns.

That's it for me. 12:30 on a Friday night - back to prepping for tomorrow's canvas.

~matt

I shed Blood for Barack Obama

On the final day of the Organizing Fellowship's three day training, which seems like an eternity ago, another fellow commented to the room that he would die for Barack Obama. The comment garnered murmurs of assent from a few other fellows and staff, including myself. And it's true – I think I would. I don't believe that Barack is perfect or superhuman, nor do I believe that all America's problems will be solved when we elect him on November 5^th, inaugurate him on January 20^th, or even build him a library in 2016. But I do believe that he has more potential and power to start us moving towards solutions right now than I ever will, so yes – I told myself that I would put my life on the line if that is what it took to elect Barack Obama in November.

The thing is, I always thought it would happen in an epic, heroic fashion, like taking a bullet for him, tackling him to get him out of the way of a Manchurian Candidate-esque rogue Secret Service agent, or getting run off a Missouri highway in a rainstorm by a racist southern trucker. It ended up being nowhere near that exciting.

Nonetheless, it's true. I bled for our next president.

The story itself isn't all that exciting. It involved a windstorm, a flying festival tent (those folding, white-topped tents under which you set up popcorn stands and all your best photography), and a conceivably misplaced but definitely well-meant attempt to put myself between the tent and a few poor souls looking in the completely wrong direction and one very nice car. End result: before I could catch the tent, the tent caught me... in the forehead.

The thing about foreheads is they don't have very many nerves – I felt the tent hit me, but I didn't feel much of any sustained pain at all. The other thing about foreheads is they don't really stop bleeding. So, as I caught the tent and worked with a few other festival goers to hold it down and fold it up, I failed to notice that I actually had a head wound and was bleeding profusely. The gash ended up being decently deep, and I spent Sunday afternoon, high voter registration time, watching the old version of Batman from a bed in the UPMC Shadyside ER waiting to get four stitches above my left eye.

A coworker of mine (being from Oklahoma, he happens to know a bit about windstorms) told me afterwards that he hoped I learned my lesson – when large objects start flying, run away from them, not towards them. Unfortunately, the only lesson I think I learned from the experience is that if I ever really need a few hours off, the easiest way to get it is by getting injured.

I got the stitches out on Friday, and besides for a ½ inch gash healing over my left eyebrow that may or may not scar, I'm doing just fine. The experience was, however, my first real in-country experience with not knowing whether my health insurance would cover a necessary medical visit, oddly applicable to this election.

---

One of the quirks about organizing is that you start to get pretty good at reading people's politics without ever actually talking to them. I've spoken with so many people about voting and the election in the last six weeks that I stereotype their political views before, or while, speaking with them. I have come to the subconscious conclusion, for example, that all black men over fifty are registered to vote. The political arguments for this stereotype are obvious: because either they themselves remember not being allowed to vote, or their parents spent a majority of their lives not voting and burned the need into the minds of their children, it is purely a matter of principle. And my experience on the street has only legitimized the stereotype.

These reads can be detrimental to my work (I must make a conscious effort to not allow my preconceptions to alter who I speak to and who I don't), but at many times they are extremely helpful: every day, I get better at phrasing questions and channeling discussions in certain directions based on the perceived political beliefs of the voter (or non-voter) I am speaking with in order to build connections that allow for discussion and persuasion.

Sometimes, however, I am dead wrong.

A few weeks ago, I attended a neighborhood house meeting, planned and run by a friend and co-fellow, of elderly folks mostly living in a retirement complex in Pittsburgh's neighborhood of Oakland. Everyone there was over fifty, and most were at least sixty-five. The subject of concern was a man who, despite his age (I would guess around sixty), was in extremely good shape. He buzz-cut kept his balding silver-gray hair looking clean and professional, and he wore white Champion athletic socks, clean sneakers, and a short sleeved shirt tucked into his shorts. Before the organized discussion, I overheard him mention to someone else that he was a long-time snowbird – he voted in Florida, where he spent every winter.

This man was clearly a Republican – I couldn't figure out why he was at the meeting. He looked like he lifted weights daily and biked on a stationary bike for two hours a day watching Fox News. He probably drove a pickup truck and owned at least three guns. (Not that any of these things would bar him from being an Obama supporter – it just made it a whole lot less likely!)

As usual, when the organized part of the meeting began, each person in the room took a few minutes to introduce themselves and tell the group why they had chosen to come. (This is an integral part of Obama-style community organizing, how we won Iowa, and why the campaign brings so many different kinds of people together.) When it finally became this guy's turn to tell his story, he began speaking intelligently and in detail about how the last eight years have deeply affected the United States' international moral standing, the misinformation that sent us into a poorly-planned war we should never have started, and the immediate need of electing Obama, someone who was already changing the face of American politics and who represented a huge step forward for the country. He didn't stop there, however: his two biggest heroes, he told us, are his own Democratic Representative from Florida Robert Wexler and Rep. Kucinich (D-OH), because of their unwillingness to stop fighting against the illegal actions of the Bush White House.

He has volunteered at least twice a week since that meeting, and will continue to do so until he starts volunteering in Florida when he moves down in October. He completely made my day, and has served as a reminder that this campaign can truly find supporters in every corner.

---

As you probably know, Barack Obama has been spending the last week or so rallying support abroad, including making a quite epic speech at the Siegessaeule in Berlin in front of 200,000 people, his biggest crowd yet. (If you have not seen the 23 minute speech, you should see it or read the transcript here.) Besides for sounding amazingly presidential and giving me goosebumps as is customary, the speech was unusually symbolic for me in a few ways.

First, I got to listen to a crowd of Europeans chant, "USA! USA! USA!", something I'm not sure has happened since the end of World War II and which I didn't really expect to happen in my lifetime. And, 200,000 people!?! Last I checked, the vast majority of gatherings that large in the last decade anywhere in the European Union have been Anti-Bush protests.

Second, by talking seriously about global warming and climate change, he brings legitimacy to the issues. Climate change needs to be addressed NOW, but far too many Americans continue to believe is bad science and/or progressive fear-mongering. (to give McCain credit, he is talking about climate issues too, but as he just reversed his position to defend offshore drilling, I'm not sure how serious he is and believe he is only talking about it because Barack is talking about it.)

Third, just days after the Iraqi Prime Minister essentially endorsed his withdrawal plan, Barack spoke about fighting for democracy with food and aid, as we did during the Soviet Blockade of Berlin in 1948, and becoming again a moral beacon for the world that we once were. Believe it or not, we might actually have found a Democratic political leader who can be "strong on defense" while advocating for nuclear disarmament and peaceful diplomacy, with our enemies as well as our allies.

Finally, while he gave the speech on Thursday, July 24, I did not get to watch it until Friday afternoon. Between the actual speech and my watching it, I was offered a paid job on the campaign. For the last six weeks, I have been working full time as an unpaid "Organizing Fellow," but that commitment ended a few days ago. Don't get me wrong: ever since I first volunteered before the Maryland primary, I have felt a part of this campaign and movement. But watching that speech on Friday, I could not stop repeating to myself, "I work for that man." Let me tell you, it's a mighty cool feeling.

~m

Vignettes

Campaign life runs together into one, constant flow. In part, this is due to the massive amounts of people you meet every day, phone numbers you collect, data you report, and meetings you attend. But a far deeper (and simpler) root is simply that there is nothing to distinguish units of time from one another. I don't know what happened 'last week' or 'two weeks ago' because I haven't had a weekend with which to distinguish weeks since I got here. And while I do sleep (some), days are so long I have caught myself or been caught saying "yesterday when you…" when I meant to refer to something that happened just that morning. November 4^th is approaching so quickly (only 3.5 months!), yet November 5^th seems eons away.

I'm convinced that the first thing you lose working for a campaign is facial recognition and name memory. I was registering voters with my Field Organizer the other day (yesterday? I don't know…) when someone came up to us and shook his hand. "Kirby! I haven't seen you since the primary!" She continued, eventually saying something along the lines of, "you'll be happy to know my brother's surgery went fine and he's in recovery." After five minutes of holding his own, Kirby separated from the conversation so we could continue our registration efforts. As we walked away, he leaned over to me and said, "I have NO IDEA who she was."

Side note: If you're reading this and under thirty, I know what you're thinking. Yes, my boss' name is Kirby. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this. It suffices to say that the irony runs deep, especially because until the fellows showed up, Kirby had no idea he was actually a bouncy, pink Nintendo bubble-creature who could suck up other Nintendo-creatures' powers.

The second thing you lose working for a campaign is any sense of chronology whatsoever. I remember a solidly good fraction of the last month, but have little perception of the order in which it occurred. Memorable moments are just that: moments, no longer in context. So, the duration of this post is vignettes, a few of the tidbits I remember from the last few weeks. The names are all aliases.

Mr. Franklin

I work in two neighborhoods, as I mentioned in my last post. The Hill District, a poor and overwhelmingly African American neighborhood in which all 15,000 residents know each other, and Polish Hill, a poor and overwhelmingly white neighborhood, in which all 1,500 residents barely say 'hi' to their neighbors.

One Hill District resident called me (I'm not sure where he got my number) and began complaining about misuse of office space and inattention to the Hill District during the Pennsylvania primary. To be fair, the campaign is well aware that the Pittsburgh primary campaign was not a great one, and many important people and neighborhoods were overlooked. His complaints turned into trying to rent us office space, and as it was 11:30 pm and I was trying to cook dinner, I cut him off, asking if he would meet with me in person the following day. He gives me an address, I give him a time, and I go back to preparing my hearty and original meal of pasta from a 5 lb bag and red sauce from a 60 oz plastic jar of 'Prego.'

The next day, I show up first to the address, a locked building on the main street of the Hill with grates on the door and A few minutes later, a cab comes down the street, flips a U turn in the middle of the block, pulls over, and the driver beckons to me to get in. After a split second of hesitation, I throw my backpack - which has my life (computer) in it – into the back seat and get in. It's Mr. Franklin, an 81 year old man who has lived in the Hill District all his life. He owns a cab company, by which I mean he drives his own cab. There's a large sign on the side of his building with the words "Eagle Taxi" and a phone number painted in cursive script. Dial the number and you'll get his wife, also in her 80's, who will use a CB radio to direct Mr. Franklin to wherever you may be. Mr. Franklin treats his radio like he were an eight year old kid, which is exactly how I would treat a CB radio if I had one. (Probably why I think he's such a cool guy.) He will ONLY call it his "communications system," never just a "radio," and raises his wife to ask when supper will be ready by calling, "Unit One to Base." It's the best thing ever.

He is amazingly proud of his independence; he does everything himself. He keeps his cab and trucks (this 81 year old has two moving trucks and does shipping and hauling, too) "repaired himself." His house, and the added deck and garage? He "built himself." I eventually found out that what he meant by these statements was that he did everything on his terms. Not at the whim of a money-hoarding mechanic, he hires mechanics to come to him to keep his vehicles in tip-top shape. He did not build his house in the literal sense, but it was built under his watch, and he owns it in the clear.

The best part: two years ago, he was flown to Los Angeles to try to hold his own on "The Price is Right." I did not believe the man until he showed me the massive, 4-foot check for $2500 that lives behind his dresser.

Now, I am working with some local artists, contractors, and community members to get kids to paint a huge Obama mural and hang it on the side of one of his buildings. The icing on the cake: it was Mr. Franklin's idea.

Marie

Unlike the Hill, it's not easy to find Obama supporters in Polish Hill. Marie was one of the few (eight, actually) names of supporters from the Primary in the volunteer tracking system the campaign uses. She graciously offered to host a Unite For Change House Party, and I worked with her to plan the small event and invite neighbors and community members. This 72 year old woman spent two evenings walking around her neighborhood with me and knocking on doors, inviting complete strangers into her home for a potluck. The day of the potluck, of course, she cooked enough food to feed all twelve guests.

A part of the House Party programming was essentially story-telling: each guest was asked to explain to the group what brought them to the party and to their support of Obama or any other candidate, with special emphasis on the host (Marie) and the organizer (me). Marie had been scared about sharing her story in our meetings beforehand, and had on my urging a few times practiced by telling me some of what she hoped to say. What came out the night of the party was completely different. This woman had grown up in quite racist Kentucky and was in her teens at the end of World War II. When racially integrated platoons would return to the army base near her town, black and white soldiers alike, who had just spent months or years fighting and dying side by side, would walk into the restaurant where Marie waited tables. She wanted to serve them, but her boss, "Mr. Roy," would not have it. Marie, a white teenager who everyone called "Peanuts," would get into public shouting matches with her boss about not serving the black war heroes.

To me, this story is great for three reasons. First, of course, a 17 year old Kentuckian had the cajones to talk back to her boss about the wrongs of segregation. Second, her nickname was "Peanuts." Third, she felt comfortable enough in a room full of strangers to tell us that her nickname was "Peanuts."

Marie is a trooper, and is going to make a great neighborhood team captain.

David Shapiro

Field organizing is probably the most humbling thing I have ever done in my life. By that I mean the job has a tendency, just when you think you're having a great day, to trip you and then have the nerve to rub your fallen face in the mud.

Moreover, it is humbling to be surrounded by people who have truly given their complete selves to this campaign. I'll be honest: I thought I was all that when I decided to take a semester off to work for the campaign, but I am surrounded by people who have given so much more and taken so many more risks to be a part of this movement. David is just one example.

David works for the campaign as a field organizer. He's a Philadelphia Jew, which means he pronounces his last name "sha-PI-row" instead of "sha-pee-row," which I still haven't gotten used to. He is blatantly honest to a fault, loves Barack almost as much as he loves all sports anywhere, and has made the profound sacrifice of buying and wearing Pittsburgh sports team paraphernalia and hiding his Phillies gear in his closet. A lawyer in his late twenties, David has spent the last few years working for one of Philadelphia's top litigation firms. In the weeks before the Pennsylvania Primary, this lawyer put in eight hours a day on the campaign doing whatever they needed him to do, after working a full day at his law firm. After the primary, he was warned that if he left to work for Barack, there would be no job waiting for him when he got back. He quit anyway, and then volunteered for a month with no guarantee the campaign would actually hire him.

I was at the bars with some of the staff a few nights ago, and I told David that he was the biggest asshole I had ever wanted to be friends with. He took it as a compliment, which is exactly how I meant it.

Steve

I met Steve, an older man who has lived in Pittsburgh all his life, waiting for a bus one night at 9:00 or 9:30 at night. Dressed in old boots, and stained khakis, his collared light blue uniform shirt was tucked in yet unbuttoned to the bottom of his rib cage. He cleans PNC Park, where the Pirates play, after every home game. It takes four or five hours each night, he told me, depending on the crowd that night. He is extremely hunchbacked, to the point that I took as unspoken truth that he has been picking up other people's trash for a long, long time. He doesn't get to watch the games, but after this many years, I doubt he would want to. Yet each night, he takes a bus to the ballpark about half way through the game, not to return until the early hours of the morning.

I mention Steve only because he doesn't fit into any important, sought-after political demographic, he will never be on tv, and no one will ever write a book about him or anyone like him. He is practically invisible, both politically and socially, yet because of the job I do, I got to meet him. And he made my day.

----

In other news, I think I might have a job after the fellowship is over! More on that later....
~m

Eight Days a Week

Talking to some friends before I left the Bay Area, I remember discussing the segment of the book/film, "Into the Wild," when Chris, the main character stops on a farm somewhere in the Midwest and works a harvest season with Vince Vaughn. (Ok, so I watched the movie, not read the book.) A college graduate of a wealthy family, he hadn't done a day of "real work" in his life. I'm proud to say that that isn't true for me – I have done a few days of real work in my life, and I might even have a couple of weeks worth of it under my belt, if you count my summer in Honduras and two trips to Post-Katrina New Orleans. I had brought it up because another one of my many visions for my own future had popped into my head- my want to take time off from whatever I am doing and do a season or a year or a few years of real work, work that involves daily physical labor. For some reason, I have the expectation that it will round me out as person – maybe that's just a testosterone thing, or perhaps I've read so much Calvin & Hobbes in my life that Calvin's dad has actually convinced me that it would "build character." Either way, while I may not be harvesting wheat or pouring concrete, I am indeed working my ass off. And I love it. Kind of.

We received a massive training packet on our first day of training two Saturdays ago, and a few pages in I found a page titled "a typical day for a field organizer." The sample day started at 6:30 AM with either bus-registration (riding the commuter bus routes trying to register voters) or visibility (to a bad field organizer, this means standing on a street corner with a sign. To a good field organizer, this means bringing coffee for the volunteers you have recruited to stand on a street corner and hold signs). The day ended at 10:30 or so – evenings are usually taken up by phone calling, which ends at 9:00 pm – then there's an hour and a half to do data entry and prepare for the next day. I found the whole sheet kind of bemusing, as they also told us that the Fellowship was a 30 hour a week requirement. That would mean it was only a two day a week job, and that's including an hour lunch break!

Go figure, 30 hours is just the bare minimum.

The last two weeks have been crazy. Lots of up, and while I love the purpose that I am working for and love working for a purpose that means so much to me, even more down. This job is HARD, and its something that I have very little experience in. The last two weeks have really been a case study into how we (or at least I) learn, to some extent, through mimicry. I like to watch once through and then repeat, building on what I have observed. This is how the New Orleans trip happened – I used my experience as a participant to help figure out what could be done differently, better, for more people. Without that first experience I would have been swimming in the dark, which is exactly the feeling that has characterized much of the last two weeks.

So, what am I doing, anyway? I am in a group of four Organizing Fellows assigned to what are known in Pittsburgh as the Hill District and Polish Hill. We're supposed to, well, organize.

A brief aside: The Hill District, (or just, "the Hill") currently one of the poorest and most violent neighborhood in the city, shares the characteristics of many inner cities – 90% black and filled with Section 8 and other Public Housing projects, it is in an area that could be and should be quite nice or at the least often traveled through – it is right next to downtown, in the center of the city's geographically defined borders, and, on a hill, it has great views in all directions. Instead, just like Baltimore's inner city, inaccessible due to a beltway that allows commuters and travelers to bypass completely the poor areas of town, or New Orleans' Lower 9^th Ward, which is a twenty minute drive from anything that might even resemble a freeway, the Pittsburgh infrastructure is designed so that visitors to downtown or those traveling through the city never have to and never get to see the Hill. It is really too bad, too: the neighborhood is a cultural mecca, once home to a strong Jewish and then Irish population, Satchel Paige's Negro League baseball team, the bars and clubs that launched many of America's great jazz musicians to fame, and August Wilson. Poor and black, the Hill is natural Obama territory, and was therefore completely oversaturated with voter registration efforts and literature before the primary.

Polish Hill, next to the Hill, mostly white, and working class, is a completely different story. A massive and historic Roman Catholic church looks over the small community, which is surprising still filled with lots of Polish people. It seems to be comprised almost completely of people who have lived there their whole lives, and renters looking for cheap, short-term housing. White and blue-collar, Polish Hill went completely untouched by the Obama camp during the primary season.

One community leader told us that, although the two communities are literally across the street from one another, they "barely know each other exist." And it seems to be true.

Ok, back on track. What's my job? They told us to organize, and gave us not all that much more than that. If you get emails from Barack, (he sends them to me all the time, and text messages; I'm just that cool. Text 62262 if you want them too) you know there are over 3,000 "Unite For Change" house parties happening across the country tomorrow, Saturday. Those are us – the parties are, for the most part, organized by Fellows like me scattered across the country. But beyond the short term goal of the parties, and the never-ending task of attempting to locate and register unregistered voters, our job is to lay the groundwork for the massive field operation that is is the Obama campaign, just getting underway. Essentially, we have six weeks to completely canvass our turfs (in our case, 25 precincts) to locate local resources, hubs of community organization, neighborhoods of support and nonsupport, volunteers, and volunteer leaders.

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Before I wrap this up, a word about community organizing. If you have watched the news in the last ten months, you know that Barack spent a chunk of his post-college youth as "a community organizer on the south side of Chicago." With that background, and the power of the populist movement that makes up the base of his vast support network, the campaign has taken on a wonderfully community-based feel. The line between field organizing, the political term that refers to the on-the-ground portion of an electoral campaign, and community organizing, the act of working with communities in an apolitical fashion to unify them around a common cause, has become blurred. But it has not disappeared. Community organizers enter communities to serve a perceived need defined by the communities themselves. Maybe a neighborhood lacks a grocery store, or two rival ethnic groups are fighting over a few jobs, keeping wages low, instead of working together to demand higher wages. While success may be achieved through political means, the end result is always less political than it is local, ideological. On the surface, field and community organizing appear extremely similar, but a deep chasm separates them. Field organizers may use the same tactics – recruiting volunteers, knocking on doors, making lots and lots and lots and lots of phone calls, talking to elected officials and unofficial community leaders, etc – but we are inherently political and come to the communities we work in with an agenda (electing a president) that we, not the community, set. In this way, we violate the first rule of community organizing.

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Remember that training manual, with the page about the typical day of an organizer? There should be another page, specifically for the typical night of an organizer. In the world of campaigns, only three kind of nights seem possible. There's:

1. the "stay at the office until the wee hours of the morning then crash" night;

2. the "go home at a reasonably normal time, like 9:00 pm, then be anti-social for a few hours and crash" night; and

3. the "hit the bars and get up waaaaaaay too early to go back to work the next morning" night.

If my limited campaign experience tells me anything, the prevalence of night number 1 will stay about the constant for the next 5 months, but as we get closer to November, there will be fewer and fewer night number 2s and more and more night number 3s.

And on that note, let me wrap up one of my few remaining night number 2s and attempt to get a few hours of sleep before I get up for my fifteenth day of continuous work. That number is just going to keep getting higher and higher....

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Up next: How I almost got hired, but then wasn't because they'd rather not pay me, shaking Barack's hand and why it was so disappointing, and wondering in amazement for hours on end how it happened that in a town called "Unity," Hillary and Barack actually split the Democratic primary exactly 107 votes to 107 votes.

"Chapter 6: Hope"

I came up with the title for this blog post about a week ago, on the side of a highway in Illinois. I actually can't give myself credit for coming up with it – that was the doing of (...guess who!) Barack Obama. It had been raining heavily all day, and we had just spent an hour sitting on the shoulder, waiting for the engine of Ben's '97 Jetta to, essentially, dry off.

After losing a day and a whole lot of money to a mechanic in Boulder on Wednesday, we spent Thursday driving from Colorado to the tiny town of Devil's Elbow, Missouri, where Ben's Grandma and some uncles and cousins live. There were no real hiccups in the drive, accept that IT WAS REALLY LONG, STRAIGHT, AND FLAT (the boring half of Colorado, all of Kansas, and half of Missouri = 14 hours) and I got the only speeding ticket of the road trip, a $150 gift from a Kansas State Trooper.

Our radar detector worked great, make no mistake – it was complete user error. It beeped, telling us that it sensed a weak "Ka band" broadcast – one of the more common bands for radar detectors – but it beeped in an odd way, convincing me it was on a weird setting. So I tried to "fix" (fiddle) with it while driving down I-70 at 90 mph. You don't have to know me well to know that's the kind of mistake I would make. I was pressing too many buttons to notice the trooper's signal getting stronger until he was just sitting behind me with his lights on waiting for me to notice him. But worry not about my poor driving habits: you don't really have to watch the road in Kansas, as it's so straight you could tie the wheel to the door and take a nap.

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Missouri was a whole new experience for me, and great – completely green everywhere, with a big river (called something that struck me as very southern, "the big little river" or something) meandering through town. Ben's grandma is one of the sweetest people ever, a German immigrant who fell in love with an American soldier posted in Germany after WWII, and a damn good cook. We went innertubing down the little big river at 1:00 in the morning with Ben's cousins, and got far too little sleep for Friday's drive: Missouri to Pittsburgh, which we had hoped to do in two days, would be another supposed 13 hours. It ended up taking 17.

We got a great start Friday morning, but it didn't last long. I took the first driving shift, and about five minutes into the drive it started raining substantially. I'm minding my own business at 70 mph in the right lane of the two lane highway when a big rig with Arkansas plates flies by me at about 95 mph. I don't read anything into it – we're on a downward slope and I figure he didn't want to get his brakes wet or something – until he merges into my lane, cuts me off, and promptly slows down to 65 mph. "Jerk!" I merge left and try to pass him – he merges left, cutting me off again, slowing down to 60 mph. I try again to pass him, in the right lane this time, and then again in the left – he just straddles the two lanes, and my insults quickly turn from printable to not so respectable.

Right then, I am struck with the brilliant notion that the world wouldn't be all that different if Ben and I were dead in a ditch. I egg the truck into the left lane, then drop down to third gear, accelerate behind the tractor-trailer and dart right, half in the right lane and half on the shoulder. 70 mph – 80 mph – 90 mph – at this point I have passed about 2/3 of the truck, and beginning to congratulate myself on my tricky aggressive driving. Too soon – he merges back into the right lane, which I am half in, all but running me off the road. Breaking, honking, and swearing with all my might, I am forced completely onto the shoulder as I slow down and return to my subordinate position behind the truck.

Yeah, so I thought a 10 year old compact just out of the shop could beat an 18-wheeler driven by an angry racist (we figure this was all incited by our four Obama bumper stickers) in a rainstorm. My mom calls me stubborn. I call me principled.

If only it was over: 30 seconds later, the engine loses power, not to start again for an hour and a half. After a tow from the local friendly AAA, a mechanic took a peak and finding nothing wrong, told us to try starting it up. It started, with no trouble at all, and we left Devil's Elbow for the second time, at 11:00 instead of 7:30. After traversing Missouri, Illinois, and most of Indiana, the rain gets heavy again. As we listen to Barack Obama read "The Audacity of Hope" to us (books on tape = best road trip EVER), the engine loses power again.

After putting skills of deduction to work, having a long-distance conference with my all-knowing father, and utilizing picture messaging for the second time in my life (the first time was a picture of a broken car part sent to my dad, also), we come to the conclusion that Ben's distributor is cracked, and when water gets under the hood (first spray from the racist trucker, then the heavy rain) it shorts out the electrical system that normally sends power to the spark plugs.

An hour later, the distributor has dried again, and we start the car. As I pull back onto the highway, Ben starts the book again. Barack reads the last few words of chapter five, and then says, "Chapter Six: Hope." Needless to say, after seven days that included finding out we had positions with the campaign on the other side of the country, planning a road trip, packing, driving across four states, sitting at a mechanic's for a day, driving across five more states, and getting into a fight with a big rig, it captured the moment.

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Since Friday (we got in at 12:30 am), those words have continued to capture the moment: training was lunacy, three 10 to 12 hour days learning about Pittsburgh, community organizing, how to throw a house party, PA's voter registration policies, primary results, and a whole bunch of campaign secrets which I'm not allowed to tell you. Then they set us loose, with little to no direction.

During a break on Monday, the last day of training, I overheard another Organizing Fellow (that's my job title) ask a staffer a question about our extremely limited resources. The staffer replied, "it's a bit of a shoe-string operation right now."

The Fellow responded, "yeah, but with a borrowed shoe-string." More on that, and my first few days, later.

~matt

zen and the art of being american

Written June 11. Postdated due to lack of internet. Pictures to come.

Reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as I drive across the country is a total trip – not only am I drawing connections between the philosophic discussion and my (extremely limited) motorcycle experience, but am following the author on his road trip as I pursue my own. Now, his trip through the West was weeks long, on the side roads, and he was traveling to travel, and ours is one week long, on far more interstates then we would like, and with a most definite destination (and deadline) in mind. But nevertheless, small similarities arise. For one, there's lots of time for quiet, introspective, philosophic thought, of which I am greatly appreciative, as my last semester at school involved next to no time for introspection or quiet.

Secondly, I am finding very true his observation that, when you are tied so closely to your route, your speed, your destination, your vehicle, and your fellow passenger(s), there are good days and there are bad days. Monday was a good day – 750 miles through the Sierra Nevadas and across the Nevada desert on route 50 – the loneliest highway in America – we put Ben's radar detector to good use and traveled, well, above the speed limit (note my comma usage), ended with setting up camp in Bryce Canyon, Utah, meeting some very pleasant travelers setting up camp next to us (an older couple, also from the Bay Area, they were on their last leg of a 5 week trip), and drinking Budweiser. Day two was most definitely not a good day – the check engine light had turned on late monday, and it continued to haunt us, as did interesting noises and weak acceleration, as we drove from Bryce, in SW Utah, to Boulder, Colorado, where we were to spend the night at my friend Annalise's house. Day three, today, was simply a very expensive day – we never left Boulder, and Ben ended up spending a solid chunk of his life savings (which, like my own, isn't very much at the moment) fixing his car.

Let me backtrack a little: for those of you who don't know, I am at the moment driving from Oakland, California to Pittsburgh, PA, with my high school friend Ben Dalgetty. Saturday morning at 9:00 am we will begin the Obama campaign's Organizing Fellowship, a six week volunteer program where, as far as we understand it, fellows shadow paid field organizing staff, learn what they do, and prepare to work for the campaign. If they like you, they hire you after the six weeks. Ben, who is participating in a campaign semester through his school, Occidental college, does not have to return to school until after the general election. I just submitted my Leave of Absence paperwork to Goucher today. Both of us are planning on getting paid jobs with the campaign and working through the general.

As I've been traveling, I've noticed some things (which I would say is generally a good thing):

1. I'm not sure which state it is that officially goes by the motto, “big sky country,” but in most of these western, non-coastal states, it is damn true – the sky just seems bigger and grander in Utah and Colorado. It is so empty, and so beautiful. Even the Nevada desert is stunning in its own, albeit nuclear wasteland sort of way (yes, that's “nuk-li-er,” not “nuk-u-lar”). And the stars.... don't get me started. The night sky from the middle of nowhere, with next to no light pollution at all, is a completely different thing.

2. Drinking Budweiser always makes me feel American. But drinking it next to my tent in a national park just takes it to a whole new level. Plus, despite what my beer-connoisseur friends might say, I have a soft spot for it.

3. On the topic of national parks, why is it that there are ALWAYS more foreign tourists there then Americans? I swear, I saw twice as many non-Americans hiking in Bryce than good old patriots. (we squeezed a short hike in before we left through some amazing rock formations called hoodoos...) Driving through so much empty space reminded me how important it is to conserve its beauty. It's not untouched, of course – we traveled on good roads, hiked worn trails, and our campsite had running water and plumbing nearby – but it is one of the few places left where humans, who after all are just as much a part of “nature” as anything else, being natural and carbon-based and all, don't simply overtake everything around them and bend it to their will but participate in their surroundings as just one group of respectful denizens. And I worry, that with so few spending time in these areas (and therefore often forgetting to participate in nature), that the imagined importance of this not-really-all-that-empty space will fade and groups of motorcyclists, families in rented motor homes, circles of tents, and kids traveling to work for presidential campaigns will turn into more air-conditioned suburbs and big-box stores.

4. If I lived out here, away from cities and on a ranch or a farm, I'd be a Ron Paul fan too. Seriously though – city life, just like any life I guess, gives you tunnel vision – gay marriage is important, fixing our schools is important, and taxes, to an extent, are just fine as they fund necessary public services. Simple, right? But driving along these roads and seeing two mile long dirt driveways, barns, houses, cabins, “keep out” signs, and pick up trucks actually used to haul things and not as testosterone-proving fashion statements reminded me it's not so simple. One image from monday especially stuck with me: we passed a man at one point while on route 50, repairing a section of his miles-long fence. He was standing on a rutted path next to his four wheeler, which he actually uses to get around his property and fix things, as opposed to just doing wheelies, scaring deer, and pissing off the neighbors, as there were tools hanging off all sides and utility bags strapped on the back and front. Who knows what he was fencing in or out, as there were no cattle in sight, probably just defining his territory as his own for reasons that I will never understand. Or maybe I do know – he was separating him from me. The point is, if I lived out here, doing my own thing, working my land or raising my horses or livestock, I'd probably vote for Ron Paul, too.

I think that's all for now. Tomorrow we hit the road again, needing to make up some time. It'll be a 12 hour day, crossing Eastern Colorado and all of Kansas, hopefully to arrive at Ben's grandparents' house in Devil's Elbow, Missouri by dinner time.