Ground Game: Inside Obama's campaign for California

The campaign for California begins the night of January 3 with the glowing image of Hillary Rodham Clinton on a TV screen. The Iowa Caucuses have just ended, and the former First Lady has lost to Barack Obama in the first real contest of the presidential election season by an alarming eight percentage points. Even worse, the presumptive Democratic nominee came in third. And still, Clinton looks happy enough on the live TV feed, as a crowd of about 25 giddy Obama supporters watch from a ninth-floor corner office at Obama’s state campaign headquarters in Los Angeles.

The windows are beginning to fog up and staffers are using campaign placards to fan themselves as they watch the TV. “This is a great day for Democrats,” Clinton begins, noting the record-shattering turnout of 227,000 caucus-goers, nearly double the number of GOP voters. “There are a lot of people who couldn’t caucus tonight …” And with that, much of the room groans in disbelief (“Awwww…!”), knowing that the senator from New York is gently spinning an explanation as to why she lost: Obviously, her supporters just couldn’t make it out tonight. Too busy. Standing behind her, former President Bill Clinton looks ashen, with a forced smile of untold rage and humiliation. But his wife’s comments are defiant and mercifully brief. And soon enough, the main event for these gathered Obama staffers, volunteers, and local elected officials arrives, as the junior senator from Illinois delivers his first victory speech of 2008.

“He is on fire!” says one staffer. “He is so good!” adds another.

Standing next to them in this crowded office is state Sen. Gloria Romero, who had endorsed Obama a year earlier, back when Clinton’s ultimate coronation as her party’s nominee was fully expected by the Washington pundit class. (Just like Giuliani’s.) “But he’s real,” Romero says.

The source of this awe is as varied as the supporters here celebrating: rooted in Obama’s early criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq; his past as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side; a promise to bridge the chasm between Democrats and Republicans after the acrimony of Bush-Cheney; plus his commanding presence behind a podium, preaching “hope” and justice in an era rattled by fear and cynicism after 9/11.

When the televised speeches are over, Buffy Wicks, Obama’s California field director, uncorks a champagne bottle. Four years ago, Wicks witnessed the Iowa Caucus up-close as a field organizer for the Howard Dean campaign and watched as that candidacy abruptly collapsed under the weight of unmet expectations and overdependence on the Internet for fundraising and organizing. Obama would not make that mistake, especially in California, where Wicks and state Campaign Director Mitchell Schwartz have organized an intense ground game across 53 congressional districts, with thousands of volunteers fully engaged in voter outreach.

As they celebrate, the target date for all that effort is still weeks away. On the crushing “Tsunami Tuesday” of February 5, when 22 states hold Democratic primaries or caucuses, the fate of California’s coveted 441 delegates will be decided, amounting to a quarter of all chosen that day across the country. And Clinton has held a commanding lead in California polls for most of the last year.

On this night, Wicks makes a brief but heartfelt statement to the gathered volunteers. “A lot of this campaign has been against all odds,” she tells them. “We just had a black man win in Iowa.” Indeed, 94.9 percent of the vote there was white. In that, Obama’s campaign already seemed very different from those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and ’88, which worked to build a “Rainbow Coalition” but depended heavily on African American support. Jackson won seven primaries and four caucuses in ’88, alarming the mainstream media enough to ask: “What does Jesse want?” But Jackson never won Iowa, and only briefly seemed to have the White House in reach, before establishment forces overwhelmed him. No one would be asking Obama what he wanted.

In the main room of the campaign office, computer stations are lined up against the wall, each of them logged onto the same website, slowly ticking off the votes in Iowa. For the last year, the media has obsessed over fundraising tallies to determine “front-runner” status. Money buys airtime and influence. Wicks suggests another way. “I don’t want your money. I’m not going to ask you to donate,” she says. “But I am going to ask for your time.”

For her and the entire field effort, California’s volunteers are less a typical campaign than a movement in the making. “The status quo is that you can’t run a campaign in California in a competitive way using field [tactics]. TV is the only way to run campaigns,” she says later. “We completely disagree. It’s our philosophy that the strength of our campaign is it’s the people who make it. We try to engage them in a very serious way, in a real way and ask them to take personal responsibility for the campaign.”

Despite the Iowa victory, the Obama forces recognize the mostly positive feelings of state Democrats toward the Clintons. In 1992, Bill Clinton beat challenger and former California Gov. Jerry Brown in his own home state. So the staff is here seven days a week, with no air-conditioning on weekends, or at one of the 18 campaign offices across the state. “We’ve always known we’d be the underdog,” says Schwartz. “Bill Clinton was popular here, visited the place a ton. [Hillary Clinton is] more well-known here than in the rest of the country. She’s got establishment figures, Antonio Villaraigosa; even in Hollywood she’s got Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner. The establishment is with her.”

There are possibilities here for Obama. While the state is led by a Republican governor – a fluke of celebrity, timing, and 2004’s recall election – California is arguably more progressive now in its leanings than at any time since the days of Gov. Brown. But in 2008, the Latino vote is essential to presidential victory in either party. And it was Latino voters who played a decisive role in the upset in Nevada, returning Clinton to “inevitable” status among the political chattering class.

“They are in trouble, but avoidable trouble, with Latinos,” says activist and former state Sen. Tom Hayden, who has not endorsed a candidate, but whose son and daughter-in-law are Obama volunteers. “Obama should build on his criticism of NAFTA, which is also a criticism of Clinton’s experience argument.

“If there’s any one constituency besides the extreme right that is focusing on immigration, it’s the broad Latino community in the southwest who have a visceral worry about their future.”

This month, the United Farm Workers Union endorsed Clinton, but Obama’s campaign in California has its own connection to the legacy of Cesar Chavez in the form of Marshall Ganz, a key UFW staffer for 16 years and in 1964 an organizer of the Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. Wicks knew of his history and reached out to Ganz for guidance in creating the organizing network of Obama volunteers. In July, Ganz led a three-day training session for the campaign, jamming into 36 intense hours a semester of community organizing techniques that he teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Obama would also be endorsed by the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), state Sen. Gil Cedillo, Congressman Xavier Becerra, Maria Elena Durazo of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and other prominent Latino leaders, including Romero, the state’s Senate Majority Leader. “If you look at those Latino elected officials who have endorsed Sen. Obama, we have definitely been more so from the activists, from the bottom up … even though we have aspired and moved into positions of power,” Romero says. “We’re part of a generation that understands that doors were opened for us, the promise was there, and it is our responsibility and our legacy to keep those doors open for youth who yearn for a better America. We’re not the status quo.”

Romero notes that Obama’s father was an immigrant, and that after being elected to the U.S. Senate, he worked openly to promote the doomed Immigration Reform Bill, and “supported driver’s licenses [for undocumented immigrants] as a public safety issue and he didn’t run from the issue when things got tough.”

The language of Obama’s campaign even suggests a connection to the political grass roots. One favorite catchphrase is “Yes We Can!” – itself an inadvertent translation of a common chant from Latino labor activists: “Si Se Puede!”

A gathering at the Valley Village home of film producer Estee Chandler is quietly buoyant on a recent Sunday, even though Obama just lost the Nevada Caucuses the night before. This is one of many “Obama house parties” across the state today, and the talk is spirited and friendly. There’s also a Republican in the house. He is a former Marine in a red sweater who says Bush has done “a pretty good job” as president, but still drove two hours from his home in Mojave to be here.

Randall Clague, 46, is government liaison for a “new space” company out there. “I’m like most people,” he tells the room. “Fiscally conservative, socially liberal.” He says he has been alarmed by the dominance of the far right and religious activists in his favorite political party and is now intrigued by the Obama message. He won’t vote for Hillary.

Another woman admits to voting for Ralph Nader last time. “And getting Bush,” an older man suggests dismissively. But soon a voice comes up on the speaker phone with a message. It’s Buffy Wicks, making a statewide conference call to her precincts. “For us, politics is personal,” she says. “That’s how we express our values.” She goes on to urge volunteers to become precinct captains and rally their neighbors to the cause. In a moment, she will be followed by a few heartfelt words from actor Forest Whitaker, but it is the words of Wicks that hang in the air after the call is over. “We are poised to win this campaign. It may take longer than we thought.”

In a back room is Chandler’s home office, and a bulletin board covered with snapshots of children of friends and family, and the words “More Reasons I Support Barack Obama for President.” The house party is winding down, and the volunteers who remain are preparing to make a few rounds of calls to local voters.

Erin Levy, 24, who just returned from the Nevada caucuses that morning, makes the first call and leaves a message. And sitting in the corner is volunteer Feather Ives, a knitted red scarf around her collar, also fresh from Nevada. She makes a call, and someone actually picks up.

“You’re not sure?” Ives says to the voter. “You’re confused? What are you confused about? … I just came back from Nevada and it was an amazing experience … If that’s one of your issues, just pay attention to who is doing the most back-biting … Right now you stand as undecided?” And Ives listens and looks up to the others watching her make the call. Then she smiles and pumps her fist in victory. One more vote for Obama.

Chandler is on a cell phone with a neighbor who already voted via absentee ballot for Obama. Not every call ends so well. Levy is on the line with another name on the list. “Ron Paul? OK, bye.”

The training of volunteers and precinct captains goes on every weekend at Obama’s L.A. headquarters. And the morning after Obama’s Jan. 26 win in the South Carolina primary is another gathering on a Sunday at 10:30 a.m. This is the final session before the primary, and the crowd is smaller than usual, just 25 new precinct captains gathered around the computers. The last one drew 170 people in this office.

Usually, Wicks leads these training seminars, but this morning she’s handed the reins to Charles Ludd, 23, a law student from central Los Angeles. The Power Point program is down this morning, so he’s improvising, based on his own experience since joining the campaign several months ago.

“First, tell your story. That’s an amazing resource for connecting people to Obama,” he tells the new volunteers. “We are the campaign. I’m a volunteer. I work fulltime, and when I get off work I work fulltime again here.”

And a few of the new faces do. One teenage girl stands up to say she volunteered even though she won’t yet be 18 by primary day.

Another is David Kaye, 39, a former lawyer for the State Department who once argued for treating “unlawful combatants” within the guidelines of the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration infamously chose another path, and Kaye now teaches civil rights law at UCLA. “The key thing is to defeat George Bush and the Republicans, and to my mind Barack Obama has got the stuff,” says Kaye to the other volunteers. “He’s shown the best judgment.”

Each captain is to contact the nearest 200-to-400 voters in a neighborhood. Regardless of the outcome of the 2008 race for president, the Obama campaign will leave behind a new generation of trained community activists.

“Barack’s not going to change the world by himself,” Wicks says. “It takes people getting actively involved in their neighborhoods to do so in a real way – and if there’s a school facing cuts in funding or a polluted river, Barack Obama isn’t going to change all these problems. We need to take charge of our community. We’ve created these networks so we can face these challenges.”

Between elections, Wicks worked for the cause of union workers and joined the national “Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign,” aiming for better health care and wages for workers at the massive discount superstore chain. “Our activists are super-excited,” she goes on. “They’re out there. We’re making 30,000 phone calls a night to voters. That’s pretty impressive. Those are volunteers working on the phones every night. I assure you there’s no other campaign in that same magnitude and with a volunteer base. Some candidates make paid calls, but we don’t pay our canvassers; we don’t pay any of our field workers. They’re all volunteers.”

Right now, the focus was more calls, reaching out to the lists of undecided voters on their computer screens. By 9 p.m. last Saturday, as Obama made his victory speech in South Carolina, that volunteer army managed 200,000 phone calls across California in a single day. The final week of the campaign before Super Tuesday would transition to a statewide canvassing of these same precincts, with the same volunteers and more than 6,000 precinct captains, reaching out in person to their neighbors.

Obama’s victory in South Carolina helps. In the media storm, it was described as a comeback, even if Iowa was only been two weeks before. All the expectations and disappointments and media intensity had turned upside down many times over. A week ago, the esteemed California Field Poll showed Clinton still leading at 39 percent to Obama’s 27, though its data was gathered before South Carolina.

Wicks says she manages not to obsess over the endless horse-race data. Every morning she’s in her “Situation Room” on Wilshire Boulevard, ready for the daily 7:45 conference call. And time is running short. But win or lose, she expects Obama’s California campaign to leave something meaningful behind, with a cadre of new activists already in motion across the state.

2008-01-31