Organizing Fellows: John in Gwinnett County, Georgia

July 20, 2008

As part of a continuing series, we’re following Obama Organizing Fellows as they share their stories and their experiences. They discuss the people they meet, the hardships of organizing, what the campaign means to them, and how this summer is changing their perspective.

John is an Organizing Fellow in Gwinnett County, Georgia. His stories appear each Sunday.

I have the great fortune of working with a Field Organizer named Tawny, who is brilliant at making contacts and following them up—in this case with a customer relations manager at a major retail chain.

We signed an agreement with the store to register voters outside its doors for Tuesday and Thursday, and on the first day we registered 60 voters, which is pretty good for our area. But we got to talking with the manager, who said there was trouble in one-stop shopping paradise.

He said, “They don’t like it. They said that all these voter registrations will hurt their party’s chances in November.” And sure enough, the next day, we got a call from our contact.

“They don’t want you out there,” he said. Tawny got a hold of his manager, who said, “Well, we’re really just looking for community groups. You know, like cheerleaders.”

Now, I support cheerleaders as much as the next guy. But we asked: “What is more fundamental to our community than voting?” To which we heard, “Well, we look for community groups, not groups doing things like that.” And you can probably imagine the rest of the conversation. So we moved our registration across the line in the concrete to an empty store and kept our work going, only half as successfully as before.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a big deal at all. Everyone who has volunteered for the campaign has a story like this one. But our country has a better story to tell than a store’s management playing partisan politics with its own customers. And we run into this attitude all the time from people who seem frightened at what will happen when lots of people get ready to make their voice heard.

And this is the great thing about working for Barack Obama. When he speaks, you can sometimes hear the awakening voices of these silent people. At every organizational meeting, and every volunteer event, we see new people who have never been involved in a campaign before come in and say, “I’m ready to work for change.”

I finally took a day off from Fellowing, to attend a friend’s wedding. I sipped icy beverages and mingled. Eventually, small talk made the inevitable turn to, “So, what do you do?” Of course, I said, “I’m a volunteer for Barack Obama’s campaign.” That always moves small talk to a much different conversation.

But my interlocutor and I discovered we shared political affinities, including Senator Obama. And we figured out that we liked him because he came from the outside and transformed his party, and continues to reach out to others in order to transform the country. And if our experience at the store is any indication, whether or not to reach out is one of the chief differences in the campaign.

If you have been reading our blogs and thought to yourself, “I’d sure like to volunteer, but…” consider this my way of reaching out to you. Get off the computer and hit the street. We’d love to have you, especially if you live in Gwinnett County. There’s a lot more reaching out to do.