A 2008 Election Campaign Reminiscence: Battling for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in Small Town Pennsylvania (5)

by R. Lee Cook

“I called the Obama headquarters in Erie and told them I needed some signs, something to give people to show their ownership in this. I knew the gentleman I was talking to on the other end and he said, ‘Bill, it’s going to take a while on the signs, because we are doing something that’s never been done before. We are putting our resources into humans, people on the ground, and it’s going to pay off for us.”

Bill Miller, who had been around the block a few times and intimately involved in a hands on way in several area general election campaigns candidly admitted to me that initially he had been rather reluctant to buy into this new “grassroots” approach of the Obama team. But shortly after Frank Poppy showed up and was joined by a stream of dedicated young people, most of whom had given up a semester of college or a year of their lives to work on the campaign, he became an ardent believer. And after a while he said he realized that the “fields” had already been perfectly “prepared” for the Obama troops to do their work at the “grassroots”.

Soon Bill Miller, Chris Billetdeaux and his seasoned local Clarion County Democratic Organization and Obama Campaign strategist Frank Poppy would coalesce with a perpetual stream of young Obama volunteers drawn from around the country to produce what the personable county chair alternately described as a “remarkable” and “amazing” organizing effort. “It was just remarkable. It really was remarkable because of the young people who were here. I just cannot praise them enough.”

“I would say that in the course of the campaign, coming through here, we probably had ten or more. However, probably five in general were based here, but they went to surrounding counties and did some outreach here and some outreach there; always coming back in the evening reporting in. It was an operation like I have never seen before. These young people were so disciplined.”

“My wife would cook a big pot of soup and have sandwiches and they would come home at night tired. They would not sit down to eat until they had made all of their contacts with their superiors and the many other people they had to talk to. It was just remarkable the way we used the internet and the computer system we had installed in our headquarters. We downloaded the voting lists, talked to the people who had voted, asked them to donate, and to participate, who they were in favor of. And of course all of these people had their own laptops. It was just amazing.”

In addition to the headquarters office on Main Street in the prime business district which was a hive of activity carried out daily by as many as fifty volunteers, their own home and bed and breakfast at the Clarion House become a major sub-station for the effort in Clarion. “Chris Billetdeaux who was a Godsend would put in sixteen hour days and another person was Iseli Krauss. She called my wife and said ‘Judy, you have a business and you are giving all your rooms away. I can keep some of these people at my house.’ She is a retired Clarion professor with a beautiful big home and these kids, I call them kids but they are young men and women, got to stay there also.”

“We manned our headquarters every day, even Sundays. We were there seven days a week. We had so many people. It was just a unique situation.”

So I asked Bill to compare this effort in 2008 that he still was so effusive about to the past national election campaigns of 2000 and 2004 in Clarion that he had been involved with as Democratic Party chair, and specifically whether there had been anything even resembling this kind of effort on the “ground”. “This was very distinctively different” he told me. “In fact”, he said, “with the [Senator John] Kerry campaign, we didn’t have signs either. But they didn’t put their money in people either. They just didn’t put in their money.”

Clearly, the troops and the energy and the inspiration, the technology and the resources had been put there for an effective electoral campaign, so I asked Miller to share some of the key specifics of the strategy used in their intensive grassroots organizing effort. “When we had our first meeting with Chris and myself, with Frank Poppy, when the young people came to Clarion, we sat down and started discussing this.” Bill said he discerned immediately from this early discussion that the Obama team had a good background in political organizing because they all understood the important first principle of making sure not to erode your primary base of voter support. “I was confident that was not going to happen” he said, so they next turned their focus to “where can we win? Where can we get the most votes? We sat down and I showed them some past history of the area and I explained that in this college town, you have many of the professors living right in the community, which is my island of sanity and I said we will win this area. We will concentrate there and we will concentrate on them seeking to broaden our vote-getting potential by trying for Monroe Township and Paint Township. That is where we have to make inroads. Then I said we will make contact through our general Democratic Party mailings and we can then call them. So we began to do these things and it was very, very successful. If you look at Pennsylvania as a whole, it has so many small colleges here, I would guess that the same thing occurred at each one of those campuses because it is just a remarkable strategy.”