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princessredtights
09-04-2007, 08:58 AM
I found this article and thought it was interesting to compare/contrast how the RP grassroots works verses the mainstream candidates. I have emphasized my favorite parts :p

http://www.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_6790496?nclick_check=1



Presidential campaigns train volunteers
By Mary Anne Ostrom
Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:09/03/2007 01:32:50 AM PDT


On a hot August night this week - still months away from the first vote being cast in a presidential primary - 50 campaign volunteers sat down to learn the do's and don'ts of walking precincts, calling voters and tapping social networks.

The meeting of Hillary Clinton supporters wasn't in Iowa. It was in San Jose.

It ended two hours later, with a rally-style power clap, led by a 28-year-old state field director whose job he told the volunteers is "to keep California Clinton country."

Internet-based electioneering may be all the rage, but face-to-face campaigning is alive and well. And, for the first time in a long while, the presidential campaigns are dispatching teams of grass-roots experts in California to help campaign volunteers bone-up on old-fashioned campaigning before the Feb. 5 primary. Typically, California's primary was too late to garner such attention.

It's hard work to get Californians to pay attention. Consider Feb. 5 is two days after the Super Bowl and that voters will be getting their official ballot materials New Year's week.

And now "voters don't want to talk about politics to strangers in September," Mike Trujillo, Clinton's California field director told the group.

So the Clinton campaign has created a strategy to get enthusiastic volunteers to call 200 of their friends and spread the word. Hold parties for your neighbors, tap your book club or bridge partners, don't forget your nail salon clique or workout buddies. According to the Clinton training guide, "Hillary Corps members are required to talk to at least 200 voters in an effort to convince at least 100 to cast their ballots for Hillary." You'll become a "HillStar" if you can recruit five Hill Corps members and manage a team of 20.

`Camp Obama'

Clinton is hardly alone. Barack Obama's campaign held "Camp Obama" in San Francisco three weekends ago, an intensive 2 1/2-day session designed to create "mini-campaign" managers around the state, featuring Marshall Ganz, a former United Farm Worker, who is now a Harvard professor. Republican Rudy Giuliani's national field director this week toured the state, meeting with dozens of volunteers at pizza parlors in San Jose and Walnut Creek. GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney will be unveiling his grass-roots strategy soon, his campaign said, focusing on introducing him to an electorate who's unfamiliar with his record.

Radio and television were going to change politics, too, but still "politics is a contact sport," said Mark Campbell, the Giuliani field director who met with volunteers this week at the Round Table Pizza on Stevens Creek Boulevard.

No question technology is being used to find volunteers, reach out to them and then keep track of them. And come election time candidates are planning extensive e-mail and text messaging campaigns aided by sophisticated voter-tracking databases.

While some of the basic mechanics of finding and winning over supporters, like reaching out to friends and neighbors, has not changed, parts of the endgame have. Absentee voting has made grass-roots hot again.

"The estimates are that half of the votes will be absentee," in California, said San Jose State University political science Professor Larry Gerston. "That means grass-roots takes on a different meaning. It used to be you use grass-roots to get people to the polls, now you need to get them to send in an absentee ballot."

The early Feb. 5 primary date, combined with competitive, well-funded races on both tickets and the explosion of absentee voting in California, means timing is everything.

29 days

Californians will begin receiving their absentee ballots Jan. 7. That is before, at least as the calendar stands now, Iowa holds its caucus or New Hampshire its first-in-the-nation primary. Voting could start earlier as states continue jockeying, but in California, the election essentially becomes a 29-day event culminating Feb. 5. The sooner a campaign can nail down a California vote before early primary and caucus winners and losers are determined, the better, especially if no clear front-runner has emerged before February.

"The campaigns are going to be running around crazy trying to nail down those absentee votes as early as they can," Gerston said.

That's one reason why Buffy Wicks, Obama's California field director, spent her 30th birthday Aug. 10 holed up with 120 volunteers in San Francisco, teaching them the ropes in a session dubbed "Camp Obama."

"They're learning Community Organizing 101 in three days," said Wicks, a veteran who learned grass-roots organizing in Iowa on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign.

Among Wicks' pupils was Ian Paris-Salb, a 25-year-old Adobe Systems project manager, who said the campaign wouldn't let them leave the training until they had set up their first meeting of volunteers. He and two others called 110 people. A week later, he found himself serving fruit salsa with cinnamon chips and his hallmark artichoke guacamole to 30 strangers crammed in his living room who had answered his call.

"They want us to be essentially like a mini-campaign manager," said Paris-Salb. His next assignment is to help sell tickets to an Obama fundraiser scheduled for Friday in San Francisco. And while Obama will be hobnobbing on Saturday with Hollywood's elite at the Montecito home of Oprah Winfrey, Paris-Salb will be putting on a mini-version of "Camp Obama" in San Jose.

Volunteers should plan to do a lot of walking, said Joyce Rabourn, who leads the volunteer efforts for Giuliani in the congressional districts encompassing Santa Clara County.

And with so many primaries front-loaded next year, it is unlikely even the wealthiest campaigns can afford to put weeks of advertising on the air in California, where it can cost $2 million a week for a statewide TV blitz.

Said Rabourn, a veteran GOP activist: "The message from the grass-roots is much more effective than hearing it from a multimillion dollar TV ad."

Being imaginative

Back at Clinton's grass-roots training session, field director Trujillo told the volunteers to be imaginative.

"We're not used to doing window shopping for presidential candidates in the primary," he said, adding, "I don't care if you want to set up a `Lemonade Stand for Hillary,' " Trujillo laughed.




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Contact Mary Anne Ostrom at mostrom@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5574.

bbachtung
09-04-2007, 04:46 PM
Wow, it is like the "national service" that they're always talking about. "Volunteer" seems to be a bit loosely-defined.

I guess I know where all of the Kirby salespeople went.

ghemminger
09-04-2007, 04:48 PM
This article Sucked becuz RP grassroots blows them big time!!