Working for Obama out of the central Philadelphia office, I was struck by the many mistakes that the organization made. For an insurgent candidacy, the management was top down and highly bureaucratic. There were many mis steps made, some of which I am sure resulted in fewer votes for Obama than he might have gotten, had the staff been more experienced and had they listened to people who knew Philadelphia or had previous campaign experience. I think there are some lessons here for the fall campaign and hopefully someone may heed them.
Probably the most serious failing was that they did not interact well with local community leaders in the Asian, Hispanic and even the black community. They lost opportunities to reach out to established local leaders and failed to involve them as much as they could. I spoke at great length with a very frustrated local African American woman who had not been able to coordinate well with the out of state campaign people.
Volunteers were turned away left and right. Calls were not returned to people who called asking to volunteer. Other volunteers were discouraged from participating and certainly from any creative idea. One gentleman, age 75, wanted to canvas and organize his senior apartment building but was told he could not do this. He stopped volunteering and only came back when I ended up calling him from the phonebank to see if he was voting for Obama and he told me he had tried to volunteer but felt unwelcome. I brought him back and put him to work calling other Center City seniors.
A creative approach to encourage volunteers to work in their community rather than discouraging them would have produced additional votes.
Someone had the creative idea of putting the polling places on the doorhangers. That sounds great except, at least on one street, they put the wrong polling place, one that was over 10 blocks further away. I know this because I handled a call from an intrepid woman who walked to the "new" polling place only to be turned away, and was smart enough to go back to her previous polling place and vote. Again, no one took the compulsive care to make sure things were done right.
Another example of this kind of sloppiness was the customized literature.
They had literature showing Barack with a burly white blue collar worker that was meant to go to Northeast Philly. Then they had the same information with a front cover showing Barack with an African American family. That was meant for North or West Philly. You guessed it. The canvassers for Northeast Philly took the leaflets with the African Anmerican family on front.
I must confess that one of the things I personally do for campaigns is phonebank. I've done this for years for many campaigns and this is something I know something about. The Obama campaign had a minimal interest in organized phonebanking. They had very few phones available and paid minimal attention to phonebanking and the information that they could get from this. Yesterday, the campaign wanted to send people out to canvas door to door in Center City rather than phone bank and I had to point out that you can't canvas in high rise apartments such as are present in large parts of Center City. Going door to door canvassing is fine in suburban areas but no one will let you into a high rise to go door to door. And there are a lot more votes potentially in one high rise building than a number of suburban blocks. It's much more efficient. In addition, there are buildings that cater to the handicapped, disabled or elderly, and many of these buildings had the polling station in them so if you can identify your voters and convince them to go downstairs and find out who voted, you have some useful information.
My phonebanking group generated a lot of information about who voted for Hillary and who voted for Obama in Center City high rises because when we called, people told us, by and large, who they voted for. The obama supporters were proud and the Clinton supporters mostly apologetic or else they hung up on us. I thought the campaign should keep this information and input it so that in the fall, we could identify Hillary voters and perhaps make a special appeal to them. But it turned out that the campaign shredded all this information because they did not see its utility.
That was my experience working for the Obama campaign in Philly - I hope that the people who run his campaign in the fall do a better job of listening to the grassroots. There was an ignorant arrogance here that was offputting to many and I found it childish and annoying to deal with.