Why David Sometimes Wins

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4552/why_david_sometimes_wins

Culture » July 17, 2009
Why David Sometimes Wins
Barack Obama is indebted to Cesar Chavez’s trailblazing community organizing strategies.
By Ethan Porter

Barack Obama’s victory last November, improbable though it was, did not come out of nowhere. Rather, his campaign was indebted to the lessons and traditions of community organizing. Of course, before he became a politician,Obama organized the churches of Chicago’s South Side. But there’s a longer lineage. If the new book by organizing guru and former Obama advisor Marshall Ganz is any indication, it’s clear that the Obama campaign was influenced by the 1960s and 1970s organizing efforts of Cesar Chavez.

In Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford, June), Ganz details how Chavez emerged from nowhere to lead the fight to unionize farm workers. The similarities between Chavez’s campaign strategy and Obama’s are striking. You could say that Chavez provided Obama with a first draft.

Ganz’s personal history and strategic insights make his argument for him. In 1964, Ganz dropped out of Harvard, and a year later he joined Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association in California, where he soon ascended the leadership ranks. Decades later, things came full circle when Ganz returned to Harvard as a teacher, preaching the gospel of organizing to the American elite. In the summer of 2007, he was recruited by the Obama for America campaign. At several “Camp Obama” retreats for staffers and allies, he explained the principles of community organizing—principles that would later lead Obama to victory against Hillary Clinton and then John McCain.

Why David Sometimes Wins is a look back as well as a look forward. Ganz recounts the gripping story of Chavez and the farm workers and synthesizes Chavez’s lessons to explain why the farm workers triumphed against the odds. He distills community organizing to its most fundamental, and effective, principles.

Ganz places special weight on the biblical story of David and Goliath, in which David, the meek shepherd, defeats the hulking soldier Goliath. In Ganz’s telling, David prevails not by emulating Goliath, but by wisely using the tools that are available to him. While Goliath arrogantly depends on his physical strength, the strategically cunning David shoots Goliath down with a stone. The moral: A well-implemented, original strategy can overcome innate disadvantages.

“The likelihood that a leadership team will devise effective strategy depends on the depths of its motivation, the breadth of its salient knowledge and the robustness of its reflective practice,” Ganz writes. At the height of its success, Chavez’s team combined all three. Since the turn of the 20th century, efforts to organize farm workers had not achieved lasting change. The workers—who were exempt from many labor law protections—faced brutal poverty. They worked without anything resembling a contract and faced exploitation by farmers and ranchers. A child of migrant workers himself, Chavez was so deeply committed to the cause that he often worked for little or no money. He often convinced his team to follow suit; they had to “suffer” for the cause, he would say.

FULL story at link.

[HopeOverFear]

1. Nice, thanks

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. Note that David killed Goliath

and how.

[quakerboy]

5. by chopping off his head

whom shall we behead?

[Cha]

3. Thanks, Steve..the bigger

they are the harder they fall.

So happy that someone came along at this point in time who learned from this particular history.

[Wednesdays]

4. K&R

:kick: