Cesar Chavez and the Roots of Obama’s Field Campaign

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4024/cesar_chavez_and_the_roots_of_obamas_field_campaign/

November 6, 2008 >

By Randy Shaw

In mid-October, Zack Exley wrote a compelling article on the Obama campaign’s extremely effective “ground game” in Ohio. Comments on the piece—as well as people’s experience elsewhere—confirmed that Obama’s highly disciplined Ohio field operation is used in other states, which helps explain the candidate’s success in the polls.

But Obama’s voter outreach model is not a new invention. Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and UFW alumni developed many of these core grassroots electoral strategies, and it took the Barack Obama campaign to update them for the Internet age and implement the UFW model on a national scale. The story of the Obama campaign’s utilizing an electoral model that Fred Ross initiated in Los Angeles in 1949, passed on to Cesar Chavez and the UFW in the 1960’s and 70’s, and which was then enhanced by UFW alumni in the past two decades, is little known, but it helps explains why Barack Obama is headed for victory.

When Barack Obama adopted the campaign theme, ‘Yes We Can,’ he was embracing the rallying cry popularized by Cesar Chavez and the UFW in the 1970s: ‘Si, Se Puede.’ But less known is how former community organizer Obama has also implemented the UFW’s electoral outreach model.

Ross, Chavez, and UFW Legacy

In 1949, Fred Ross ran the field campaign for Edward Roybal, who was trying to become the first Mexican-American to win a Los Angeles City Council election in more than seventy years. Ross developed an intensive voter registration campaign, a door-to-door outreach effort, and the most intensive get out the vote effort that the Latino community had ever seen. Roybal prevailed, a victory that has been described as “the birth of Latino politics in California.”

During the 1950s, Ross recruited and then trained a young Chicano named Cesar Chavez. When the UFW faced its first union election vote in 1967, Chavez turned to Ross to run the campaign. Ross trained fifty to sixty organizers for this election, a process that former UFW Organizing Director Marshall Ganz described as akin to a “school.” Following the model he had successfully used to elect Roybal, Ross required organizers to keep a file card on each worker, to record every contact, to write down any questions the worker had, and to keep going back to the worker until they agreed to vote for the union.

FULL story at link.