Patriotism and Public Service
Since 2001, it seems that Republicans have had a monopoly on patriotism, or at least that's the way they've succeeded in portraying it. But how exactly do they define patriotism? If patriotism means caving into fear mongers and seeing who can hate "the terrorists" more, then conservatives are pretty damn patriotic. But the way I see it, patriotism is about more than just talk. If you really love your country, then you ought to be able to make a few sacrifices to show it.

Let's take Iraq for example. When was the last time that anyone in government ever asked the American public to sacrifice anything for the Iraq War? Of course, Americans are paying a heavy price for the war in form of hundreds of billions of tax dollars and thousands of lives, but that's a different kind of cost. Nothing is asked of me. Nothing is demanded or ever expected. During World War II, Americans made tremendous sacrifices which affected their lives daily (speed limit lowered to 35 mph, food rations, gas rations, clothes rations, etc). It seems all too easy to forget that we're at war, fighting a very costly battle in a desert half way around the world.

The way Republicans have framed the war is that you either support the troops, the war, and the President, or else you're unpatriotic. There are those who say that being critical and questioning of your government in times like these is the true sign of patriotism. I agree with the latter message to a certain extent, but in my opinion true patriotism goes further. Conservatives have shown us over the last few years that simply mouthing off about supposed love for freedom can be nothing more than empty words. Patriotism is about action as much as it is about talk. When I was younger I remember hearing Kennedy's famous words, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," and not understanding their full meaning. His message, I have now realized, was not only a call to public service, it was a deeply patriotic and altruistic statement. It asked Americans to think beyond their own self-interest, which seems to be all that Republicans care about these days, and think about the common interest of the entire country. It's a bold kind of patriotism, one that demands action and people banding together to do what's right, one that Republicans are afraid to touch. Frankly, it just doesn't fit in very well with their everyone for themselves philosophy. But it sure as hell fits in with our we're all in this together philosophy.

I realized recently that I'm a very patriotic person, just not in the Republican definition of the word, which has now become commonplace. That's why I get so fired up every time John Edwards talks about a national call to public service. He says, "It is time to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war." It couldn't be said any better. If my President asked me to plant a tree or use an energy efficient lightbulb, I'd jump at the idea. Whether it's re-painting the rusty slide at the playground down the street, or running for public office, most people are pretty damn proud of doing something for someone else. There are many great charities and non-profits already doing this type of work, but how about something on a grander scale. What if we decided that building a better country is a national priority, and that everyone has a part to play in that endeavor.

Public service is patriotic. It's time that we recognize that simple truth and get the Democratic party to start talking about it. Democrats have lost power over the last few decades because we haven't talked about values and the Republicans have. We have values too though, and there is no reason for us to ever shy away from them, because when our values are put up against theirs, ours win every time. Period.

I'll leave you with the excerpt, from Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor, which inspired this post:

The Mississippi River rose in the spring and there were urgent flood warnings on the radio. One afternoon I put on warm clothes and took the bus to St. Paul and crossed the Wabasha Bridge to the West Side where people were at work filling sandbags and building dikes to save the low-lying houses. It was foggy, and then it began to rain. An army of hundreds of volunteers hard at work, men and women, drawn up in assembly lines, holding the sacks and filling them and passing them in a chain to the dike. It got dark. Nobody left. The Red Cross brought around sandwiches and coffee. We rested and went back to work. Trucks brought in more sand and bags. A couple of front loaders worked at anchoring the dikes with earthen banks. It felt like wartime. I worked until after midnight and lay down in the back of a truck under a tarp and slept until daybreak and got up stiff and cold and they brought us more sandwiches and coffee and I got back in the gang and worked until noon. Someone worried about the dike bursting. A man said, "When they go, they go slow, they don't go sudden." I wasn't sure about that, but I stayed because everyone else stayed. I sort of collapsed in the afternoon and was going to go home but slept a couple hours on a tarp in somebody's front yard and when I woke up, there was water in the streets, people wading through it, some men with muddy overalls, pitched emotion in the air, though nobody said much. We had put so much into beating back the flood, and we kept working- shovel, fill, tie, and pass, shovel, fill, tie, and pass- and felt privileged to be there doing it. I could hear the river boiling by and slabs of ice heaved up on the dike and National Guardsmen patrolling and when people couldn't stand up any longer, they sat down and ate baloney sandwiches and drank coffee. And got back up.

I went home in the morning. It was so overwhelming, I sat on my bed and cried. For the relief of getting out of those mud-crusted clothes and standing under a hot shower, but also for what I'd seen, the spirit of all those workers caught up in the job of saving their neighbors' houses. Forget all the jabber and gossip, all the theoretical balderdash and horsefeathers, here is reality: the river rises up in its power and majesty, and the people rise up in theirs, and while one can do only so much, you must do that much, and we did. None of the news reports captured the reality of that event, which was the spirit of the crowd, of which I was one. An experience that warms a Democrats heart, a scene from Grapes of Wrath, or the crossing of the Red Sea. The People, yes.

By God, no matter what Republicans say, the people of this country really do care about each other. We are not a cold people. By God, when John F. Kennedy said, "Ask what you can do for your country," he spoke to this country's heart and conscience.

  ¶ posted by Ian @ 10:54 AM 1 comments links to this post  

New ideas taking hold This morning (Saturday) I met with a half dozen or so Lubbock progressives and gave them an overview of my week at NOI. Topics that stuck in our minds for further investigation and local implementation were:

• College Campus planning


• Innovative fundraising methods via Actblue


• A serious effort to build a better voter metadatabase


• Distributed/Home phonebanking to extend our current phonebanking program


• More training, based on the NOI materials and on the DFA Night School materials (which are excellent!)

And, to be good disciples of Marshall Ganz's Learn-Do-Reflect cycle, we had a nice lunch afterward.

I will probably repeat my little training spiel in a month or so.

Pass it on!  ¶ posted by Dem-X @ 2:23 AM 0 comments links to this post  

ACTION: Save The Internet Hey NOI. Many of you are probably familiar with the "Net Neutrality" fight now taking place. If not, FreePress' savetheinternet.com has some great info. They're asking people for stories to submit to the FCC, but there's only one day left, so do it now.

Feel free to share your stories or links in the comments, and thanks for working to protect a free and democratic internet.

Labels: FCC, net neutrality, savetheinternet

  ¶ posted by Tim @ 4:14 PM 1 comments links to this post  

A Look Back at NOI Summer '07 (with slideshow) Being a NOI Boot Camp attendee was an incredible experience. The most valuble element for me was making connections with a diverse group of experienced trainers and motivated peers. The NOI training also gave me an excellent view into how campaigns and organizations function, and the tactics and tools which have proven most successful in recent years. I've been inspired and energized, and plan to take the skills I've learned into the campaign work I do in the years to come.

Thanks to Zach, Judith, Roz, Lori, and all the brilliant trainers who gave time to share with us a little of their knowlege. It was an awesome week.

Here is a slideshow I put together with NOI photos that people posted on their Facebook profiles. Enjoy...

  ¶ posted by Ian @ 3:17 PM 3 comments links to this post  

Seriously. I'm really enjoying the thought of telling future NOI participants. "Be careful when Zack Exely invites you into the basement. You won't get out for a very long time."  ¶ posted by Patrick @ 6:33 PM 1 comments links to this post  

Where do we go from here?

• Okay so now that we have a grasp on the tools, what do we do with them?
• Should we elect better candidates or focus on changing the institutions?
• Should we change the laws that govern social relationships or should we focus on improving the results of our organizing within the current dynamic? Can we afford to neglect one in favor of the other?
• Who got hired where to do what work? How is it going?
• What should an organization of organizers look (beyond a solidarity network)?
• Should we attempt to actively collaborate on a project? If so, what project?

(and why isn't North Carolina one of the states on the NOI masthead?)

  ¶ posted by Jerimee @ 2:43 PM 0 comments links to this post  

This is what I call A Progressive Experience... Participating in the New Organizing Institute Campaign Bootcamp was indeed an amazing and remarkable experience and if I ever have the chance to do it again, I would do it without no doubt. I personally would like to thank each one who made that possible. Zack Exley, Judith Freeman and Roz Lemieux thank you for ALL the hard work that you put into the program and each one of us; to the trainers thank you for sharing your knowledge and providing us with the tools needed to have a successful camapign. To the sponsors, thank you for giving us the opportunity to be part of such amazing program. Each one of you has contributed to the development of 60 progressive young leaders who are going to make a difference as they return to their respective communities.

The NOI Bootcamp not only provided me with the tools and skills needed to conduct an effective campaign utilizing technology, but also linked me with other progressive organizations and amazing progressive people like you. I view this program as a place where progressive people exchange ideas and gain the skills needed to serve their communities.

One of my highlights of the program, from many that I had throughout the whole week, was meeting Professor Marshall Ganz. Indeed he is a fascinating person to meet and has so much history to share with progressive serving leaders like him. I was impressed with his candor and his eager to share his knowledge with progressive young leaders like us.

Quite often servant leaders, likewise organizers, don't receive the credit that they deserve in this society and it’s mainly because they do it to give back not to get credit for. Servant leaders and organizers embrace the meaning of democracy throughout what they do for their communities. Democracy is not helping someone in an individual level, like some politicians do, rather than bringing people together and committee them for social changes. One of the things that Professor Ganz explained in the meeting is that many politicians use the words "constituencies” not knowing the real meaning of the word and what stand for. The word constituency is derived from the Latin root. For instance, Cons-tituency—means together; while Constituency—means stand; so constituency embraces these words: “a community that works together stand together”

An organizer links the resources to empower the community under the ideology of eradicating social inequality in this society; while, some politicians, in the other hand, take away those resources available in the community so constituencies cannot empower themselves.

It is important to find where is the source or who hold the power as Professor Ganz explained at the meeting. Servant leaders utilize the power to empower members of the community and other servant leaders as well; while, politicians like to abuse their power upon the constituencies in their communities

When it comes to the qualities that politician and servant leader must have, I look into:
1. Relations skills—which is the foundation of a good leader
2. Motivation—knowing what’s your constituencies stand in certain issues
3. Values—highlights who you are as a person and your believes
4. Strategies—what are you going to do for your community and how you are going to achieve your goals.
5. Action—making things happening in the community and live by your promise.

One of the things that drive organizers to do good for their community is the fact that they know the people their community and also they know how to serve them. I firmly believe that some politicians don’t know who their constituencies are and by not knowing them, they often don’t know how to serve them.

Overall, it is time to think like organizers as we move forward in becoming server leaders in our communities. People in our communities need more organizers rather than some self-driven politician who only purpose to become an elect official is to help him or herself and help those ones who think like him/her. So, would you rather have a server leader who is community-driven or a self-driven politician? Think about it as we move on into ‘08!

Once again, thank you for allowing me to participated in such amazing program. It was indeed a learning experience, THANK YOU!

Sincerely,
Edwin Zambrano
Progressive by heart, through actions and by spirit

“It is time to live the present, focusing in the future, but always retaining the past. I have seeing a lack current of leadership and we found ourselves shopping and looking back in previous great leaders. It is time to emerge a class of progressive leaders that will become the current and future Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, as well as others organizers”  ¶ posted by TazEdwin @ 9:53 AM 0 comments links to this post  

A new kind of nonprofit When Judith Freeman and I founded the New Organizing Institute, we knew we wanted to deviate from the traditional DC-nonprofit model. We didn't have it all worked out perfectly in our heads, but we knew we didn't want big fixed costs that needed to be fed by constant grant writing and fundraising. So often that fundraising frenzy can overwhelm an organization and subvert the original mission.

We wanted the New Organizing Institute to be driven by members of the organizer community, not by a crew of people who just train. The ideal was that top people in their respective fields would agree to set aside some time from their busy careers to train the next generation---in other words, that our trainings would be driven by current practitioners who had their own stories of trial and error to personally present.

Easier said than done. It took a few tries, but last week at our 2nd annual "campaign boot camp" we saw the model really start working. Roz Lemieux, our E.D. is really the key ingredient that allowed this idea to work. Without her at the center, holding everything together, nothing would have happened. She created the framework in which all this stuff could take off this season, and gave Judith and I the freedom and the time to recruit these members of the community.

Special thanks go to the following leaders in the organizing & technology communities for taking a ton of time out of their schedules to work on the training:

Madeline Stanionis (Watershed Company) who spent weeks planning our email writing day, recruited and prepared some of the best practitioners in the field and came all the way out from San Francisco to lead the day.

Katie Allen (DNC) for planning an amazing field training day. She's one of the rare people who both has respect for and experience in powerful "old school" field organizing principles and understands cutting edge field and targeting technology. She's one of the organizers in this country who's re-writing how this work is done, and so we were really lucky to have her. Josh Hendler (DNC) also helped out a great deal.

Mark Sullivan (Voter Activation Network) for spending two full days with us and our trainees and made it possible for them to get field practice on a live installation of the VAN.

Clay Johnson (Blue State Digital) for providing constant help and support to both trainers and the trainees throughout the week. (Including Bill Clinton and Al Gore impersonation voiceovers for ads some of the trainees made.)

Katelyn Sabochik, Lauren Miller & Chris Stelmarski (Blue State Digital), and Nita Chaudhary (MoveOn) for not only serving as trainers but also coming back several nights of the training to work with trainee teams.

Natalie Foster and Daniel Mintz (MoveOn) for traveling great distances to run one of the most exciting trainee exercises (a detailed comparison of two different live event tools).

Frank O'Brien & Ari Rabin-Havt (OMP), Brent Blackaby (Blackrock), Marc Laitin (Wired for Change), Rachel Allison (Donordigital), Adam Green (MoveOn), Lilia Tam (Iraq Campaign), Hilary Zwerdling (MRSS) for presenting during Madeline's day-long email writing workshop and staying that night to work with our trainees individually on their writing.

Raj Aggarwal (Join Concepts) and Jordan Higgins (Senate Dems) for providing graphic design and other assistance to our teams.

Josh Hendler for putting a ton of time in with Judith to plan the "Data Track" of the training.

Yair Ghitza & Jason Ost (Catalist), Amy Gershkoff (MSHC), Maren Hesla (EMILY's List), Keith Goodman (Bullseye), Dan Castleman (America Votes) for taking time out of their busy geek lives to raise a new generation of political data nerds.
And to Dan (America Votes) for being the best SQL-for-beginners trainer in the world, ever!

Mike Podhorzer (AFL-CIO) for putting it all into perspective with his keynote to our data track.

Chris Mann (MSHC), Courtney Dozier (Forward Together PAC) and Marty Stone (Stones Phones) for teaching modeling, volunteer management and the state of the art of phone banking respectively.

Mike Sager (VA Dems) for being the best VAN trainer in the world.

Jamie Tincher (DFL) for coming all the way in from MN to present on the great '06 work of the MN Coordinated Campaign.

John Miyasato (Crossroads Consulting) for three things: (1) conducting an amazing GOTV training, (2) for appointing himself as our official social director for the week and (3) working to put the character/personality/fun back into the progressive movement.

Adam Klaus (Working Assets) for putting up with our technical difficulties and demonstrating the national voter registration widget at the NOI on the same day that it was officially launched.

James Hannaway (DFL->Obama), Tate Hausman & Alex Zwerdling (John Hall for Congress), Jamie Henn (Step it Up), Kevin O'Brien (Tester), Adam Green (MoveOn), Beka Economopoulos (Greenpeace, Not an Alternative) and Robert "Biko" Baker & Jennifer England (League of Young Voters), Erin Hill (Act Blue) and Cammie Croft (Iraq Campaign) for taking the time to reflect on and present their recent cutting edge campaigns.

Phil de Vellis (Murphy Putnam) for giving our class a thrilling ride through the possibilities of online video.

Josh McConaha (DNC) for showing off how Party Builder can be used to boost small campaigns.

Jessica Vanden Berg and Steve Jarding (Maverick Strategies) for giving us an incredibly inspiring and open view into the Webb campaign.

Jane Hamsher (Fire Dog Lake), Laura Packard (Michigan Liberal), Cliff Schecter, Jesse Lee (The Gavel) and Robin Marty (Minnesota Monitor) for participating in our blog panel. And also Cliff Schecter for doing a media training workshop.

Andrea Johnson (Richardson) and Aaron Myers (Edwards) for taking time that they really did not have to talk about presidential Internet campaigning.

NOI Fellow Matt Stoller (Open Left) for spending pretty much the entire week with us, teaching and hanging out with our trainees. (Some of whom were actually pretty star struck!)

Lori Metcalf and Beth Hanley for working behind the scenes to make sure we all were fed and housed. Ute Pannen for volunteering a week of her time to help out with logistics.

Bernie Pollack, Ben Waxman, Kate Stayman-London, DJs Shred and ReeHee who packed MCCXXIII for a fundraiser to benefit this class of NOI bootcamp trainees.

Dave McGonagle, Susan Markham & Kellie Dupree (EMILY's List) for mentoring and materials. And Susan especially for surprising us by marking up everyone's resumes by hand. (They really appreciated it Susan!)

Amy Pritchard (Democratic GAIN) for connecting dozens of potential employers with our trainees, then taking time out to talk with them one-on-one about how to land their dream job, as well as donating hundreds of GAIN training manuals. Heather Muchow, Kari Lundstad-Vogt (EMILY's List), and Courtney Sieloff (Jobs That Are LEFT) for waking up early on a Sunday to do mock interviews and prep the trainees for the career fair.

And our sponsors, for providing many of the resources to make the training possible, and especially for not expecting anything in return (except a look at the resumes of our grads!): AFL-CIO, Astro Data Services, Beaconfire, BlogAds, Blue State Digital, Care2, Democracy in Action, Dupont Circle Communications, Fenton Communications, Free Range Graphics, Indelium, Joint Concepts, MoveOn.org Civic Action, MSHC, NGP, Trellon, Voter Activation Network (VAN), Watershed

And especially:

Google's Ginny Hunt, Bob Boorstein, Peter Greenberger & Benjamin Weisberg for holding a special lunch event on AdWords, as well as Jeff Keltner for putting up with some scheduling changes on our part and teaching our trainees how to use Google Apps for their campaigns.

Karen Ackerman (AFL-CIO) for helping us remember what we're fighting for with an inspiring talk on economic justice and the AFL-CIO's political program.

Darcy Burner (Darcy Burner for Congress) for coming all the way out to DC from Seattle just to provide some inspiration to 60 future campaigners. And inspire us she did! (Did you know she was the lead project manager for Microsoft's .Net???)

Marshall Ganz (Harvard) for giving a talk about the narrative, emotion, risk and craft of organizing. From the start to the finish you could hear a pin drop. Several of the trainees told me afterwards that one talk changed their lives and changed their minds on the spot about what kind of job they would seek coming out of the training.  ¶ posted by Zack Exley @ 8:34 AM 0 comments links to this post  

Just the beginning...

I have to admit that after the first two days of NOI Bootcamp, I had my doubts. The turf-cutting tools and advice about phone banking and listserv management were useful, but I was asking myself (and others) - where exactly does the "new" in "new organizing" come in? Are we just learning how to use new tools to execute an old model more efficiently? If advances in technology have truly changed the way people communicate, shouldn't we be dealing with a new set of questions and assumptions about the relationship between people and politics? Does a generational divide exist between today's young people and those who were in our position just one or two election cycles ago?

As the week progressed and we talked more about online organizing, the new media ecosystem, coalitions and movement-building, I started to think that the week's agenda had been designed to foster the exact questions I had been asking. And as we listened to Marshall Ganz talk about social movements, discussed our role as organizers until the wee hours of the morning, and pressed trainers on questions of inclusiveness and purpose, hints of an answer started to emerge.

When Dr. Ganz said that we should be talking about values instead of issues, the trainees broke into spontaneous applause. Our group liked to clap, but this time it seemed to catch Dr. Ganz a bit off-guard. Young people wanting to talk about values? But it makes sense. Sites like Future Majority have documented a growing trend among Millennials toward increased civic engagement, religiosity, and political awareness. This could be an essay in itself, but perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from moral relativism and bank toward a more frank discussion about what we value and why. Maybe we can leverage this for victory in 2008. That's the plan, right?

In high school, a friend of mine said that the most fundamental question a person can ask themselves is: Am I going to try to save the world? The people whose "yes" answer can be taken practically for granted are a special breed - idealistic critics, passionate world-changers, visionaries. When people with such inclinations start talking, something amazing happens - a better world seems possible. I know that sounds like a bunch of sappy hippie bullshit, but it's true. And I'm starting to think we should just embrace it, sappiness and all.

- Erin Kenzie

p.s. Everyone has been thanking Roz, Zack, and Judith (with good reason!), but I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Lori, who did a lot of work behind the scenes, and to the trainers, who took time out of their very busy lives to hang out with us. Much love to all.  ¶ posted by kenzie @ 12:08 AM 1 comments links to this post