Senator Obama’s Campaign Training Meeting

Saturday I attend one of Senator Obama’s training meetings at the UNM Law School. The training started late because it had to be moved from a union hall in the southeast part of the city due to turnout. The meeting was to be one eight hour training section for new volunteers. Once the meeting got started the first half went like most campaign meetings for new volunteers. They explained the set up of how the groups worked and what the goals for the groups would be in each neighborhood. We broke at noon for lunch and when I returned on time they had been running the standard speech from the candidate meant to inspire the new volunteers. At which point I expected the volunteers to be broken up into groups for training on how to do door to door neighborhood walks and to be trained on telephone calling styles. I expected that the trainers would want to explain call list to people who had never seen one and how they were used but that was not what happened.

We were broke out into groups but then each group was told that you would have to come up with a two minute life story that could move other voters to come to the polls. Individuals were encouraged to express emotionally painful feeling in front of the other group members nevertheless they were told to be honest about their life stories. I have to admit that this did not make me personally feel very comfortable. I had a friend who joined a church in the early eighties and they used the same type of story telling to emotional move people in their introductory meetings so maybe I am more then a little jaded by this type of introduction to a group setup but still I have to say that I was not overcome or thrilled by the training.

Maybe I have just been catholic far too long to be comfortable with those types of behaviors in public. I understand that emotion is a strong motivation tool but I have to wonder about using this type of style to get out the vote in an election. Maybe long standing democrats like me have become far to detached to evoke strong emotional feelings from new voters. After all the same style of introduction has worked well for new churches in this country in the past twenty years and politics is not that different from a religion as we have leaned for the republicans in the last eight years. Maybe the Obama group has finally found the one element that we have been missing in past elections.

I have worked on many campaigns in the past and must admit that I was hoping for more skills training from Senator Obama’s group. I wanted to know what was different for his group and how we could best use the resources that his group could supply our city to help get out the vote this fall. I hope his group decides to filter out the experiences catholic individuals who are not at ease with displaying their raw emotions in future groups and provide them with a different type of training that includes more hands on skills training. I know that I would be personally far more comfortable with that type of training.