By Jerry Kellman
Director of Organizing, Gamaliel Metro Chicago

I’ll begin by sharing some of President Barack Obama’s inner struggles during the time he was organizing and how his training as an organizer helped him with these struggles.

When I met Barack Obama for the first time at a coffee shop in New York City in 1985, most of the issues that he would have to grapple with in political life, and the gifts that he would draw on to overcome them were already present.  Barack was African American on the outside.   But on the inside, he was a citizen of the world.  He was struggling to figure out how to respond to the varied misconceptions that people had of him. People judged him by his skin color.  Some liked it, some did not. People judged him by his pattern of speech and the prestige of his education. Some liked it and some did not.  Being judged by whom people think you are, rather than who you know yourself to be is difficult for anyone, but it was particularly difficult for a young man who wanted to make a difference in the world.

What Barack learned in his time organizing in Chicago, was to not let others define him but to define himself.  This was the single most important lesson Barack learned as an organizer.  It may be the most important lesson that any of us ever learn.  It is the lesson which enabled him to be elected President.  The power of Barack’s ability to define himself has been so great that in the process he has redefined America for Americans. And he has redefined America for the rest of the world.  Of his two major opponents in the election, Hilary Clinton also did a wonderful job of defining herself.  Unfortunately for Secretary Clinton, she never had the opportunity to work as an organizer on the south side of Chicago. So as good as she was at defining herself, Barack was better. This ability to define himself, rather than have others define him was fundamental to Barack’s campaign for President and will be fundamental to how we will engage in community organizing in the future.

One of the amazing things about the 2008 Presidential Campaign and the beginning of Barack’s presidency is how much Barack Obama has become a symbol.  He is a person, a political leader with a set of policies, but for the majority of the people in the world, he is also a symbol. This is particularly true outside of the United States and among young people. The power of the symbol that is Barack Obama is greatest among those who feel they had the least opportunity to influence the actions of the government of the United States. For them, Barack is a symbol of change.  He is a symbol of how those outside the normal channels of power and decision making can bring about change. Barack is also a symbol of diversity. He is a symbol of our ability to cross walls that have been established to divide us: by race, prosperity, religion, ethnicity, nation, age and even political ideology.

I hired Barack to reach out to those who were on the outside, folks who were poor and Black on the south side of Chicago. But Barack had never been poor or Black. Well of course, he had been Black, but largely he had been protected by his life from the problems of racism.    But what Barack had been almost his entire life was an outsider.  We all know the biography. Barack told it to you in his book as he told it to me in that coffee shop almost twenty-five years ago. An American kid growing up abroad, not knowing his father, sometimes physically separated from his Mom, moved back to Hawaii where he was one of a very few African Americans, he was very much an outsider. Outsiders basically have two choices. They either try to be like everyone around them or they identify with other outsiders. Barack chose to identify with other outsiders and in time become a symbol for outsiders throughout America and the word.

I want to describe how this ability to define himself although he was an outsider was shaped by his experience as an organizer and how in turn he used this experience to shape his campaign for President.

There was a peculiar resonance, between who Barack was when I met him and the training we would provide him as an organizer.  When Barack and I came to know one another, he was torn between the idea of a career in public life and a career of telling stories, of writing fiction.  The first thing he was assigned to do as an organizer was to listen to people’s stories.  The basis of organization is relationships. Relationships are built at the deepest level around personal stories and narrative.  Like any organizer, Barack spent hour after hour in one on one interviews, in small group discussions listening to people tell their stories.  It was in learning to tell his own story that Barack was able to define himself. It was in teaching others to tell their stories that Barack learned to be an organizer and later a leader.

I think it is worth noting that as gifted as Barack was, like most new organizers, he struggled with this in the beginning. His connections could be superficial.  Again and again, I would challenge Barack to go deeper, to connect with others at the level of their deepest grief and their strongest longings.

The Catholic spiritual writer Paula D’Arcy says that God comes to us disguised… as our own life, as our own story. Stories are powerful because they describe and name the world for us in a more profound way than any data or even photograph can convey. If you can tell your story, you know who you are. If you can not tell your own story, others will define you. Were the lower income African Americans and Hispanics that Barack worked with, and that I continue to work with on the south side, people who were: ONE–lazy and could not compete, OR TWO–victims of closed factories and bad luck, OR THREE–part of a multi-generational struggle to overcome the worst kind of adversity and would they find a way to overcome obstacles once again?  Knowing what you do of Barack, what message do you think he learned to convey to people?  Well if you listened to his inauguration address, you know he learned to hear the story of how if we struggle, we can overcome adversity.  The poet T.S. Elliot wrote that “we had the experience, but missed the meaning.”  We tell stories so that we won’t miss the meaning.

David Axlerod, the strategic heart of the Obama campaign believes that politics is about competing stories. So responding to his own experience as an organizer and Axlerod’s advice, Barack told his story again and again.  He told the story he wanted to tell about himself. He told us that he came from a family that has overcome adversity, from a Grandmother who overcame barriers of discrimination against women, from a father who believed America was the promised land, from a single mother who gave him everything he needed, from a wife who grew up in the most segregated city in America but went on to live the American dream.

When the campaign organizers gathered people in small groups, they asked potential campaign workers to discuss three questions. The first was… “What is happening in your life that you are participating in this discussion?  What life experiences brought you here?” In other words, they were asked to tell their story.

The next question was, “How does your story connect with the others who are here and with others in the United States?”  The discussion participants came to see that what unites us is always greater than what divides us if we are listening to one another’s stories.  Those in power pursue a strategy of divide and conquer.  Organizers help people find their commonality.  The great secret of those who try to take away your dignity for the sake of their own power is that they do it by turning brother against brother and sister against sister.  One understanding of the Biblical Hebrew word for Satan is that it means “one who divides.”  The Holy Spirit can only arrive when people are gathered together. For as long as I remember, the key to political power in Chicago has been keeping Whites, African Americans and Hispanics divided. Barack learned that the key to opening the doors of power to others was to connect people. When we connect with one another at the level of our grief and hope, there is no power on earth that can keep us divided.

There was a third question and that was “how do the stories we have told and heard relate to this Barack Obama, this obvious outsider who believes that he can be elected President of the United States?” Organizers will recognize that question from countless house meetings and small theological reflection groups.  Although Barack was taught to ask it like this, more or less: ”Understanding your grief and hope, and how your grief and hope connects you to one another, what is the opportunity of the present moment?” For organizers, this is the action question.

Because as much as we used stories to define ourselves and not let others define us, as much as we use stories to connect ourselves to others who we previously thought we had nothing in common with only to discover that they were just like us, stories without action were incomplete. They were a dream without a future.

We use stories to define ourselves and to prevent others from defining us.  We also use stories to form connections. But those who are busy defining us and taking more and more for themselves, who are busy eating off the plate of a hungry brother and sister, would like nothing more than to have us tell our stories to one another all day long.  If you want to define yourself, your stories must always result in action. We describe large efforts for social change as movements.  The first instruction that Jesus gives to the Disciples is to keep moving.  Sooner or later, we get to the point where we say to ourselves, “I don’t have to live this way.”

I tried to teach Barack about action by modeling it for him. And he modeled it for the leaders he pulled together on the south side.  I think we learn the most difficult things by watching.  I taught Barack to do one on one interviews by having him watch me do them.   I learned about the things that he understood and the things that he did not quite grasp by watching him. This is also the way he was taught about action.

Action, movement for organizers, is not flailing around. It is disciplined and reflective, as Barack was during the campaign.  It recognizes emotion, but saves emotion for when we are among friends or when it furthers what we want to communicate as Barack did during the campaign. In the heat of the moment, we remain as cool as we can be, careful not to react to everything that comes our way, choosing our battles, careful to communicate what we intend to communicate.  This is what a good organizer does and we see that in Barack during the campaign.  Good organizers model this approach to action for others. Organizers project these action characteristics so that those they work with will learn to  imitate them. Barack projected this and created the expectation that his campaign team was to behave the same way.  From the campaign team, this attitude permeated to all levels of the campaign.  The Obama campaign displayed a remarkable ability to collaborate and to remain consistent.

Sarah Palin, Rudy Guliani and other Republican leaders who ridiculed organizing at their convention could have helped their candidate if they urged him to be more like a community organizer.

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Training Obama: Lessons for Organizing. Part Two