Called it! When it became clear that McCain was going to use the hurricane to try and squeeze political points, I said Obama should use his army of volunteers to try and get assistance to the victims. While this might score political points, it would certainly be the fundamentally decent thing to do. Fortunately for all of us, Obama is a fundamentally decent man.

Sen. Obama gathered the pool outside after services at St. Luke's Lutheran Church. He told us that his camapaign plans to mobilize its huge e-mail list of supporters to volunteer or send money once the impact of Gustav becomes apparent and authorities know better what kind of help is needed. He said his campaign is coordinating with local authorities.

"We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back," he said. "I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary."

Your pooler asked him if McCain's visit now is appropriate.

His response: "A big storm like this raises bipartisan concerns and I think for John to want to find out what's going on is fine."

"The thing that I always am concerned about in the middle of a storm is whether we're drawing resources away from folks on the ground because the Secret Service and various security requirements, sometimes it pulls police, fire and other departments away from concentrating on the job."

"I'm assuming that where he went that wasn't an issue. Were going to try to stay clear of the area until things have settled down and then we'll probably try to figure out how we can be as helpful as possible."

While John McCain seems to think that service is about individual effort, Obama understands that the path to service is through collective action. I can think of no better example.

As for Obama and my prediction, all I can say is that Obama constantly lives up to my better inclinations and steers clears of my worst ones. I wasn't originally an Obama guy, but I am now.

On a less political note, we should all have the residents of that area in our thoughts and/or prayers, and when we get that email, I hope we can all respond.

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I'm a new poster on mydd, but I've lurked since 2004.  (Strictly off and on - if I'm a political junkie, I'm a fair weather political junkie.)  

This isn't a story about my voting experience, or the caucus I attended.  It's not a tale of slogging through wind/rain/snow/tornadoes to volunteer for my preferred candidate.  I don't live in a Super Tuesday state.  (Well - there was some Super Tuesday news from my home, but it was the least democratic of any of the contests held anywhere at home or abroad in either party on February 5.  Perhaps that's enough to guess where I am?)

So I didn't vote.  I didn't volunteer.  Instead, running late, I left the office around 5:45 p.m. and headed to the public library where I spent the next three hours preparing tax returns for people who make less than $40,000 per year.  There were six volunteers there last night.  I'm not sure how many returns we prepared - maybe 18, maybe 20? - as there are always people whom we can't help, or can't help just then.  (Consider the woman - an immigrant - whose husband has his return prepared at H&R Block, where they tell him to file married filing separately in order to maximize his itemized deductions and sell him tax preparation services and a refund-anticipation loan, without ensuring that he understands that this has consequences for his wife, too.  She's going to come back next week, with a copy of her husband's return, so that we can figure out how much he's 'saving' with that option, and compare it to how much it will cost her.  How's that for "people" on your "side"?)

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ChangeGCI is a group of veterans from MoveOn's field campaigns run by Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI). We have been blogging to expose the ways that GCI is failing its organizers AND the MoveOn members that it recruits. Earlier this week, we posted a set of recommendations of actions that MoveOn can take to begin to resolve this crisis of leadership. If you find our stories compelling, and you agree this issue must be addressed by MoveOn, please send an email to Eli Pariser (eli@moveon.org) and cc us at ChangeGCI@gmail.com (or contact us there directly, and we will update you with further information about how you can send a message to MoveOn).

I accepted a job with GCI during the spring of my senior year of college.  After graduation, I attended a canvass training, but soon after the training I was transferred from the canvass staff to the MoveOn Operation Democracy organizing staff. Throughout my time with GCI, my interactions with management were much better than others I've heard about and read about on this blog. Working for GCI certainly cost me money, due in large part to their incomplete reimbursement for things like cell phone service--but again, my experience was not nearly as bad as what others went through. My superiors were very civil when I told them I was leaving, and they wished me well as I moved on. But I still want to add my voice to the chorus calling for changes in the model being used for organizing volunteers.

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"We must give ourselves the permission to fail."

That is the lesson that my dearest college professor most indelibly imparted to me: you're gonna get it wrong before you get it right. (I said it to myself every morning for a year, as I learned the lesson the hard way...) But eventually, that permission must expire--or the wrong lessons are learned.

In 2004, MoveOn ran its first massive field campaign, Leave No Voter Behind; the campaign was subcontracted to Grassroots Campaigns Inc. Things went wrong, as things always will on a campaign -- and then things got worse, as things often will on a campaign. But after the initial setbacks, we found ourselves pinned under a crisis of leadership in which GCI betrayed the good faith of its employees, and MoveOn's members, in order to protect its contract. This move apparently worked: MoveOn rehired GCI to relaunch a field campaign.

I only began writing the series on Leave No Voter Behind when I had good reason to believe that GCI and MoveOn had simply learned the wrong lessons from the failure of that campaign. I had heard that the damage that GCI wrought in 2004 -- through mismanagement and unprofessional standards -- seemed to be continuing; however, these accounts were still second-hand. That soon changed. For the last two months, I've received a steady stream of emails from veterans of MoveOn/GCI's second and third failed campaign attempts. As far as investigative reporting gigs go, this one was rather easy.

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ChangeGCI (CGCI) is a group of veterans of Grassroots Campaigns Inc operations--specifically the MoveOn campaigns of Leave No Voter Behind, Operation Democracy, and Call for Change, as well as former high-level GCI staff who were with the company at its inception (you can read diaries from some of us here, here, here, here, and here). We believe that even though GCI is engaged in important work, it has consistently misapplied core organizing principles; we believe that GCI sacrifices the quality of its campaigns for the sake of the quantity of its recruits, and that its result is far less than the sum of its parts; we believe that a campaign organization has a responsibility to honor the commitment of each organizer and every volunteer, and that whenever such honor is broken, the progressive movement suffers.

Upon MoveOn.org's request, we have submitted the following recommendations as to improvements that it can make to its GCI field program. MoveOn has not yet responded. We have a wider set of recommendations for mid- and long-term improvements to GCI's campaign model, but MoveOn's campaign is currently entering into a critical phase, and the following actions have been selected because they are all accomplishable in the short-term. We believe that these actions would bring immediate gains in effectiveness to the 2006 Call for Change campaign; we also believe that this would set a precedent of campaign accountability that can continue to develop beyond this election. Potentially, GCI could become a positive force in the progressive movement; however, if it is not held accountable, we believe that it will continue to squander our most precious resources.

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