Barack Obama’s campaign for President of the United States has led to building cohesive teams, social bridges, effective coalitions, productive self and ethnic esteem and civic involvement. Staff, volunteers, supporters and even observers continue to grow as a direct and proximate benefit of the Obama’08 campaign’s approaches to voter and volunteer involvement.
People of diverse and converse ethnic, education and employment descriptions have joined minds, hands and hearts to learn about election laws, debate techniques, voter registration and campaign participation. Technological skills, effective teams, self-esteem, political knowledge and political interest have reached new levels. Campaign volunteers and staff have honed skills, techniques, systems and strategies which are transferable in the market place, school house, board room and family home.
Here are some examples of Barack the Leader, Barack the Builder:
1. www.barackobama.com
www.barackobama.com offers templates and opportunities to connect with affinity groups, organize events, research issues, view videos, create blogs, register voters and volunteer for canvassing and contact voters.
2. Volunteer Training
Obama’08 has trained volunteers to canvass neighborhoods, coach volunteers, connect supporters, convince doubters, monitor the polls on election day, evaluate debate techniques and send stories to the media. The offerings and opportunities abound for people participate for one day or every day, in their local community and in other states, as individuals and in groups.
3. Innovation and Inspiration
Senator Obama has encouraged supporters to participate by means of their creativity and talents. Creativity and innovation have given new energy and elements to the traditional t-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers and lawn signs. Videos, songs and jewelry are showing and sending the message to “Act”, “Believe”, “Change”, “Hope” and “Vote.”
4. Global Warming
At the Berlin Wall, throughout Europe, in many languages, many countries and many minds, the power to inspire, listen, respond and involve have motivated and demonstrated the significance of hope, political empowerment and self-development. During the Pennsylvania primaries, I rode up in an elevator filled with people chatting and cheering in a diverse language and dialects. "Obama" was on the minds and in the mouths of enthusiastic supporters from France, Korean, Japan and yes, the United States.
5. Leading and Building by Example
The construction of new social, political and economic paradigms requires vision, plans, designs, foundation, tools, timelines, budgets and teams. Senator Barack Obama is leading .Senator Obama is building.
His leading and building have inspired individuals, families, organizations and communities to use their tools, skills, abilities and experience to construct and fortify plans, procedures and progress in education, politics and economics.
Dreamers and builders from diverse backgrounds, benefits and bases are leading and building by example.
These multi-talented, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic dreamers are building power surged Towers of Able rather than power drained Towers of Babel.
Great Article about our Pike Obama Chairman Ryan. Way to go and JOB WELL DONE leading the way to get out the vote for Pennsylvania's primary on Tuesday March 22nd!!
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080420/NEWS/804200329/-1/NEWS
If you look on Hillary's website under EVENTS...there's very little posted within a 250 mile radius:
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/actioncenter/event/?mt=0&d=250&z=10940&s=z&EventSearchAndResults%3A_ctl0.x=20&EventSearchAndResults%3A_ctl0.y=11
NOT that I plan on going to any...but either they're clandestine...OR...nobody cares!! Hmmm...in the meantime for all the Obama events I've attended there are just as many HIL-iots making a scene. Wonder if they are using our Events listings to follow our movements and impact us at various locales...thoughts??
Greetings from Bucks County, the alamObama SWAT team is on the ground and ready for action. We've been hard at work for the past two days at the Lower Bucks County HQ in Levittown, PA. The alamObama, grassroots organization from San Antonio, TX has sent eight of their very best ground troops (volunteers) to help bring home a Victory for Barack. We've been staying busy putting together GOTV packets for this weekend's last push also verifying and contacting out of state volunteers. The staffs in the Lower Bucks County HQ have all been Great. They've welcomed us with open arms and a Great attitude of not just closing the gap but WINNING PA. We've had the pleasure of meeting U.S. Congressman, Patrick Murphy of Bucks County, who along with the Obama staffers; Rachel, Luca, Josh and the rest of the Lower Bucks County staff are all Great Americans. Saturday is going to be a big day for all of us; the alamObama SWAT team will be canvassing in Bensalem, PA, which is also in Lower Bucks County. Remember YES WE CAN / SE SI PUEDE!!!
Yes, it's beautififul weather, great times to be outside and CANVAS FOR OBAMA!! Please MAKE the time for CHANGE and come out to Pennsylvania and help local offices -- THIS IS THE FINAL WEEKEND before Primary Day on Tuesday April 22nd.
Contact and Location information follows. Office is open until 8:00 PM. Please dont just sit there - do SOMETHING. This effects every democrat. If you live near PA or in PA, look up your local Obama office on this website and participate. We have particular need at the location below, which is minutes from the Delaware river across from Orange County NY and Sussex county, NJ. Right off Interstate 84.
If you want REAL change in America and support Senator Barack Obama - this is a crucial period - please join us! Thank you!
Location:
Office Address:201 W. Harford StreetMilford, PA, 18337Second Floor of the Old Milford School House
The office is located across from the Milford Post Office on the second floor of Joey's Pizza. This location is easily accessible for out of state volunteers wishing to help out this weekend or on Tuesday. (Located off of Interstate 84 and Routes 206 + 209)
Contacts:
RyanPike County for Obama Chairman570-540-0640
Ari SchoenholtzField Organizer - Pike and Wayne countiesObama for America651-402-4176
Everyone criticizes Obama about the "Bitter" comments because he made it at a fundraisers in San Fransico behind closed doors, people say he got caught because he thought nobody was listening, But what the media doesnt tell you is that he made these very remarks on Charlie Rose during an interview in 2004 !!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHodpyhXFSg
THE MEDIA IS LYING TO YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
Around 36 of us, from Palo Alto, CA and Stanford University, are flying to Pennsylvania this week, to help the Obama campaign! Most of us will be in Philadelphia. Some in Pittsburgh. We also seriously need volunteers in Erie. I will be in Philadelphia from 4/16-4/23!
Let me know if you want to help us or get in touch with me. :p We need all the volunteers we can find.
Need help in Northeast Philly
During the last two weeks I spent time helping out at the Northeast Philly HQ office. Northeast Philadelphia campaign staff has put out an urgent call for additional volunteers to help with Get Out the Vote canvassing activities.
Northeast Philly is a strong Hillary area.
In a nutshell, they need people to go out and canvass, walk the neighborhoods and talk to the neighbors. They also need phone bankers to talk to neighbors to find which way they are leaning and to persuade wherever possible.
The office is located at 1607 Pratt St, Philadelphia, PA 19124, across the street from the Frankford Transportation Center .Doug's number is 361-446-5150
NE Philly Headquarters (Philadelphia, PA)
1601 Pratt StreetPhiladelphia, PA 19124
Doug 361-446-5150Dave 609-868-2733
Kim 215.704.8225 northeastphillyforobama@gmail. com
YES WE CAN!
In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.
Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.
Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.
Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.
But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.
As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.
In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.
Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.
“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”
During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”
Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.
Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”
Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.
“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.
“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”
Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.
“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question of her record.
In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in 2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11 billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.
Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.
“We’ve had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in to office preventing bad things from happening,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton’s characterization. Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for compromise at the expense of the poor.
When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton “wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Ms. Chapin said.
Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having “had a hand in devaluing motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of children and their families deeper into poverty.”
In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.
Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to expand job training, access to health care, child care and food stamps.
When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative. Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.
In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.
“I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.
Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal immigrants. But “pragmatic politics” had to be considered. “If he vetoed welfare reform a third time,” she wrote, “Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”
Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children’s Defense Fund, an activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton called “sad and painful.” Mrs. Edelman’s husband, Peter, quit his administration post.
In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by 35 percent, as employment climbed.
In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census data.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24060990/
Go Obama Go! We are on the Move toward closing the gap between Senator Clinton's lead in PA! This national poll revealed the following.
For those of you who are not aware, The Field is hosting a page that will allow you to directly communicate with Debra Kozikowski, currently an uncommited Superdelegate who was a supporter of John Edwards. In her words:
“Here’s your challenge. Think about me wearing my super duper hat reading your posts. Convince me why I should deliver my superdelegate vote to Senator Obama or for the minority here who support Senator Clinton — you too can rise to the occasion with civility and grace.”
There have already been so many amazing posts in support of Obama - add your own voice and take some time to read why this campaign is so important to so many of us! For those of you needing a re-charge in this long fight, this is is essential reading!!!
http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=1007
Well this is it. Tomorrow is my last day in California for two months while I work the streets of Pennsylvania, Indiana and Kentucky to help Barack Retail. I've decided that calling Hillary "Senate Majority Leader" and the next "Governor of New York" will be the way I will approach discussions of her. That way our prospects can begin to think of her in another powerful role besides "President" which we think our guy is better suited for.
Not going negative is a challenge to the intellect. Barack is a great teacher of how to do that. I am amazed at how level headed he always is. What an amazing example of how to be a new kind of candidate.
I've been holed up in my multimedia factory all Winter and need to get some fresh air and most of all EXERCISE. Hopefully tearing myself away from the internet and HDTV will get me back into the human race. Both these media are highly addictive. But I've had little face-2-face contact with other human beings for quite a while now. Hope I can make the transition without too many withdrawal symptoms.
Door-2-door is sort of my first love. I've always been my best knocking on doors talking to strangers. I started doing it when I was a little boy, selling greeting cards door-2-door for prizes. The summer between high school and college, I successfully sold encyclopedias door-2-door in North & South Carolina.
4 years ago I worked full time door-2-door for Kerry in RENO Nevada for the ACT organization all summer-fall. This is just my way of introducing myself to all the places where I'm going to and where I'm coming from, Santa Cruz California. See y'all on the campaign trail soon.
Taylor Barcroft
I've created a site Can Hillary Win and I want to put as many really great quotes about Hillary's chances of winning the nomination on it. I've already got 4 really good ones, but I want as many as possible.
Requirements are that they should be from reputable sources (preferably non-partisan) and they need to be available on the web, so I can link to them.
Also, if anyone out there has a blog or site where they can post a link to http://canhillarywin.com that would be great. It will help the site come up in google. If you do make a link, have the text of the link read "Can Hillary Win" - that will also help it come up in the search rankings.
The site has zero advertising, zero commercial interest. I simply want to get the message to as many people as possible, as fast as possible, so HRC will drop out and we can move forward with defeating McCain!
If you have a quote & link, leave a comment or email them to fattymelt[at]gmail.com.
Thanks!
How to send a tax fax to HRC - http://tinyurl.com/3xk2w6
and don't forget...
http://www.canhillarywin.com/
and
http://willbarackwin.com
http://canhillarywin.com/
http://canbarackwin.com/
Spread this far and wide!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BfNqhV5hg4
