•  Campaign Videos (September 2011) « Obama for America
  

[Nat Sound] [Music] Obama: ...meet you, Nora.  Henry, good to see you.

Oscar, California: I'm in Washington, DC today, and I just had lunch with President Obama.  There was a group of six organizers around the country who were chosen based on an essay and numbers and just their overall work for the campaign.

Obama: Every time we've seen big changes in this country, it was a combination of you know political leaders doing the right thing, but also them being pushed by a strong grassroots movement, and public opinion shifting.

What I want to do is see how can I spark that kind of energy at the grassroots level.

Victoria, Washington, DC: For me this lunch it was a true demonstration of what the American Dream should be, and a President who's dedicated to making sure that the American Dream is a reality and a possibility for every single American.

Kathleen, Idaho: It's a very casual atmosphere where you feel like you're talking to a member of the family.

Obama: When I got involved in organizing, it was, it grew out of my interest in policy.  We would organize these groups and we'd go to city hall and we'd talk to the school board, but if the schools were still underfunded, that decision was being made somewhere else in politics.  And so what I realized is it wasn't an either/or situation, it had to be a both/and situation.  You had to have good organizing at the bottom, but you also had to have a political system that was responsive to ordinary people and not just lobbyists or special interests.

Oscar: Organizing this summer is really about team-building.  That's our model.  We build teams.  We go around neighborhood to neighborhood, collecting our friends and supporters and really starting an infrastructure to put in place that's going to carry us through the 2012 elections.

Obama: So many folks, they get isolated, and it's hard to break out of that isolation but when they have the opportunity to be able to connect with somebody and share interests and share concerns, that's part of what America is about is people from different backgrounds being able to connect in that way.

Nora, Oregon: I now know about grassroots planning, I now know how to build a community and make them rally around issues and have the ability to change their communities and their surroundings.

Obama: And so I hope you are always remembering that any campaign, any volunteer organization its strength are the people who are involved.

Henry, Pennsylvania: If you give it your all then the campaign will give it all back to you and I think that people who give everything they have to the campaign will see that, either in meeting with the President or they'll see that in how their community votes in 2012.

Obama: So I just want to say thank you to all of you, not only for what you do every day but seriously you inspire me and are constantly reminding me of why I'm doing what I'm doing, so, keep it up.

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Notes: The lunch took place on Aug. 10 at Ted's Bulletin on Capitol Hill.  According to Oscar De Los Santos' posting on the Obama campaign blog ("Lunch With the Organizer-in-Chief"), the group had burgers, and the President had "his with mustard, a side of fries, and a small salad."

Here's the text of the Sept. 3 email from Jeremy Bird that led to the video (subject line: "Can you organize in [your city/town]):

A couple weeks ago, President Obama sat down for lunch with six of the campaign's summer organizers to thank them for their work and share some of the lessons he learned when he was a first-time community organizer himself.

He made the time because organizing is at the heart of this movement. It's how we're building our operation from the ground up over the next 14 months.

As we pause this weekend to celebrate the working men and women in our country who fought for the right to organize, it's worth taking a few minutes to listen to what the President had to say -- and think about how we'll organize this campaign in the months to come.

Check out this video from the President's lunch to hear him speak in his own words about what it means to organize. Then will you sign up to be a volunteer for 2012 in [your city or town]?

Yes, I'll sign up to volunteer.

Not right now, but I'll chip in $5 to help build the campaign.

Labor Day has added significance in the political calendar -- it's seen as the moment when the race for the Republican nomination will really heat up.

That means we need to be prepared for even more false attacks on the President's record as our prospective opponents try to build their own campaigns.

But we'll win this election the same way we won the last one: through people stepping up locally, taking the lead in the communities they know best.

Some supporters will dedicate months to this campaign, while others will pop in for a few volunteer shifts here and there. Any time and expertise you can share helps grow this organization -- and brings people together to make our country greater.

That's a strategy our prospective opponents won't follow.

Watch the video, then sign up to volunteer in your community:

http://my.barackobama.com/Labor-Day-Volunteer

Our job from now until November 2012 is to keep working to bring more people into the political process. And that begins and ends with organizing.

Hope you have a great Labor Day weekend.

Jeremy

Jeremy Bird
National Field Director
Obama for America

Copyright © 2011 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.