By Michael Giglio in Rome
An event held by Americans in Italy for Obama in Rome on Thursday.
Tonight, Molly Gage is a celebrity. Cameras are flashing and rolling, giving the plaza outside a small theater in Rome the feel of a lightly hyped movie premiere, and each interview seems to spawn another. A man jumps out of the crowd and sticks a microphone in her face.
"Obama, cambierà il mondo?"
Gage summons her best Italian: Yes, Barack Obama will change the world. The man furrows his brow with journalistic satisfaction; this was the answer he expected. Her white T-shirt bears that ubiquitous blue "O" surrounded by the words "Americans in Italy for Obama."
Like its cousins who have fueled Obama's vaunted grassroots machine across the Atlantic, the group started small and spontaneous before growing fast through the campaign's online social network. It is now the biggest and most visible of the expatriate country groups -- such as those representing Germany, Luxembourg and Indonesia for Obama -- with 369 registered members across Italy. They've taken to the streets to push voter registration and phone-banked to swing states, and their homegrown videos have become viral hits, with one recently making its way onto CNN.
A small contingent were something akin to guests of honor at Thursday night's "Roma per Obama" event, where the local intelligentsia gathered for a subtitled video compilation -- the Iowa and Denver addresses, the "Yes We Can" YouTube sensation -- and speeches littered with familiar campaign mantras recast in Italian. There were invocations of the American dream and the preamble to the American Constitution from a podium draped with an American flag. Politicians scrambled to get into the frame with the Americans in the hopes of boosting their image with an armful of spare change.
Among the speakers were two Italian documentary filmmakers who had just returned from covering Obama on the campaign trail in the United States. One praised the campaign's use of the Internet, calling it "simple but brilliant." The other raved about its volunteers -- whether it was making t-shirts and buttons or canvassing, everyone did their own thing for the cause.
And here was a prime example, thousands of miles from all the action, "a group of Americans doing street-level organizing in the middle of Rome," as Gage puts it. Its contribution -- though small in scale -- is emblematic of the campaign's groundbreaking push to tap every last reservoir of volunteer support.
Chicago-Style Organizing
Karl Rove mobilized a vast network of conservative Christian churches into the grassroots base that carried George W. Bush to his unlikely 2004 reelection. But the concept of working through community institutions -- anything from churches and schools to local labor and civil rights groups -- is also the hallmark of the Chicago-based school of organizing in which Obama cut his teeth. It was founded in the 1940s by grassroots icon Saul Alinsky and lives on today through his Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which has 57 affiliates in the United States and abroad.
Obama has never been directly aligned with the IAF, but he attended one of its famous 10-day training sessions and worked under several Alinsky disciples in his early Chicago days. His identity as a community organizer has helped to define his campaign.
"Elements of Alinsky and the IAF are written all over his campaign, in his own personal approach to how he does politics, on the one hand, and the way he uses organizing techniques, on the other," says Dr. Leo Penta, who heads the IAF’s Berlin chapter. "He expands them electorally to a larger extent, but he nonetheless bases them around relationships and buidling a base of people that move your agenda."
The IAF strategy focuses on organizing through local volunteer institutions, thereby saving time, effort and money. But it has at least two significant limitations -- geography and the changing ways in which people connect -- both of which the Obama campaign has managed to overcome.
"The more scattered the people are that you want to bring together, the less you can rely on institutions, and the more man or woman power you need to bring them together," Penta says. "(Now) people are more and more scattered and less and less institutionally connected, and we find ourselves increasingly trying to build institutions."
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