“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff.”
“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.”
“(S)aid Marianne Doherty of Boston, “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”” (emphasis added)
I don’t want to overstate it, but this excellent bit of election-night reporting and analysis by conservative columnist Byron York offers some good evidence for a case that one of the fundamental problems facing Republicans today is that they haven’t done enough one-to-ones.
I doubt there’s a more profound insight into the nature of the political challenge Republicans and conservatives face in the wake of yesterday’s election than Ms. Doherty’s: “I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now.”
With all due respect, I suspect she has…and she’s not alone. Millions of Republicans probably feel the same today.
The good news is there’s a way to get back in touch with “the identity of America”: one-to-ones.
“One-to-ones” are short (30-40 minutes), intentional conversations between people who are interested in being public leaders, and who are willing to take the time to get to know more about (and to be better known by) other leaders in their community. They are a foundational practice in hundreds of community organizations all across the country.
When Barack Obama went to Chicago in the 1980s to work with the Gamaliel Foundation, his supervisors put him to work doing hundreds of “one-to-ones” a year with leaders in the community organization he worked for, with potential allies, with elected officials, with business leaders, with anyone who might help build the power of the organization he worked for and help advance its values and interests.
Multiply a young Barack Obama by hundreds of young, energetic, idealistic organizers a year. Take the 20-200 key leaders in the organization he worked for and multiply them by all the organizations affiliated with Gamaliel, IAF, PICO, DART, IVP and other similar networks and organizations. Then add in all the other community organizing efforts in recent decades that owe their existence to a commitment to bringing people together around common values and interests…despite their divisions by race, class, creed, sexual orientation or political philosophy.
Over the past 40 years, since the death of Saul Alinsky, that’s untold tens of millions of hours—most, though not all, on the political left—invested in building relationships, understanding and connection with and among community leaders and organizers. One essential product of those conversations is that people walk away with a better understanding of “the other” and of themselves in the context of this political commonwealth we call the United States of America.
One result, I would suggest, is what happened yesterday. The Obama campaign knew what kind of turnout they wanted to have. They knew what it would take to deliver that turnout. And they delivered that turnout. They could accomplish all that, in part, because of the relationships of public trust, responsibility and accountability that existed throughout their campaign organization. And those relationships rested in turn on a foundation of one-to-ones.
Don’t despair, Republicans. All you have to do is invest tens of millions of hours in building relationships across the boundaries of race, creed, class and culture that all-too-often divide us and not only will you rebuild your political power, you’ll rediscover“what the identity of America is right now”.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/