This is a very big day in Fort Wayne for the Barack Obama campaign.
Quite a bit of the heavy lifting for today's event is the responsibility of Chris Farrell, the northeast Indiana regional director for the Obama campaign.
Mr. Farrell arrived in Fort Wayne a few weeks ago in order to set up the headquarters, talk to area Democratic leaders and ramp up the Obama effort in advance of the Indiana primary on May 6th.
Mr. Farrell is a veteran of the Obama campaign in southeast Iowa, the state of Alaska and southeast Ohio. What he has learned along the way is being applied here. That includes setting ambitious but what he says are completely realistic goals for new voter registrations. Those goals are realistic because the Obama campaign is a learning organization that is taking the benchmarks and experiences of early primary and caucus states and applying that fully to Indiana.
The track record in other states is that approximately 80% of newly registered Democratic primary voters tend to vote for Senator Obama once they reach the primary voting booth or caucus location.
Next Tuesday's registration figures will be telling for the Hillary Clinton campaign. High numbers of new registrants, particularly in key counties, will not be good for her campaign.
Mr. Farrell has been featured in previous stories in other states during this campaign year. KTUU TV 2 in Anchorage interviewed Mr. Farrell at a "practice" caucus. The Anchorage Press' Amanda Coyne wrote:
In presidential contender Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Midtown Anchorage, handwritten posters fill the walls, charting volunteers and tiers and districts and delegate numbers. The guts of dismantled telephones are strewn across the floor. Trashcans overflow with Chinese food containers, and there’s a constant buzz of activity. Three guys, Joe Hardenbrook, Chris Farrell and Andrew Gall, are charged with harnessing that buzz into action, into getting people to stand for Obama, instead of his main opponents, John Edwards or Hillary Clinton, in the upcoming February 5 Democratic caucus.
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When Obama announced that he would run for his party’s nomination, he vowed to do so in all of the states. He’s kept his promise. And so far, on the eve of the caucuses, he’s the only Democratic candidate with an office and paid staff in Alaska.
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It’s all, as Farrell says, “Good times.”
But still they can feel the frustrations of running a campaign in a caucus-naïve state twice the size of Texas, so far from headquarters, from the support of the cadre of Obama volunteers who’ve been roaming from state to state, from other offices that share resources and advice.
They’ve had to find couches to crash on, cars that start in below zero weather, volunteers willing to be outside, waving signs while hands and faces turn purple. Farrell had to learn that being called a cheechako isn’t anything at all like being called a macaca, and he’s undoubtedly the only staffer in any of the three major Democratic campaigns who, while walking to work his first day, had to negotiate a pair of moose in his path.
[ ... ]
Before Chris Farrell began to organize for Obama in Iowa, he was living in a beautiful Rhode Island apartment. He had a beautiful fiancée and a job that paid for it all. Then, to prove his mettle, he made his way to the south side of Philadelphia, to work for the mayoral race there. He lived in his car for awhile, then in a rundown studio without a door. He was cold and hungry and happy then. In Iowa, though, he had the time of his life.
Farrell has a shock of red hair gelled into stylish points. [ ... ] Nothing about him is nonchalant. He's a blur of motion, of action. In the small Anchorage office, his phone is always to his ear. He paces a lot and talks to his computer when there's nobody else to talk to. He insists on high-fiving the stream of people parading in and out of the office. Everything for him is “good times.” The strange packages, the onerous task of setting up a phone bank—trying to get people in Barrow and Kotzebue to do such a thing as caucus. But don’t think of him as just another salesman. Get him in a room alone and you'll find a substantive stillness there, a capacity to really listen, which he professes to have learned from his idol. When he was an organizer in Iowa, he says Obama would come to his area and really listen to him.
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Alone, at an Italian restaurant one night, in one of his rare still moments, Farrell talked about what he learned in Iowa.
“Mostly,” he says, “I was taught that listening is the only way to get a real feel for the pulse of a community. That’s what community organizing is all about. Understanding that we’re all our brothers’ keepers. And no matter what happens in this race, all across the country, in Alaska and Utah and New York and Iowa, Obama will have started something. It’s a movement. It’s finally our moment.”
He gets tears in his eyes and leans back into the booth.
“It’s good times,” he says.
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