Patrick Goggin
By Patrick Goggin
December 6, 2008
We are now just over a month from the historic election that saw us elect the first African-American President, Californians pass the hateful Proposition 8, and progressives impressively maintain their majority on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. While we find ourselves within a strengthening global recession during the holiday season and pondering how Obama and Congress will navigate the treacherous waters we are deeply steeped in, I want to take a look back at the amazing 2008 election that was and beyond.
As I grew up, I heard many stories about my father’s ten-year tenure (long before term limits) in the California State Assembly—some good, some not so good, but most intriguing. He was first elected when I was six. My early political memories were riding and waving on fire trucks in parades. By the time I was in high school, I was helping by walking precincts. At age 16 he was voted out of office and it hurt, mostly because I lost what was so familiar.
Two decades later in 2003 we witnessed, and many of us participated in, the Howard Dean and Matt Gonzalez phenomena. Dr. Dean’s candidacy began the revolutionary use of the internet to organize a national political campaign – remember the meet-up? Had he not issued his infamous Iowa scream, we might have seen a President Dean. Regardless, without Dean’s innovative campaign, we very likely would not have seen an Obama campaign like the one we did. In many ways Obama was Dean 2.0. Indeed, it was Dean who, later as DNC chair, established the 50-state strategy adopted by Obama that contributed greatly to his primary victory and electoral landslide.
DNC National Chair Howard Dean
Photo by Luke Thomas
Locally that year, Gonzalez galvanized progressives around an articulate, very intelligent candidate for mayor against what many of us perceived as the socialite and far too moderate candidacy of Gavin Newsom. After Gonzalez made it into a runoff with Newsom, progressives frenziedly organized around the City and nearly pulled off a fantastic upset. Election night was bittersweet – Gonzalez won on getting out the vote on Election Day, but lost badly in absentee and early voting.
Nationally and historically, Republicans have had the upper hand in absentee and early voting over Democrats. Thus, Newsom’s employment of a Republican dominated strategy was THE reason for his victory. Progressives learned a fateful lesson locally in December 2003 and again nationally in November 2004 when W. squeaked by John Kerry. Amongst other things, absentee and early voting pushed W. just a nose ahead of Kerry in another photo finish, this time in Ohio.
In 2008, the Obama campaign and progressive candidates for the Board of Supervisors changed the early voting dynamic. November 4 confirmed this when Obama won Florida, and a number of other swing states, because he won the early vote. Here, progressive candidates vastly improved in early voting – combined with their get out the vote performance, they went four-for-four in open seats.
I live in District 11. Having known Supervisor-elect John Avalos as a neighbor and fellow progressive, I naturally endorsed and supported him early on. When we first chatted about his candidacy, I relayed to John my family’s experience. My father has said quite often that if you run for office, walk all the precincts. Connecting with the voters one-on-one was how John believes he won.
Supervisor-elect John Avalos connecting with voters
at a street fair in the Excelsior.
Photo by Luke Thomas
In the fall, I found myself walking precincts for John and phone-banked for him the weekend before the election. On Election Day, I was a co-precinct captain for the precinct where I live and vote. When we were not vote-counting at the poll, we were walking the precinct door-to-door and calling known supporters and undecideds all day until the polls closed at 8:00 pm. The Avalos campaign had this happening in every precinct. Simultaneous to discovering during our final vote count that many of our targeted voters had shown up to the poll, my phone started ringing off the hook and honking horns told us that the election had been called for Obama.
Later that night I learned that John and the other progressive candidates were ahead. With ranked choice vote counting yet to come, I remained cautiously optimistic. However, I could not help feeling at a very visceral level, when it comes to winning elections it truly is all about the ground game – connecting one-on-one with voters and making sure they vote by Election Day.
The Hunger Site
December 10, 2008 at 1:23 am
I’m so glad that District #7 elected John Avalos. Thanks to him for having the sense and stamina to walk every precinct.
However, concerning Barack Obama. . . I wish this weren’t true, but it now seems more likely than not that Obama’s legacy will be an African holocaust, ongoing and worsening. Maybe another six or seven million lives, maybe more, most of them Congolese, though the stage seems to be set more carefully every day for a U.S. invasion of Sudan, as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice prepare to assume their posts.
This isn’t about who Obama is, because Obama’s now channeling so much institutional, corporate, military, military industrial, and historical force that that’s not even a sensible question.
Nor is this about how anyone voted. I Ralph’ed as soon as I got my absentee ballot,, but who cares? I might just as well have Cynthia’d. Then I shut out the noise, aside from the essays, mostly on African websites, about what Barack Obama would mean to Africa.
The reality now looks a lot worse than I or anyone else expected, except the editors of The Black Commentator, The Black Agenda Report, both U.S. publications, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All year I kept having this uneasy feeling that I couldn’t quite reason through, until I more thoroughly studied the Congo War. Then I understood Black Commentator Editor Larry Pinkney’s prediction, that this was gonna be worse: http://www.wariscrime.com/2008/11/06/news/obama-presidency-more-of-the-same-only-worse/ .
This is not about Obama vs. McCain, though McCain would no doubt have met more resistance in Africa. .
I’m just trying to understand what is, now. I became interested in Congo while studying the consequence of natural resource extraction, most of all mining. That inevitably led me to Congo’s unparalleled and “geostrategic” mineral wealth, and thus, to the world’s deadliest, and least reported, war.
December 8, 2008 at 11:40 pm
FYI: I did not support Prop V on keeping JROTC in our schools.
Thanks again, Patrick, for all your support and for your piece extolling our ground game!
December 8, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Oh, Mr. Anderson, your opinions are obviously scientifically designed to suck the joy out of life.
You entirely miss many of Mr. Goggin’s adroitly made points. Mainly that, although there are certainly differences between local and national progressive politicians (and I’m sorry if you don’t believe that Mr. Obama actually falls within that rubric but you’d be wrong) we can find correlaries in use of ground strategies at the local and national level thus explaining the victories of many candidates in this most recent supervisorial election – not to mention the numerous similarities in ideologies.
Also, you posit that the defeat of prop K and win for V were losses for progressives. If that’s the case then why did so many progressives, such as John Avalos and myself, support JROTC and oppose the pro-pimp prop K?
And to Marc – the reality is there is a very strong “old-school” Catholic community in certain neighborhoods of D11, especially in the Outer Mission, where it was not uncommon to see homes with yes on 8 signs next to Myrna Lim or Ahsha Safai signs in their windows. I share your assessment of the need to continue to target those areas in order to advance marriage equality.
December 8, 2008 at 9:31 am
Patrick Goggin is a typical SF progressive, who inisists on congratulating himself and his comrades on their great victory in the recent elections, even though they lost on a number of issues, like public power, affordable housing, legalizing prostitution, and JROTC. Goggin seems to think the election of Barack Obama is also a victory for progressives, but fortunately Obama is nothing at all like a city prog—he wants to win the war in Afghanistan instead of turning it over to the Taliban again, and he opposes gay marriage, though he opposed Prop. 8.
Goggin tries to portray Mayor Newsom as some kind of Republican, but he’s a prototypical San Francisco Democrat, who will have a hard time getting elected governor with gay marriage and the sanctuary city for illegal immigrants issues weighing him down politically. And in his distorted account of the Gonzalez-Newsom race for mayor in 2003, Goggin of course doesn’t even mention the homeless issue, which was the main issue in that campaign. City progressives screwed up on that issue, since Newsom promised—and delivered—action on homelessness, while Gonzalez gave us nothing but hot air about “root causes” of homelessness.
December 6, 2008 at 8:44 pm
When I walked out of “Milk” at the Castro, my first thought was that John Avalos had just won Dan White’s former seat and how much that represents for just how far San Francisco has come.
Unfortunately, D11 is still one of the places where Prop 8 fared best in San Francisco:
http://cybre.net/pub/prop8_d11.html
Let’s hope that we can leverage off of John’s organizing in D11 to connect with the communities that opposed Prop 8 as we move forward.
-marc