Dean's 1,000th Neighborhood Meeting...

Taking cues from the legacy of Cesar Chavez...


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/politics/campaigns/05DEAN.html


"With little notice, the Dean campaign will, sometime this week, log its 1,000th neighborhood meeting like the one that took place here Sunday at the home of Jim and Polly Curran, two of Dr. Dean's earliest supporters. These sessions are led not by the candidate, but by paid out-of-state coordinators trained by experts in community organizing.

The meetings are designed to create a foundation of supporters with an intense personal commitment to a candidate that political consultants say cannot be created with a television commercial and that will be resistant to attacks on Dr. Dean by his opponents.

This show of organizing prowess is a tribute to the past and a nod to the future. These are the same methods that were used to organize farm workers in California 25 years ago. Mr. Steinberg is one of 45 Dean coordinators trained by, among others, Marshall Ganz, a Harvard University sociologist who helped pioneer these methods in 16 years with the United Farm Workers.

"The very first get-out-the-vote I learned to do from Cesar Chavez," he said. "House meetings were the No. 1 organizing approach that we learned to use in the farm workers."