Obama gets out the vote, with a little paid help from his friends

PHILADELPHIA -- Barack Obama's campaign says that as a matter of principle it has never paid to hire election-day workers to work the streets and man the polls, relying instead on volunteers and full-time staffers to turn out the vote.

"This is a campaign that goes from the bottom up. This is a campaign where we give what we have," Philadelphia councilwoman Jannie Blackwell said at a rally-like press conference a few weeks ago. "We all volunteer because we believe in the cause."

But the 100 or so people who lined up in a basement room at Pinn Memorial Baptist Church in Wynnefield, a largely African-American middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia, when the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. had less altruistic intentions. They were waiting to show their drivers' licenses to an organizer, who in return would present each with a chartreuse wristband, a stack of campaign literature, and the address of a local polling place. When they returned thirteen hours later, after polls closed, each would be given $100.

This is a vestige of the legendary election-day operation conceived a generation ago by Chaka Fattah and Curtis Jones, Jr. as a counterweight to the Democratic City Committee, a party machine based around a hardened ward structure. Fattah and Jones imagined that they could create an independent organization that ran parallel to the party's, relying on a regular cadre of workers hired out of Philadelphia's low-income neighborhoods to turn out the vote for candidates they endorsed.

Now Fattah is a congressman, the first prominent Pennsylvania politicians to endorse Obama, and many of his key aides are working on the campaign. Jones is a councilman, and the literature handed out at Pinn Memorial is distributed thoughout most of his district. It bears his portrait, the words “We the People,” and two of Jones's ballot recommendations: Obama and Rob McCord, a well-financed candidate for state treasurer from the Philadelphia suburbs who appeared to be funding the project.

"Hillary may have the dream team, we have 'We the People,'" said Jones, on the church sidewalk.

His workers were heading to polling places, where they were expected to stand outside and distribute the "We the People" literature to entering voters. Inside the church, which hosted two election divisions, one of Jones's workers was busy showing an 18-year old how to navigate a ballot for the first time, pointing at a large pink sheet and explaining to push only the #1 button for Obama.

A more conventional Obama get-out-the-vote operation was being run blocks away in a large Wynnefield home that a Jones aide described, with ambiguous irony, as the 'Obama safe house." Volunteers were greeted in a sunlit foyer by an Obama supporter who had traveled down from New York's Upper East Side. A table of refreshments sat in a neighboring dining room amid framed paintings and a Navajo rug used as a wall ornament.

Over at Pinn Memorial, the last workers were signing up for the day. "Make sure you people all take a McCord button," an organizer told them.

"I want an Obama button!" a woman replied.

The organizer said he had only McCord buttons and handed her one. "Well, I've never heard of him," she said.

"Take a little bit of McCord lit, too," the organizer said.

Another woman grabbed a stack of handbills with McCord’s picture. "That's who's giving us the money," she said.