Dipdive Interview Exclusive: Buffy Wicks, Deputy Field Director in Texas for the Barack Obama Campaign

March 3rd, 2008 in Dipdive in Texas by Hillel Aron

Dipdive’s Hillel Aron sat down with Buffy Wicks on the floor of a small, dark, empty office.

HA: How many volunteers do you have in Texas right now?

BW: We’ve trained over 4000 precinct captains. That’s sort of the number we’re putting out there. It’s happened in a pretty short time: a couple of weeks.

HA: What do you think of your chances in Texas?

BW: I feel good on the ground. I feel like we’re doing everything we can, and we’re building a pretty amazing trained group of people…You know, I’ve been on a lot of different campaigns, and I see the polling numbers, but I don’t take anything for granted no matter what.

HA: You don’t have any internal polls?

BW: We haven’t had any in a while. I don’t even know what they are. You’re seeing the polls we’re seeing. It’s pretty close.

HA: You’ve worked on the California campaign, and now you’re in Texas. We have this image of California and New York as the cosmopolitan centers, and then Texas and Iowa as the flyover states [who are voting for Obama]. Do you think that’s accurate?

BW: It’s a good question. You know, we’ve made a decision in the campaign to play in every state. I think that strategy has panned out for us so far. Our campaign certainly invests a lot in the ground operation. And if you look at a state like Idaho — if you compare Idaho to California, Idaho’s a caucus. A caucus requires grassroots organizing to do better there. California’s a state where people tend to rely on media. But we ran a ground operation in California — a very, I think, good ground operation. But in Idaho, if you have 10,000 people showing up and you have 100 activists that are going door to door for a weekend, they’re going to get closer to that number, versus in California you could have five million voters…the numbers are just bigger.

HA: Are you saying that Obama has won the states he’s won because of tactics?

BW: Well, I think it’s tactics and it’s message. I think Barack’s message is one that people from all sides of the aisle — Republicans, Independents, and Democrats — respond to really well, and those are the folks you find out in Idaho and Texas. We’re legitimately running a grassroots campaign. And there’s total ownership of it. I think that’s pretty powerful.

HA: Isn’t saying, “We’re running a grassroots organization” a contradiction because the connotation of grassroots is that no one’s running it?

BW: No, not at all, and I’m glad you brought that up. Movements don’t just magically appear out of nowhere. Successful campaigns or movements are disciplined infrastructures, where everyone has a specific role and task, and they’re part of the larger strategy. What happens in a lot of other campaigns is people think of volunteers as, “Oh, they’re just annoying and we have to give them busy work to keep them satisfied.” But for us, our strength is that people want to be a part of this campaign. And my job is to give them the space to be part of it in a way that’s meaningful and real.

– Hillel Aron