SUN PRAIRIE — Keeping with his campaign promise to stay more responsive to the public, a group of President Barack Obama’s supporters held the state’s first Organizing for America listening session Tuesday night outside Madison.
According to Dan Grandonod, head of the state OFA organization, the group will focus on two main goals: acwwcomplishing the president’s policy priorities and strengthening the group’s grassroots movement by encouraging individuals to get involved and have an impact in communities around Wisconsin.
The organization will be set up and run on a national level by the Democratic National Party and work with the party at all levels, though members plan to outreach to citizens from all party affiliations and minority groups from around Wisconsin. Funding for the organization will come from individual donors.
Obama supporters from the Madison area met at the Tuesday session to discuss and improve ways to keep former campaign volunteers engaged in Obama’s presidency.
They also hope to keep them working toward Obama’s message of change through grassroots organizations and involvement in local politics and issues while supporting the president’s main policy principles.
At the listening session, attendees discussed ways to organize their group, including volunteer training to better educate the public, ways to engage in discussion with those who disagree with the president’s message and ways to engage youth and college students across the state.
Members also discussed local issues likely to face the Sun Prairie and greater Madison area in the coming months, including everything from bus lines to reaching out to troubled youth.
The Sun Prairie branch of OFA plans to meet monthly to educate its members on Obama’s policy and work to tackle local problems.
“This the way we won the election. … This is the way we will change America. It’s our time,” Grandonod said of volunteer participation.
To help accomplish the goals, OFA plans to organize communication methods to keep its members around Wisconsin in touch with one another, organize phone banks to call formally active campaign volunteers and get them involved in the new OFA organization, host OFA meetings in homes around the state to help educate citizens and write letters to editors of papers around Wisconsin to educate the public on Obama’s plans.
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Alec Loftus stressed the importance of such meetings as a tool to help keep the state’s citizenry educated on the president’s policies.
“I think it’s important to keep people informed about the president’s plan for fixing the economy,” Loftus said. “Its good to keep people involved in the political process. … A lot of new people came into the political process last fall, and it’s important to keep them engaged.”
Republican Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Kirsten Kukowski advocated taking another route. According to Kukowski, rather than educating citizens about the president’s policies, she suggested OFA should help explain and justify the Obama administration’s actions.
“We hope the new staff will take time to explain to hardworking Wisconsinites how spending and borrowing more than any time in our history is the smarter, more responsive government we were promised during the campaign,” Kukowski said.
OFA will give a similar presentation in Middleton tonight.
