Cesar Chavez showed Obama path to White House

[struggle4progress]

By Ruben Navarrette
San Diego Union-Tribune
December 13, 2008 6:00 AM

... Randy .... Shaw's new book, "Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century" ... looks back on the UFW's impressive knack for grass-roots organizing and how some of the union's former disciples went on to lead movements where they helped organize janitors, hotel workers and others .... according to Shaw, some of those baby boomer activists recently put their organizational skills to work in service of a new cause: the Obama campaign.

Shaw said they include people such as Marshall Ganz, a former UFW foot soldier who now teaches community organizing at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Ganz, who also worked on the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, joined Obama to help organize young volunteers. Then there is Eliseo Medina, a former UFW field organizer who is now executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union. Medina is an Obama adviser ...

"Everyone is so impressed with the efficiency and discipline of the Obama campaign," Shaw told me recently. "But if you look at the description in my book of how the farm workers ran campaigns in 1960 and 1972 in the Latino community, word for word, that's what it was. The media wasn't interested in where this whole Obama organizing model came from. But it was from the farm workers movement" ...

Shaw believes that ... the strength of community organizing lies in showing average people how to use the tools they have to fix whatever problems they're facing ...

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081213/A_OPINION0611/812130323/-1/A_OPINION06