Kudos to Professor Share for spotting this rather lengthy mention of PG alum Chelsea Waliser '04 in New Yorker magazine's profile of Barack Obama. As you'll read, Chelsea is working on Obama's campaign in Iowa, and whatever the outcome, it sounds like we trained her well:
At a recent training session, Chelsea Waliser, an energetic twenty-five-year-old from Washington state, was explaining the byzantine rules of the caucuses—how to win the most delegates for your candidate—to nine women and eight men sitting in a semicircle on mismatched chairs and couches. Waliser, who has long curly red hair, stood before a large pad of paper filled with equations, the sort of thing that sometimes makes the Iowa caucuses seem designed to alienate ordinary people and prevent them from participating....
Unlike the Republican caucuses in Iowa, which are fairly simple, akin to a straw poll, the Democratic caucuses are arcane, rule-bound Party meetings where members are not picking Presidential candidates but choosing delegates to their county conventions. Winning the most delegates for your favored candidate requires not only a sure grasp of mathematics but a keen understanding of group dynamics. In 2004, John Kerry’s precinct captains were generally professionals who knew how to use caucus arithmetic to get more delegates for their candidate, while Howard Dean’s captains were young and poorly trained newcomers who were outmaneuvered in caucus rooms across the state. Waliser is training her captains to be disciplined. Within each precinct, she counselled, an Obama team had to include people responsible for specific tasks, including a “host,” a “greeter,” a “checker,” and a “persuader.” And then there’s the “corraller.” At each caucus, any candidate who does not gain the support of a certain percentage of the attendees—typically, fifteen per cent—is considered nonviable, and supporters may disband and align with other candidates. “Realignment” is a chaotic moment when campaigns descend on each other’s groups and try to poach from them. The arguments used during realignment are notoriously haphazard, ranging from the high-minded (“Join my group because my candidate opposed the war”) to the pedestrian (“Join my group because I loaned you a snow shovel last week”). This, Waliser explained, is why every Obama group needed a corraller—to ward off the poachers. “This person will in a polite and respectful manner physically contain the Obama group and ask them to stay in their place,” she told her precinct captains. She suggested feeding them in case they got restless. “The name of the game on caucus night is stand and stay, so this is where the chocolate-chip cookies are crucial.”
I'm not certain in which class she learned about the power of cookies, however. Read the whole piece here.
