Campaign 2008

Jonta Williams, a 31-year-old software developer, was too busy campaigning for Barack Obama to watch or listen to Hillary Clinton’s exit speech.
“That’s my attitude towards the whole thing,” said Williams, whose journey on Saturday from Far Rockaway to Jamaica was a mere crawl compared to her campaign trips to New Hampshire and Ohio earlier in the year. “I’m like, ‘let’s do the work’ because at the end of the day that’s going to make it happen,” Williams said, adding that she pays little attention to the media, instead focusing on her volunteer efforts in Queens County for Obama, a grassroots team Williams heads up, most would acknowledge.
“It’s all been so organic that I don’t have a particular position,” explained Williams, who, after visiting Obama’s campaign website last summer, got her start in politics passing out flyers at a street fair in Astoria.
While Queens County for Obama is the main grassroots organization championing the Illinois Senator in Queens, many smaller groups have spun off of it. Most began at mybarackobama.com, the Obama campaign’s online platform for grassroots action. Among them is the 204-member “Astoria is for OBAMA,” of which Alexis Soterakis is an organizer.
“There’s also ‘Astorians for Obama’ [in Astoria, OR]” Soterakis said, chuckling as she differentiated between her group and the six members who comprise their Pacific Northwest namesake. Soterakis highlighted the “bottom-up” community organizing structure among Obama supporter groups, noting that she doesn’t even know the person who started “Astoria is for OBAMA.”
Often times, explained the 30-year-old attorney, a supporter group “gets created and takes on a life of its own.”
The same goes for a campaign, it seems. Will Sweeney was the volunteer coordinator for his congressional district in Jackson Heights during the primary season. The 32-year-old regularly got up at six in the morning, “flyered” for Obama, went to work at a film company in Manhattan all day, and then “flyered” some more, often starting at the top of an apartment building and working his way to the bottom, placing leaflets under all the doors.
“I was prepared for the convention,” Sweeney said, adding that he had already researched what it would have cost to travel to Denver for the Democratic National Convention, believing that Clinton would not exit the campaign on her own accord.
But with an Obama victory in Montana last Tuesday and an endorsement by Clinton a few days later, the nominee appears to be the freshman Senator from Chicago.
As New Yorkers have voted Democratic in presidential elections for over 20 years, Queens is not quite viewed as a battleground borough for the general election. That does not mean it is being overlooked, however. The Jamaica office the campaign used during primary season may very well open again and Sweeney, whose wife is six months pregnant, said he will stay involved, albeit on a “super local” level.
“If anything, this seems like just the beginning of a whole new phase,” he said.
Michael Reich, Executive Secretary of the Queens Democratic Party (QDC), said his organization is firmly behind the presumptive Democratic nominee, adding that the QDC’s strategy will be the same as it would have been if Clinton were the nominee.
“We will be working very hard to elect Senator Obama,” Reich said, underscoring the important senate and council races in November.
“It can’t start and end with Obama,” said Williams, who echoed Reich in addressing the significance of the local elections in November. “Barack Obama’s not gonna come down and fix the flooded streets in Queens,” she said. “Local leadership’s gonna do that.”