‘We can change the world’

Michael J. Mishak

Friday, Dec. 21, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

Ryan Williams is living out of his car.

The floor mats double as a trash can, littered with Taco Bell refuse. The back seat is both clothes closet and storage locker, with easel, draft pad, clipboard and yard signs.

Williams, a field organizer for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is not technically homeless. He's got access to the guest bedroom of a Clinton supporter in Las Vegas. But his schedule - working 12 to 14 hours a day - doesn't allow him to see it as much as his Toyota RAV4.

For 5 1/2 months, he's been going door to door, identifying supporters, recruiting volunteers and doing the kind of exhausting, miserable work required to win Nevada's Democratic presidential caucus on Jan. 19.

Priority one: explaining an obscure political event wherein voters must show up at a particular place and time and publicly voice support for a candidate. The caucus will be won or lost largely on the efforts of field organizers.

For a two-hour stretch this week, Williams knocked on nearly 40 doors in an east Las Vegas neighborhood - confronting barking dogs, slammed doors and too many people in bathrobes - just to collect about a half-dozen commitment cards. The campaign uses them to estimate how many supporters it expects to show up on caucus day.

Undeterred, 23-year-old Williams presses on. He's a good fit for the job: clean-cut, articulate and perpetually chipper, the type of guy grandmothers love (key demographic!). He talks about public service, not politics, and says "we can change the world." From anybody else, the talk would sound at worst contrived and at best naive. But Williams believes it.

Williams was on track to follow in his father's footsteps as an accountant, until his sophomore year at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, when a friend committed suicide shortly after being arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia.

The death rocked the community, Williams says.

His friend had been the class clown and made no apparent cries for help. The circumstances prompted Williams to press for an investigation of the police department and detention practices. What could have happened that afternoon that would trigger suicide?

With the help of a city council member, Williams and his friends persuaded authorities to investigate. They found nothing wrong.

But through the experience, the 16-year-old discovered politics.

Before long, Williams had created a youth advisory committee for his city council district - an effort that later went citywide - and found himself grilling the Long Beach police chief over the way authorities police teenagers.

"I was committed to making sure nothing like this ever happened again," Williams says. "His death is why I'm here."

Williams climbed the rungs of government, volunteering first for the city councilman who helped him, then at City Hall and finally interning on Capitol Hill for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where he met Clinton. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, last year with a degree in political science.

After the campaign Williams wants to work at the federal level as a liaison to local governments and study to become a lawyer in the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps.

But for now it's all Clinton, all the time.

After this day of knocking on doors, Williams had hoped to meet with a volunteer. But she's a florist and has to cancel because it's a busy week.

It's busy for Williams, too. He uses his unscheduled free time to call and remind people about a caucus training session he's holding in a few hours.

The excuses start rolling in: dog's sick, son's car broke down. And then there are the "maybes." ("Maybes really mean no," he says. "They're just trying to be nice about it.")

That job done, Williams starts calling the people he missed at home today. "Guaranteed, if you don't chase them, they will never fill that card out," he says.

Two dozen calls later Williams drives to the training session - parking and, right there in the street, changing from a Hillary T-shirt to a pressed button-up and sweater, and sneakers for dress shoes. "You have to look nice for these people who come out," he says.

Organizing is like prospecting: sifting through rivers of mud to find specks of gold. And tonight, there are 13 of them - more than filling the living room at precinct captain Peter Fama's house in Las Vegas.

Williams gets down to business. "This caucus will only work if we commit to action," he says, explaining what's at stake: After going red in recent election cycles, Nevada, with about 10,000 more active Democrats than Republicans, is poised to turn blue - in 2008 and 2010. "Then we can get rid of America's worst governor," Williams adds. That gets the crowd going.

After a brief caucus explanation, Williams tells his story. The group is moved. "I really saw the power of government," he says. "We gave kids who didn't have the right to vote the power to make changes. I saw my calling."

And then, the pitch for Clinton.

"I originally didn't care for Sen. Clinton," he tells the group. "But she changed my mind. She could have done anything with her life, but it's never been about her or her party - it's always been about public service and the people of this country."

He quickly runs through the issues ("She pushed for universal health care before it was the cool thing to do.") and hands out commitment cards. Nine people sign. The meeting breaks but Williams hangs around with Fama and two elderly women in the kitchen, sharing coffee and a cheese plate.

On the way back to Clinton headquarters, Williams gets his first personal call of the day. It's his sister, saying she's in town vacationing.

But there's still more to do. Another hour of phone calls and some data entry, to be precise.

"This campaign is almost like family," he says in between calls at the office, his voice all but spent. "But hopefully, I'll find time to see my sister tonight."

Editor's note: This is the conclusion of a three-part series profiling organizers from the campaigns of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.