More Election Failure: Pettiness and Manipulation Writ Small!

The last few weeks I have been helping out a local candidate in his bid to become Chair of the county's Democratic party. Out of respect to him, I'll leave his name out, but anyone involved knows who it is.

My motivations were clear and pretty unassailable (or so I like to think). Between May and November, I got to work directly with the local DEC leadership as well as the largely more experienced crew who came into town to represent the Kerry campaign. To make a long story short: the local folks ran primarily on emotion and good intentions, while the imported people ran on strategy, tactics, communication, metrics, and accountability. Guess which side I favored? Hint: it's the side that accomplished more, and has more evidence of their accomplishments!

We all lost, of course. But it had become clear to me that we desperately needed a change in the local structure if we were going to turn things around anytime soon. I can't claim that the Kerry people had a perfect plan or executed it perfectly, but I can claim that they made a plan and executed it, and I consider that to be the minimal set of actions necessary to achieve success.

After a period of wound-licking following November 2, the next red-letter day on the local political calendar was December 1. That's when, according to the party's by-laws, every DEC officer would be out of a job and there would be an election to determine who would fill those leadership positions going forward. At first, I figured that Change was a hopeless cause and I shared those feelings with some friends, for two main reasons:

1. Who in his/her right mind would be willing to run for the unpaid position of DEC Chair and try to make something positive out of the mess we had on our hands?
2. The current leadership had, by alienating a large faction of the group and watching them leave the DEC in 2002, then stacking the deck with likely supporters, consolidated a power base that seemed pretty unstoppable. If they decided they wanted to elect Jeb Bush, it didn't seem like anyone could stop it.

But then a great candidate stepped up and agreed to run! It was someone well-known in the community who had demonstrated a strong ability to organize--a local Technocrat of sorts who seemed like a great candidate to drag the local party through a fundamental overhaul.

Furthermore, a sober look at the situation revealed that there were only 138 people who would be allowed to vote on 12/1, and a quick survey suggested that we had a good bit of support for our new candidate. So, off we went. I revised my outward stance from Situation: Hopeless to Situation: Flicker Of Hope. I set up a voter tracking database for our little fifth column to share (a la the Kerry campaign), and we commenced our discovery and recruitment efforts. Our man did not have an official campaign manager, so a group of 5-10 of us worked together to shepherd things forward.

Fairly soon, it became clear that a lot would ride on our candidate's ability to win over some of the power brokers in town: local politicians, business and union leaders, and leaders in the various ethnic communities. The rest of us did what we could by sleuthing contact information for the 138 voters, making phone calls, and soliciting advice from various contacts around town. We lined up as many votes as we could, we worked to get proxy votes in place for supporters who could not make the 12/1 meeting, and we continually kept track of how the vote looked based on the information we had accumulated.

The good news is that, on the eve of the election, we had a mathematical chance. We had banked about 56 votes, to the opposition's 51, leaving some 30 people whose stances were either unknown or--according to them--undecided. We were hurt by a sizable bloc of union/labor voters who had been instructed to support the opposition candidate; we did not seem to have much support from minority voters; and we were sickly certain that a large number of the unknown or undecided voters were planning to vote against us.

An aside: leading up to the election, I talked with two members of the opposition group who made some reference to "my Web site". In one case, the person was talking about www.johnlumisabigdumbfuckingidiot.org, but it was unclear what the deal was in the other case. I found myself wondering why the hell any of these people were focusing on my Web presence, but I decided not to worry about it. Transparency, right? I'm all about it.

Election night. Our guy came packing buttons and platform statements. He made an excellent speech. And we got our butts kicked, 72-44. In the end, not all of our people showed up, a lot of the opposition people were there, and a few of the votes that we counted on defected to the other side--not unlike the conventional-wisdom diagnosis of the recent Presidential election.

Another similarity in the two elections is that substance got its ass kicked by emotion. Neither candidate talked much about their platform, but our guy did emphasize his idea of creating more Democratic clubs in the area outside of the formal DEC hierarchy so that we could harness a larger number of people and direct their energies more locally. Lamentably, both candidates either made race-related statements themselves or had surrogate speakers who made racial comments. More Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt came from a weirdly ominous and vague statement from the opposition candidate regarding sexual orientation and implied bigotry.

All in all, it was another acutely embarassing evening for local Democrats, and I felt bad for any "newbie" Democrat who happened to show up for the first time yesterday. It was embarassing because the meeting lacked structure, featured equal--and equally unprofessional--numbers of weirdly-hostile rants and meandering snoozefests, and was almost completely devoid of anything constructive regarding our party's future. Anyone without a firm grip on the notion of causality and its attendant complexity would simply point to that meeting and say: "This is why the Democrats lost in 2004."

I can only hope that the new officers--thralls of the opposition candidate, every one--will take action to turn this group into a legitimate organization: one that has goals, seeks to unite local factions, places reasonable people into further positions of leadership, recruits capable workers, and above all endeavors to function like a true organization. And by this last item, I mean that we transform our goals into operational plans, make our leaders accountable for those plans, and put metrics into place to determine whether further changes need to be made to the plans or the personnel involved. I will continue to participate in the local DEC and attempt to lead from within as best I can.

On a final, personal note: the only real offense to me during this stretch took shape on the night of the election. A friend of mine came up to me and said that another DEC member on the other side of the room was not supporting our candidate because of some offensive statements he had encountered on John Lum's Web site. If my corporate experience taught me nothing else, it is that you need to confront problems like this with direct communication. So, I went over to the guy, offered my apologies, and tried to understand what had happened.

What had happened was pretty clear: someone on the opposition side had made a calculated decision that they would attempt to smear my candidate's reputation by smearing me! Apparently, e-mails were circulated that directed DEC members to my Web site and provided specific links to material that--it was felt--would reflect negatively on me. And it obviously worked, though it was completely unnecessary in the end, in light of the landslide for the other side.

Here's my plea: I understand that some stuff on here could be deemed offensive by some people. I can make individual apologies if need be, but I won't be beholden to the Political Correctness Police, and I will not compromise by giving up the level of transparency that I want here. What is offensive to me is that a fellow Democrat would be so small-minded as to mount such a smear attack on another Democrat, especially when there is no formal professional connection between me and the ultimate target of the smear. At every level, Democrats cannot stoop to this sort of ad hominem, unscrupulous, and indefensible behavior; and if they do, they need to admit to themselves that they either have lost their way, or that they never understood what it meant to be a Democrat in the first place.

- posted by John @ 7:13 PM