lumrant
Friday, November 12, 2004
Campaign Reflections (ii)
The woman on the phone at the HCDEC headquarters turned out to be the right-hand man (so to speak) of Spencer, the main Kerry guy who had been sent down by the Democrats. Not that there were really any official roles established! In fact, the only people on the scene at all at this early date turned out to be Spencer, Andrea, and Sara, and Spencer was the only person getting paid anything.
Looking back, Andrea was a real hero of the campaign. She worked both hard and effectively, and she was captivating to boot--which probably helped in the "work effectively" arena. She was one of the few folks in the early going with any real-world job experience--as a professional recruiter, no less--and she single-handedly carried the "Kerry House Meeting" thread of the campaign for the Tampa area.
I spent about an hour talking with her, and what I will never forget is that Andrea made me feel like she really cared about my opinions and my motivations for wanting to get involved. I assure you that it was difficult for me to convey that feeling to certain unnamed volunteers later that fall, as the higher-level aspects of the campaign were shoved further and further aside by the urgency of our day-to-day logistics.
From that day forward, I began coming into the campaign office on most of my off days from NI, which meant Mondays, Fridays, and Thursday afternoons. Other people I met early on were Spencer (with whom I had briefly spoken at the DEC meeting earlier), Sara Lonardo, and a guy named David Geller. Sara was a Yankee like me, not yet 21 years old and interning with the campaign in between semesters at Wheaton College. David was a few years older, slightly nervous, and wore numerous hats for the DEC (the local Democrats), including the "tech guy" hat that I seemed likely to put on myself at some point.
As I would gradually learn, part of David's nervousness was probably driven by the incredible tension that existed between the Kerry Campaign crew, who were led by Spencer, and the local Democrats, who were chaired by a woman named Janee Murphy. I didn't catch on to much of it right away, but there was already a resource struggle smoldering away between the two groups. At one level, the struggle was apparent when a total of 8-10 people from both camps would periodically be working out of an office that was meant for 3 or 4, tops. On a more direct front, I was treated to the occasional odd lecture from Janee about how Spencer's gang would be gone in November and how I should really focus my energies with her group instead.
Perhaps this tension helped spur me to make a philosophical decision early on: I would do all of my work on a strictly volunteer basis--no payment for anything. That way, I could make my own decisions about where to spend my time and energy. I chose Spencer's team, and over the course of the next five months, my feelings toward the DEC leadership changed from bemusement to irritation, and ultimately to rage!
Monday, November 08, 2004
Campaign Reflections (i)
My mom got me started. After some half-hearted efforts on my part that included submitting my name to the johnkerry.com Web site, I still hadn't received a reply from anyone. Mom finally just told me to look up the local Democrats in the phone book--something that honestly just hadn't occurred to me in this age of the Internet.
So, I called. And miraculously, in retrospect, the phone was answered! My first contact with the Democrats was with a woman named Bobbie Sandler, who urged me to come down to the office to talk with her, and also suggested that I attend one of the monthly meetings of the HCDEC. That HCDEC bit was confusing to me at first, since I checked the Web site and found that HCDEC stood for Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee. How exactly could I just show up at a meeting of the county Democrats' "Executive Committee?"
Well, as it turned out, there is nothing particularly Executive about the HCDEC. My first impressions of the group were pretty good, though. I attended my first HCDEC meeting at the Valencia Gardens restaurant on May 17, 2004. There were around 75 people in attendance, including Bobbie Sandler, who was the group's Outreach Coordinator, and I settled down at a table with a couple of other newbies to see what the meeting would entail.
This particular meeting turned out to be the most interesting of any that I would attend through the Election itself, as the big guest speaker of the evening was Alex Penelas, long-time mayor of Miami and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Florida that would be up for grabs in November. I was pretty impressed by Alex. And after his speech was over, Janee Murphy, the chairperson of the HCDEC, briefly gave the floor to the youthful Spencer Hutchins, who was the regional representative for the John Kerry campaign. It was an interesting evening, despite my general sense that I would never be able to familiarize myself with or give a damn about the local Democratic candidates.
A few weeks later I finally showed up at the HCDEC office on Busch Boulevard for my meeting with Bobbie. It was a tiny little office, but that was OK because there was hardly anyone on the scene at that point. Nobody greeted me at the front desk, and I tentatively crept toward the back of the office until I got to the point where I was inadvertently eavesdropping on some young woman who was on the phone. So, I stepped back out of the office and decided to wait for Bobbie to show up. After a while, it became clear that she wasn't going to do so, and when I walked into the back of the office again, the woman who had been on the phone had hung up.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Hating My Conspiracy-Minded Fellow Dems!
Here's the first of what I suspect will be a lot of new items from me. I wrote this in response to the tidal wave of Floridians I met, both during and after the campaign, who insist on believing that the big problems in front of us have something to do with electronic voting machines.
Here's my problem:
- There was more real-time scrutiny on the Florida vote this year than any other election in the history of the world.
- There are hundreds of Democratic party officials with a huge vested interest in the results of the election and tons of financial and other resources available to build a case for fraud or conspiracy.
My big point is that it's not votes that are being manipulated--it's people's minds. The Right has done a McCarthy-esque job on the folks in this country who have traditionally done an excellent job of defending impartiality and objective truth. By pounding away at the "traditional media" and the "liberal elite," the Right has successfully destroyed any faith that average Americans once had in the reliability and the motivations of the people involved in these institutions--never mind that the fundamental makeup and tenor of these institutions hasn't really changed since the days of Cronkite. Many people--perhaps most people--in this country now believe that objective truth is impossible even to approximate, and that inherently biased individuals are incapable of producing an unbiased, professional news product.
To complement this undermining of traditional sources of objectivity, the Right has worked to elevate individuals like Rush Limbaugh and organizations like Fox News into alternative positions of authority. With Fox News, there is rarely even the acknowledgement from conservative pundits that it is in fact a purposefully biased source of "news." With Limbaugh, the shift is incomplete, but there has been a blurring in the same direction. While many conservatives still admit that he's a strongly-biased entertainer and not a news man, Limbaugh himself relentlessly uses words like "truth" and "right," and most of his listeners no longer make a distinction between his agenda and the agenda of, say, the New York Times.
This is one of the fundamental reasons why we lost the election, and this is what I want people to spend their energy thinking about and working against!
