A factor that has not been widely discussed as an issue in the Bush victory is the totally disorganized state of the Democrats as campaigners. Will Rogers said, "I don't belong to any organized political party -- I'm a Democrat." But they were winning back then when he said that. Now it's not funny any more.
We saw the disorganization from a distance with the Kerry campaign's inability to figure out how to present the candidate and what issues he was going to take on the issues, but I want to give a short personal account based on my anecdotal experience.
As some of you know, I have been a long-time advocate of a We Don't Do Democrats position. Yoshie and I are actually both members of Solidarity, which endorsed Ralph Nader. However, I put my independent politics on hold for this election, and actually not only voted for Kerry and gave hihim alot of money, but volunteered for him, going down to Columbus, Ohio -- my home State of Illinois being safely Democratic -- for election day and the previous weekend, to do whatever they Dems had for me to do. I also brought a friend on this expedition. I stayed with other volunteers at a hotel that, being an overpaid lawyer, I paid for. And there were hundreds of volunteers from as far away as NY and Calif.
The Dems had no fucking idea what they were doing in Columbus. I'm a lawyer, so they put me in touch with something called the Voter Protection Program (VPP), to fight expected GOP challenges to minority) voters. They planned and then canceled "mandatory" teleconferencing training, sent me emails saying I had not sent them my information (I had), and in the end participation in the program didn't require a law degree anyway because out-of-state voters couldn't campaign closer than 100 feet from the polling place, and out-of-state lawyers can't practice law in Ohio.
They scheduled a meeting for Sun., which I missed because when I got into town I decided to visit friends (I used to teach and went to law school at Ohio State), but it emerged at Monday's training meeting that they kept 300 mostly out-of-state mostly lawyers there from 7 to 10 without accomplishing anything any told them to come back the next day. People who had traveled a distance were sort of mad about that.
Monday it was not easy to find something to do. I went down to DP HQ, which was in a hard-to-find union hall on the south industrial part of town, and was a total zoo, and it took me almost an hour to get assignments for myself and my friend. Other people in my hotel room reported similar frustration. My friend's assignment turned out not to exist, so she contacted Rock the Vote, which she located on her computer, stayed in her hotel room and called people in Pennsylvania using her cell phone. She said Rock the Vote was pretty good, by the well, actually organized.
My Monday assignment was to canvas known Democratic voters who had already been visited. Supposedly, anyway. I did one minority-working class housing complex where it was hard to get into the buildings (locked outside doors), and not surprisingly few people were home during the day. Many of the addresses were bad. Then I did a middle-class suburban neighborhood, again visiting known Kerry supporters to remind them (again) to vote and to reconfirm addresses.
The woman directing the operation at the branch office I went to said her boyfriend was coordinating the Ohio campaign and had coordinated state campaigns for Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 1996, and so was supposed to know what he was doing. She said that the job I had was necessary because they'd check at the pools on Election Day to see whether these people had voted and call them to make sure that they got to the polls if they hadn't yet. However, in the suburban areas it was a pretty good bet that people with Kerry yard signs were gonna vote.
Monday night I went to the VPP meeting. It was the worst organized meeting I have ever been to, in a long life of bad left wing meetings, although it was chaired by a New York lawyer who had lots of experience and was the national VPP chair for the DDems I think. There was an Ohio lawyer woman cco-chairwho could not answer a straight question or talk for less than 15 minutes at a time. There was no agenda.
(Or parking, I will add --this was at the Seafarer's Union -- are there seafarers in Columbus, Ohio? -- and it had a parking lot that would just about fit the seafarers in Columbus. I illegally parked at a pizza place across the street and had to keep running out to check to make sure they had not towed my car. Which they did not, fortunately.)
After a while they had all 150-odd people in room introduce themselves, where from, what experience, etc. Why was unclear. This would be OK in a 20 person meeting. We wanted to know what we were supposed to do and where were supposed to go. After the introductions and various digressions the NY lawyer gave us an inspirational speech. They mysteriously read off some names of people to be sent down stairs. After a bit one of this came up to rant about how disorganized everything was, he resented having flown 1000 miles and being subjected to pointless chaos. Then they told us the stuff that they had already sent us in out emailed packets about the VPP, and read off the names of everyone remaining one by one, sending us ddownstairsto get our assignments. There we waited in a single file line in a basement hallway for hours while people got their locations and assignments. I was literally last in line, having lost my place when I went to the bathroom.
When I got to the assignment room, they asked me if I was a group captain. No one told me if I was, what's that, what's involved, I said. You get the registered voter lists so you can see if people are listed, and you act as a sort of counsel to the community organizer at the polling place. OK, said I. I got back to the hotel att 10.30, three hours of my life gone. The process could have taken an hour if they had been organized. Everyone was pissed, as you can imagine.
The assignments were for 14 hour days, 6 am to 7.30 pm -- although many of the volunteers were older and retired lawyers. Standing at the polls. Outside in the freezing rain. Despite there being more people than they could easily using, we were told. This was not thoughtful. We were told that sandwiches would driven around on election day -- none were, I went across the street to eat at Subway. Fortunately there was a restaurant near my polling place. Lots of polling places didn't have one.
So election day I stood alone -- no community activist, no other volunteers, no one but me -- all day from 6 am to 7.30, with my pad (they didn't have clipboards either), my literature and my voting list, saying, Hi, I'm an attorney from the Ohio Democratic Party Voter Protection Plan, and I'm here to help if you have any problems inside. I did manage to save about 4 or 5 provisional ballots (which were not counted because Kerry conceded before they became an issue). When I called in at 7.30 there was still a 2-3 hr wait and they wanted me to stay anyway even though no one could come ion any more and I could not enter myself. I said fuck it and went back to the hotel to take a hot shower.
My friend reported that she had been assigned to drive people to the polls, she had been sent to about five houses, but had not in fact been needed at any of them. After a bit she went back to calling people through Rock the Vote. Others in my room said the deal was the same, pointless assignments that were hard to get, no support, confusion, lack of consideration.
That was how I spent Election Day and the day before in the battleground state of Ohio. People in my room bitterly reflected that if wanted work that mattered and reasonable organization we bet that we could have gotten it at Republican Party HQ. So, anyway, maybe my experience was atypical. But I doubt it. I think this lack of professionalism and seriousness was a factor in Kerry's defeat. I agree with my fellow volunteers who came to Ohio from NY and California and Kansas and Oklahoma -- this was my room -- that the Republicans could not have been worse and were probably a lot better.
Unhappily,
jks
PS, sorry I didn't look you up, Yoshie, I was busy selling out.
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