-- Luke
----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2004 1:27 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Votes Count But Organization Decides: Report From TheOhio Front
>
> 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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