Ah, the campaign trail. Sometimes just as refreshing as the smell of napalm in the morning. This is the second in a running series of reports that I am going to attempt to bring you from the inside of my campaign for mayor of a small southern city. I hope you find them enlightening, perhaps a bit intriguing, maybe even entertaining at times. But at the very least, I hope that I can share some unique perspective on that great American ritual of democracy. Come along with me below the orange squiggly.
We are still relatively early in the campaign season. I am still gathering "staff" if I can call it that. Our campaign organization is too small to pay anyone except for a modest stipend for a few specialists that we will engage. Most everyone will be volunteers. Mind you, that doesn't mean amateurs. I've got some very devoted and dedicated people that are helping me, some with decent campaign experience. To devote the amount of time and energy, and sometimes money for a local campaign like this, means that you have to truly believe in the cause and/or the candidate. Personally, I am deeply touched by the trust I've received from so many friends and acquaintances who are willing to give so much of themselves because they believe that we really will make a difference. At the same time, it puts a certain burden of responsibility on the candidate to live up to those expectations. (I'm not saying that I can't, just that there is a lot of pressure) Of course, I wouldn't be doing this if I thought that I couldn't deliver.
But there is an interesting atmosphere to the campaign at this early stage, a sort of surreal quality that it isn't really happening yet. For the most part, you don't have any formal speaking engagements this far out, no debates yet, just a lot of one-on-one announcing to people who you mostly already know or associate with in some capacity. You can pretty much expect a lot of encouragement at this point, primarily because it is coming from people who know you best and want to see you succeed. There isn't any hard reality at this stage of the campaign because you haven't necessarily engaged your opponents to any degree. All you can do so far is attempt to get the word out that you're running for office to as many folks as possible, start to raise a little money, (that's a subject that will fill several columns in future diaries), and get organized.
This early phase leads to one of the more fascinating aspects about campaigning, from the candidate's perspective at least. It is the number of campaign "experts" that you encounter. Everybody's an expert because they've watched a few episodes of the West Wing, or House of Cards. Unfortunately, it seems that each one of these experts also has someone that you need, absolutely NEED to get in touch with, someone who is critical to your campaign and that you will lose horribly if you don't contact them. Your expert insists that this somebody is somebody with a lot of sway in your district, somebody who knows lots of people that he or she can influence. So you take the time out of your ever contracting schedule and you go visit this "somebody," who almost invariably turns out to be a nobody, but a nobody who thinks very highly of themselves because YOU, the great and noble candidate for office has given them an audience, a nobody who talks up a storm, a nobody who won't let you out of their grasp until the rest of your morning/afternoon/week has flittered away, a nobody who doesn't have a clue as to how any modern campaign has been run since Thomas Dewey.
But in the end, these are the things that you endure, because you just never know. Every once in a great while, that "somebody" does turn out to actually be "somebody!" One of the great things about campaigning is that you never know who or what you will encounter until you get there. Just like politics itself.