I got letters this week. Letters from Ted Kennedy. Letters from John Kerry. Letters from Hillary Clinton. Letters from Barbara Boxer. Letters from senate campaign committees. Letters from house campaign committees. Letters from the candidate for my local senate seat, and for state offices.
What do any of them want from me: money. That's what they want. Oh, a few also asked me to email someone, or write a letter to my editor. But for the most part, they want my money.
You want to know why Dems lose? It's not because some of us are more moderate than others. It's not because we don't all agree on the war, or on abortion, or on a dozen other subjects.
We lose because we make extremely poor use of our resources. Because the powers that be -- even many of the "grass root" powers that be -- don't see the rest of us as anything but ready sources of cash. Because no matter how angry we are, no matter how willing we are to work, they don't have anything for us to do.
Don't get me wrong, I know cash is important. With all the media in the grip of the corporate right, it takes money to crack open the door even a little bit and get out what messages the networks will allow. But money is not the be all and end all of politics. It can't be, or we're sunk. Because friends, there's a lot more money on the other side, and no matter how we try to keep it out, it's always going to leak back in through another route. If cash is all there is, then I'm saving mine and looking for a nice place in Nova Scotia.
I give to campaigns -- often until it hurts. And I give to charity. You know what? Not to sound like I'm endorsing Bush's entanglement of church and state in providing services, but I feel a lot better about giving to the charities. That's because:
- I don't see the charities blowing most of the money on idiotic plays that even a nine year old could see were boneheaded. Or paying out seven-figure salaries to consultants who have miserable track records.
- When I volunteer at a charity, they put me to work. And I don't mean make work. I mean, they find something that really puts my skills to use.
Here's a couple of examples. Years back, I volunteered for an organization that was helping to rehab people who had been seriously injured. When they found out that I had worked at a paper, and that I knew how to code computers (something they found out because they
asked), they paired me up with a guy who had previously worked at a paper, but who, following a stroke, was having vocabulary trouble and who found it difficult to read some of the commands on his computer. Together, we worked out a system with icons for some of his common task, and abbreviated commands for others. He couldn't retake his previous position as an editor right away, but it cut way back on his frustration and he started making progress for the first time since his stroke.
At another organization, they ran me through a quick query after I volunteered and put me to work teaching computer skills to inner city kids. When they found out I'd written a few books, they added a creative writing class to my plate. I was happy to do it, because I was applying what I know to helping people, and the kids got classes from someone who both knew the subject and enjoyed talking about it. We all won.
Now, contrast that to my experience with campaigns. I've been volunteering for decades. Back in my home town, I was often working for relatives (I had a father, great aunt, and grandfather who all held elective office). I did everything from answer the phones to running the memo machine (it was a long time ago). I helped to write speeches. I scheduled events. I wrote campaign literature.
Twenty five years ago, I moved to another state. Since then, I've volunteered in several congressional, senate, and local campaigns. Know what I've been called on to do? Hang literature on door knobs and make cold calls. Not only is this work that someone coming out of high school could do as well (and likely better) than I can, it's also darn near worthless. I mean, come on, has your vote every really been changed because someone hung a piece of green paper on your door reminding you to "Vote Democrat!" But I do it. I slogged through ankle-deep slush until ten minutes before the polls closed, trying to drag one last vote to the polls. What happens when I've asked about getting more involved in actually shaping the campaigns message? I've been looked at like I dropped in from Mars. Actually coming up with the message is reserved for experts, the guys whose huge salaries are being paid when all us peons are asked to pony up our cash.
I've written thirty-one novels, better than two hundred articles, and had a short lived TV series. I believe I have some sense of how words work to bring out both emotional and rational responses. I at least have an idea of what makes a decent sounding phrase. Watching these "experts" come up with awkward, non-sensical campaign ideas, all predicated around the core concept that voters are idiots, does not incline me to put out either more of my time, or my money.
Even my experience with the Dean campaign was less than satisfying. I was one of the original organizers in my area, and for the first few months it was a thrill just to feel so involved. But as we got close to the actual election, it often seemed that we had a hundred people, all asking the same question "what do you want us to do?" Even when we did things as simple as writing letters to voters in other states, people jumped on the task eagerly. We wrote three hundred letters in a night. People were that anxious to have something to do.
kos and others have complained about wasting energy on marching. Okay, fine. If you don't believe protesting is important, then tell us what is. You've got a million angry people out here generating enough energy to fry eggs on the sidewalk, and you're letting it all go to waste.
So that's my plea as we head toward 2006: give me something to do. Give us all something better to do. Something more than opening up our wallets. Something more than being phone drone #23.
Just a couple of initial suggestions:
- we need a central database not just of volunteers, but of skills. I've signed up on three campaign sites already this year. All of them are feeding separate databases. Not one of them asked me anything beyond name and contact information. Why not? We need a place where someone could go and gather up a series of experts on just about any topic and set them to work. If we go into this campaign season, still paying millions to the same "media experts" and campaign managers who have bilked us for decades, we will invest hundreds of millions, they will get rich, and we will lose again. For a party that professes progressive values, why do we operate campaigns in such a top down, failure rewarding, the-rich-get-richer fashion? When I see a campaign that scoops up volunteers to work on harmonizing the message with the real concerns of voters in a district, a campaign that takes advantage of volunteers in preparing that message, polishing that message, and finding innovative means to deliver that message, I believe I'll be looking at a winning campaign.
- we need to be more regularly involved as a group in civic affairs and local volunteer organizations. One of the best things we ever did at the Dean campaign was get involved in local charities, food banks, and things as simple as cleaning up the side of the road -- all the while making it clear who we were. Why are Democrats everywhere not doing this all the time? Why are local Democratic parties not organizing opportunities to participate at every turn? Maybe this is already happening. Maybe I just don't know where to look. In that case: why isn't it more visible? Why isn't volunteer opportunities a front page topic on kos every day? We sure throw up those "bats" or other means of fund raising. Why are we less energetic in setting people to work?
Put me to work. I'll hang paper if I have to, I'll man that phone. But don't ask for me to pay for the "suits" again and stay quite about it. Don't treat me as if I'm a cog, interchangeable with a hundred other volunteers, and really not good enough to know what's going on in the corner office. I have things I know how to do. So does everyone else. Let us use our skills to help you, and you'll find yourself with more than just workers. You'll have an army.
Update [2005-10-2 19:24:25 by Devilstower]:
Update -- Open Source Politics
After posting the above, I got another thought. I believe one of the things I'm really after is something akin to "open source politics."
I'm currently acting as the Enterprise Architect for a large company. Part of my job is to try and keep the software architecture as "clean" as possible, to see that it all plays
together, and that we have the right skill sets to match what we're trying to run on our servers. Until recently, I shied away from "open source" software. After all, we knew our business, so we had an advantage on that end, and if we were going to get code from elsewhere, wasn't it better to pay "experts" to do it?
It wasn't until about a year ago that it struck me: most open source projects have far more man hours in them than I could ever hope to muster -- sometimes more than even Oracle or Microsoft could allocate. When I grab something like the iBatis persistence layer, or the Struts framework, I'm getting software that's been tested and refined in a way that neither my home grown code, or commercial products can match.
Can the same kind of effort apply to a political issue? Can education, or energy policy, or health care policy, be worked through the same kind of active refinement that benefits these software projects? Can we find a way to publish a policy, "debug" it, and put it out there again and again, until the
idea is so "clean" it's both clear and functional? I think it's an
concept definitely worth trying.
It may seem that's what we're already doing with a blog, but I think to make something like this really work, you'd need some of the same structure given to open source software projects: something like the tools at "Sourceforge."
Sourceforge provides tools to open source projects that
allow code to be "checked in" or out. It allows project heads to
merge the latest contributions, and produce "daily builds" (which
contain the latest code, but may have bugs) along with "stable
releases" (which are, as the name implies, more solid, but may be lacking the latest changes).
I think it's worth a shot at tackling ideas the same way.