• this started based on what happened on my election day.•

Extrapolating on limited personal experience is the way to tunnel vision and to getting lost in an echo chamber. I doubt that my experiences are endemic of any other volunteer’s but I doubt that my experiences are entirely alien.

But fuck it, it's a blog, what do you expect? On the internets, I know everything. I'm just typing this stuff out because I keep thinking about it. I don't know anything about anything.

•

The largest assets these volunteer confederacies have are energy and vigor. Youthfully staffed and organized, these organizations are theoretically innovative. These organizations-- from MoveOn to MeetUp crews-- are designed to be unlike anything else out there and yet they're not. Command and control exists in a hierarchical structure like any other organization; the problem is that outside of the corridors of power there are middle managers that only know what they've been taught and, when presented with a question outside of training, don't know how to react. So there’s a failure of structure, and a failure in lateral thinking.

At the first MeetUp, uh, meet up I went to, I raised my hand and asked the Head Guy what the Dean campaign was doing in KC to beef up its ground-game w/r/t senior citizens and Hispanic voters, two blocs of voters historically and regionally disenfranchised. The Head Guy shrugged and said, boy, if YOU want to do something, you should! Come back and let us know how it went! What’s more is that since Missouri’s primary came fairly late in the game, no one was quite sure what to do anyway. No one was going to ramp up until it was clear that Dr. Dean either was or wasn’t the candidate, and rightfully so. It was really an opportunity to sit in a large room and write letters to people. Which we did, and proudly, but still.

I’m all for initiative, but, uh, can I get some signs or pamphlets or something from somebody? As Sanders says, volunteer orgs like this one are long on ideas and short on the doing. I wanted to help; I didn’t want to mastermind the Dean campaign’s Hispanic outreach program.

(As an aside, did anyone bother to check IDs at any of these places? Or credentials or… I don’t know, check anybody’s anything? I wonder if any 527s or PACs or whatever were infiltrated and subverted from within. In my experience, no one would've known until it was too late. Something to keep in mind if you want to play dirty, I guess.)

The question as I see it is how do you make organizations that are long on ideas and short on the doing come to some kind of parity? As decentralization is the key and soul of their identity, adapting that kind of P2P sensibility that’s alleged to inform their upper echelons inside and out seems the answer.

These organizations should be able to adapt on the fly, restructure and reorganize at will, and take decentralization as law. Any task should be handled like P2P software handles file sharing: divide and distribute. Instead of burdening any one volunteer, be they seasoned pro or, like me, a bumpkin, split the job into smaller and smaller jobs and task out available resources, managed and with oversight by someone hooked into a larger level of command and control.

Take my question as an example: what does that sort of thing entail? Community contact and then media and Information distribution. One person collates a list of Hispanic newspapers, media, and community centers. One person in charge of getting Dean materials in Spanish. Use friend-of-friends if needed to find anyone who speaks Spanish (as it so happens, Kel and I sat next to a guy that did). Someone contacts area nursing homes, sees if they allow candidate literature to be left about, see if they permit meetings on premises, stuff like that.

Or another more practical example. When I got back to the MoveOn headquarters, I’d print out directions to precincts as volunteers came in. It wasn’t smooth, as each had to be printed one at a time, after each precinct was checked and rechecked and contacted and all of that. I kept wondering why these packets didn’t already exist. We’d have volunteers sitting around for up to an hour at some points because the information flow got backed up. I realized that, shit, there had to be almost 50 precincts all told, and would these packets contain maybe 7, 10 pages. You figure 20 copies of each and it’s a pretty big hit to the office printer, a Kinko’s bill, whatever. I understand in this age of billion dollar campaign spending that sweating a 200 dollar Kinko’s bill is vaguely ludicrous, but at the same time if co-owning a company has taught me anything, it’s if you mind the nickels and dimes, the dollars will take care of themselves. Anyway. So you make digital files, .RTF files or PDF files of each packet, and get volunteers to bring a single printed copy with them for each weekly meeting. One person prints one copy, once a week, and you’ve shifted a big printing bill into little manageable bits and pieces.

Anything would be better than tasking a guy to make it all happen as you need it and losing hours, minutes, and seconds.

I’m spitballing but it seems like the job initiating outreach to these communities could be a manageable task when spread out between a cluster of volunteers instead of one. And yet the guy heading the meeting didn’t have a script or the training to allow for him to see or think this way.

So there’s systemic failures because large things don’t get done, or get done a hundred times over, and there’s no execution strategy. For all their power-to-the-people bluster, this machine is designed to be large and to go in one direction.

They should be a cluster of small machines with interpretive objectives.

These failures happened because while innovation and revolution existing in the foot-labor, the organization was choked at the top of the pyramid. An army of volunteers tasked to see if the bosses did their jobs right, unable to adapt as needed. There was no boss-to-boss supervision that I could see; for example, no one knew the Missouri 20-05 was doomed before Election Morning until we told them. The Super-Precinct Leader wasn’t overseeing the Precinct Leader, and the MoveOn management crew wasn’t overseeing the Super-Precinct Leaders.

We need structure with meaning, adaptability with cohesion, and improvisation with strategy. This isn't compromise; it's a plan.

Karl Rove established “Strategery” almost immediately after he took over Hillary Clinton’s old office in the West Wing. He wanted to know why Bush lost the popular vote, why the Republican’s GOTV efforts were so unspectacular, and how to insure Hispanics didn’t vote in a bloc against them. In short, every step since their first was heading towards re-election. The GOP had 4 years to get ready, with a dry-run 2 years in at midterms. That link up there is from April, 2001. 4 years they’ve been planning.

What I’m saying is that we really only got off our couches 18 months ago. We did good but not good enough. We weren’t organized to win; we were organized to be seen. Election Day was our dry run and we had no margin of error. The kids were disorganized because their go-to guys were disorganized. People gave John Kerry 80 million dollars on the internets and who knows how many hours of their lives. These people gave up their time and money and you gave them stacks of paper full of people sick of robo-calls and attack ads and uninspired leadership.

So. Structure with meaning. Not just structure, President-VP-Etc.-You, but a meaningful and adaptive structure. These groups need to have a fractal-type leadership design, where the whole of the organization exists in cells that, if split off from the whole, contains the entirety of the whole all the same. Leadership on the fly. Don't train leaders on a local level to behave like Pavlov's dogs, train them to be Karl Rove. State by state at first, then county to county, then precinct to precinct, set up mini-orgs trained by people that know what to do when the unforeseen happens. If we had had someone in the 20-05 that knew what was going on, what the mood of the precinct was and what its voters were looking to hear, then we’d have had a game-plan when everything went sideways.

We kept seeing and hearing about repeated, overlapping efforts. There was no coordination between groups. Rather than 10 groups doing 10 things have 10 groups tasked to each do one thing. MoveOn does advertising, Vote or Die does canvassing, ACT does phone banking, etc. The division of labor doesn’t matter as long as the labor is being divided. A group located in D.C. doing oversight and strategy or whatever is needed-- and I think there is one but its name escapes me-- and everyone else splits up to handle the work.

You’d prevent volunteer burnout. People would come in and they obviously didn't want to work the phones or door-to-door, if that was all we had at the moment they'd get frustrated and leave. It’s easier to train two people on how to run effective door-to-door canvassing than it is to teach them how to vaguely delegate vaguely understood tasks.

One thing I learned from talking to voters is that burnout is high. This is the age in which no negative ad can go unanswered and one campaign turning the volume up to 11 gets the other campaign up to 12. The result is voter hostility and spite; shrill doesn’t work. I’d bet people voted for whoever didn’t call them last.

Anyway. So those are some thoughts on how to address what I saw as institutional failings. I want very much for John Kerry to be the Democrats’ Barry Goldwater; I want very much for this debacle to teach us all to begin the planning and organizing now. There’s only, what, 100 weeks until midterms?

Thoughts about the party next up, in terms of strategy, branding, and narrative. For my own piece of mind, if for nothing else.