7.25.08
In another airport, swinging the same bag, sporting a beard I’m too lazy to shave off despite the summer heat. My haircut, dating to the fourth of July by a friend with kitchen shears is growing out. I’m the very model of modern campaign efficiency and frugality; personal hygiene has yet to slip as much as in 2004, but the endgame hasn’t begun yet. I’m just involved earlier on this time.
As in 2004, the game is crowded, but this time the players coordinate a little better. Unfortunatley, as none of us can coordinate directly with the candidate or his surrogates, he is now deploying an army of inspired volunteers to the very same places we endevour to work on his behalf.
While we attempt a coherent organized voter registration drive on his behalf, his army of volunteers, with no limits, no pay, and little direction, crowd us out by dint of sheer numbers. They are wolf-like, traveling in packs, and as they are short-term they do little in they way of longterm thinking, let alone even planning to sustain their work over a period of time. Their organizational plan appears to be based around saturation; without pay, standards, or much oversight, they swarm us on the ground, appearing to be indifferent to common cause.
While I welcome the zeal the candidate appears to inspire in the younger moneyed class, the volunteers themselves are irritating. Driven on as much by the promise of an actual job with the campaign as much as ideology, they are the future’s political hacks, but without the skill base. Irritating and full of pompous self-assurance, conversation or parley is derailed by their self-reverential martyrdom.
Perhaps these are the sort of people who have always made history. And perhaps they irritate as much because of their amateurism as be because regarding them may be just a tad too uncomfortable. Are they what I am become? Or what I came from?
I comfort myself that issue-based organizing is non-partisan, that we professionalize activism, that we use a business model that allows longer term success because impose goals, track everything, follow up on performance, enforce standards. Because we drive everyone all the harder. And our stance on volunteerism has always flowed from that model; volunteers are expected to hold themselves to the same level we are.
Perhaps this is why we aren’t very good at cultivating volunteers. And perhaps the candidate’s organizers have finally cracked a code, allowing volunteers to set their own level of involvement, driving them on with rhetoric and idealism while letting them find their own workpace and rewarding only the most ambitious.
But then again, perhaps the monster bankroll, and the clear horizon of the campaign are factors as well. After all, the candidates professional campaign, the beast that has now joined with Dean’s 50 state strategy is anything but lax. They are goal oriented, idealistic, but prepared to carry the fight where it matters, holding themselves to account and executing the tightest of messaging control.
Free work is free work. Even if it gets in the way of those professionals unwilling to fully commit to one side or another.
