Training...

After a sojourn in Seattle, (where my friends agreed that if they saw a black person they would hold them down until I got there to register them), it was off to Boston, to train a new crop of young directors. They are nervous, excitable, drunk, liberal in the limp wrist, let's all hold hands and march together way, and overall a pleasant bunch.

The training began with two days of basic skills, during which time I spend some time breaking people of the habit of treating this like college (i.e. show up hungover, don't do the thing very well, think that no-one's going to call you out on it).

It's funny. I did the same thing when I was in my first training. The first time someone sat me down and told me "Imagine telling the person you're raising money from at the door that their check, which you've just told them is going to pass good legislation, is being used for a training that you're planning to show up to hungover and wing it. It's probably not going to go that well" it hit me pretty hard.

That being said, I was just off of a week in Seattle where I was drunk enough to call off for a day. But a little hypocracy is par for the course when mixed in with the dogma.

Anyway, the training was cool, in that folks learned the skills to recruit train and manage people, as well as some of the organizing principles behind the skills. The trainees varied in enthusiasm level, but for the most part, a certain gravitas had decended by the end, and folks were ready to go out on their own.

And go out on their own they will. The majority of the upper managment layer is taking a leave of absence to go and work on electoral politics as opposed to issue based stuff. Trial by fire for the new folks. The last time we did this was in '04, when an entire staff of newbies run by one experienced staff person nationally broke all the records. Probably something to keeping things really simple.