Later today I'll hopefully get to some Lieberman events, where I'll be sure to give you a blow by blow of every last drop of Joementum. I see Lamontblog has a description of Tom Lindenfeld's plan for GOTV. Lindenfeld is the field specialist air-dropped into Connecticut by the DC consultariat. He's buddy buddy with the ACT crew, and comes out of New Jersey. It's quite remarkable just how much of the Democratic field consulting world comes out of New Jersey. It's like everywhere you turn, there's another person who got their start in the Jersey machine. My sense is that New Jersey, Chicago, California, and Boston are probably the four dominant field cultures in the Democratic Party, with Boston and Jersey standing out for special notice.
Anyway, here's what the New Haven Register reports about Lindenfeld's plan.
Meanwhile, New Haven Alderwoman Jacqueline James, D-3, said a young, mostly white staff from New Jersey was in charge of canvassing for Lieberman, and that hundreds of people were turned away July 22 after being told the campaign was looking for 16- to 21-year-olds.The alderwoman estimated 56 young people were hired out of about 500 people who showed up, attracted by the $60 a day fee, or about $800 for the duration.
She said LGS does not know the demographics of the city at all. James suggested that they match inexperienced teens with more savvy workers, but this was rejected.
"They kept saying this is how we do it in New Jersey. I kept telling them, `This is not New Jersey,'" said James, who no longer volunteers for Lieberman.
I love New Jersey. It's a wonderful, beautiful state with a remarkably grassroots political culture. But there's no way to say this nicely, New Jersey professional field operatives are basically thugs who have learned that it's easier to make money using Excel and Powerpoint. When I worked in New Jersey, I never saw it directly, but there were a lot of rumors of walking around money and payoffs to black church leaders on both the Republican and Democratic side. There was a sense that reverence for the machine was more important than anything else, and this leads to treating voters with a sense of nasty condescension and open dishonesty. In New Jersey, voters know politicians are lying to them as they lie, and politicians know that voters know they are lying. It's corrosive to the staff, and corrosive throughout the machine and the state.
Field campaigns in New Jersey are built on cash and cynicism. Volunteers do not exist, and if they do, they are mostly considered suckers. Lots of field people, idealist young folks usually, told me that the central managers had no idea what was going on and were demanding number counts that were just sort of dumb. The field managers were brutish and charismatic bullies, and new consultants tend to appear constantly for every micro-constituency group. Does this work in New Jersey? It's hard to tell. It's always hard to tell, actually, and that's kind of how these people stay in business.
Now, my sense is that turnout in New Jersey didn't actually rely on these expert field operatives, even though these operatives got paid lots of money. Turnout actually relied on local machines getting their people out. It was locally done, and the New Jersey field experts were basically superfluous, or to the extent they were not, knew who and how to pay the right people off. How does this apply to Connecticut? Well, asshole field bullies may find that New Jerseyans are willing to put up with their nonsense, but that doesn't fly in Connecticut, where local towns and civility is more the norm. In Connecticut, there is a culture of volunteerism, and people don't respond to nasty machines. They like nice and gentle politics, and they like it progressive.
It's not surprising that Lindenfeld is going after the African-American vote in Connecticut with this Jersey machine sense of arrogance and disdain for local Connecticut residents. I don't think it's going to work, but we'll see.
Not being inside the Lieberman campaign, I'm on thin air here, but I will speculate as to the nature of their operation. It sounds like what's happening on the ground is that Lindenfeld is hiring young kids too inexperienced to give pushback because he feels like he doesn't have time to 'correct bad habits from locals'. While his numbers may or may not look good, they are not going to be real numbers, and he will not have accurate counts of 1s and 2s if he has them at all. Because of the young staff and intimidating culture, field problems will be swept under the carpet. To the extent they are not, the answer to everything will be 'more more more'. More robocalls. More rumor mongering. More canvassers. More vans. More bad commercials. More consultants. More money. The end result might be that Lieberman's massive GOTV operation could courteously ferry a lot of Lamont voters to the polls.
This kind of organizational disaster will sound familiar to anyone who's been in a stodgy company or organization getting smacked around by a smarter, leaner competitor. More is not better. Actually, it's kind of familiar to anyone who's been a Democrat all these years and watched us get our asses kicked by Republicans.
It's nice to be on the other side for once, running circles around our very own Dukakis-Gore-Kerry-type candidate who keeps acting the dunce. Oh, and while resources will be poured everywhere in terms of numbers of canvassers, vans, phone banks, and robocalls, my guess is that there will be no local machine to do the real GOTV for Lieberman.
I could be wrong, of course, but that's what it feels like.
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