Down to the Wire - Last Minute Cash and Flash on the Campaign Trail

It's after Labor Day and the absentee ballots go our in one month. And you have no money.  What to do?  Panic of course. Then call the Campaign Doctor. Can't find one in the Yellow Pages?  Let us help.

Go back over the names in your data base, spreadsheet, Rolodex, stack of business cards, Christmas card list, high school yearbook, book club members, church members, PTA members, co-workers, and everyone on your block.  Call them up or stop by their home if they're near by and you already have a relationship with them. Hand them an envelope and ask for money.

Oh, that sounds easy, you say. Hi, here's an envelope, give me some dough. Ha!  Not quite as simple as that, but try these few not-terribly-difficult-or-painful steps and watch the cash start coming in:

• Make the call.  If you don't pick up the phone, the money won't come.  So start dialing for dollars now.

• Have a script.  All you need is something simple like this:  Hi Hillary, have you got a minute? You know I'm running for dogcatcher here in Pleasant Valley. Well, the election is coming closer and I need your help to make sure my mail gets to the absentee voters. There are more of them today then ever. I need to raise $10,000 to finish my mailing. You know how expensive the post office is these days! Can I count on a $500 contribution from you and Bill? 

(Now you pause, take a deep breath and sweat for a five count)

Hilary has to say something. It's likely to be along these lines: Well, that's a little steep for us, Michelle; I'll talk to Bill tonight and see if we can come up with $250. We'd love to see you as dogcatcher. I'll call you back tomorrow.

Your turn: Thanks Hil!   I am under a bit of a time crunch. I think you will like the pieces we are sending.  My opponent has been telling some untruths and I need to set the record straight.

Hil: Of course, Micelle. Talk to you then.

See?  Nothing to it. Just be upbeat, specific about what the money will be used for and ask.  The pause is crucial or you will find yourself talking them down.  Let them consider what they can give.  Of course it's best to have some idea of what they are capable of giving first. And of course, know if there are donation limits in your race.

And it's better yet to have done this several months ago, so you have a war chest and your last minute calls are just to shore it up, not get the whole campaign rolling.  But if you find yourself in a crisis, try the phone, and leave no stone, or relative, unturned. 
  

•  Follow up - And if Hilary forgets to call you back, call her and offer to pick up the     check personally. Then do it. And thank her profusely.  Now she is invested in you and your campaign and maybe she'll even walk a precinct or call her lists on your behalf too.

Debra Debra Debra - Come back to Earth!

I cringe to think what Debra Saunders, the so-called "token" Republican of the San Francisco Chronicle will do to Clinton's speech and then to Obama's, considering the mash up she made of Michelle's.  In a weirdly constructed column, Saunders entitled:  First lady: You, too, can be Mitt Romney, today, she takes the Obamas to task for having received student loans, as described in Michelle Obama's stirring speech at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday.


This is the weird part. I had to read these three short paragraphs several times and I must say I am stumped . Maybe you can hep me understand what this all means if anything, to Ms. Saunders:
 
     "As I listened the first lady talk about what her family did to make sure she got a first-class education and how she and her husband struggled to pay off their hefty student loans, I couldn't help but think that Barack and Michelle Obama would not be the fine people they are today if they hadn't had to stretch themselves to get ahead.

     "So why do they seem to think the government should hand out more taxpayer-backed grants and loans to today's college and graduate students? If someone else had handed their college and law-school educations to the Obamas, they'd be Mitt Romney.

    "Yet they bash Romney for not having to work as hard as they had to in order to get where they are today."

Ok, let's parse those sentences. First she says Michelle and Barack are fine people because of the struggles they had to get ahead.  So far so good.  Then she asks why they think government should help other people get ahead.  Huh?   What does this mean?  Others should not get what they got?  Which is really not "getting" anything, but the opportunity to got to college and then work hard to pay back the loans that paid for their education.  Is this what she's saying.

And then, say what? These hard working people who want others to have the same opportunities they did bash Willard Mitt Romney because he had to "work as hard as they had to in order to be where they are today?"

Did the editor leave out a crucial sentence?  Is Debra really saying that Romney a) had to work hard and b) is now where the Obamas are today? 

I don't get it.  Romney came from wealth.  When he went to college he lived in a basement and ate spaghetti with the lovely Ann through choice, not circumstances.  And poor Ann just never could never understood why he did that.  Something about the Mormon missionary experience he had to get out of his system I guess.  Did he take out student loans? Maybe, I don't think so.  (and so what?) Is he now where the Obamas are today?  Not by a long shot. He's on Jupiter and they are simply living on Planet Earth. And this is meant by way of analogy, not to slam Mr. Romney for being out of touch with the home planet (even though he is.) 

(For those who don't like to interrupt their reading to click through to arcane internet sites, and to paraphrase Bill Clinton, here's the score: Romney $250 million; Obamas not quite $6 million. No, it's not chump change, but Barack Obama didn't have a rich daddy who gave him his first stock options or who bought him a home when he got tired of the "dump" he lived in in college.)

I guess Saunders is drinking whatever they've been pouring over in Romney world. Because she finishes up her column with the wholly unsubstantiated statement that "More student aid leads to higher tuition; higher tuition leads to record college debt." 

Not that I don't think some unscrupulous college chancellors in both public and private schools wouldn't jump at any excuse to bloat their own salaries as we have seen all too often in our own UC system, but come on.  If that's the case, don't punish the students, change the system.   Does Saunders really believe people shouldn't get student loans?  Does she really believe Mitt had to work as hard as the Obamas ever in his life?

Earth to Debra, come on back down here and let's get you some help.  Seriously, making her write this column every single day of the Convention might just be too much to ask of a nice San Francisco Republican.

 

Poor Little Desperate Debra Saunders

Really Reaching Saunders:

Poor Debra Saunders, she's getting a little desperate this week.  It must be tough being a Republican in a Democratic Town, but she gets a column in the San Francisco Chronicle at least twice a week, and more this week.  (One of these days they'll get around to firing her and hiring me, or at least inviting me to post my blogs as a counter point, but I'm not holding my breath.)  First there was her column taking the Democrats to task for saying that the Republican's (Mitt's) economic plan was to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while taxing the middle class more to pay for it.  Well, says Debra there's no evidence for that. The Dems just use the analysis provided by the Tax Policy Center.  

Well, Debra, where's your evidence that it's not true?  She doesn't cite a single reference for her supposition. What the Tax Policy Center did was analyze what they know of Mitt's plan pointing out they have to take what he says and make assumptions based on that because "Governor Romney has not offered a fully-specified plan. He has been explicit about the tax cuts he has in mind, including a one-fifth reduction in marginal tax rates from today’s level, which would drop the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and a cut in capital gains and dividend taxes for families with incomes below $200,000. He and his team have also said that reform should be revenue-neutral and not increase taxes on capital gains and dividends. But they have not provided any detail about what tax preferences they would cut to make up lost revenue."

Such a revenue neutral plan would logically "reduce taxes for high-income households, requiring higher taxes on middle- or low-income households. I doubt that’s his intent, but it is an implication of what we can tell about his plan so far." Understanding TPC’s Analysis of Governor Romney’s Tax Plan by Donald Marron.

Even Debra was forced to admit that Romney was vague about his policies, and that the Tax Policy Center's assumptions were logical given the information provided.  But, she continues, Romney would never raise taxes on the middle class.  Don't hold your breath.

Pro-life Saunders:

In today's column, she asks "where are the pro life Democrats."  Newsflash for Debra, we are all pro-life. We are also mostly pro-choice.  As in women should be able to make their own choices about their own bodies. It's not one or the other.  The anti-choice crowd calls themselves pro-life, but they are for the most part, anti-life, after that life is a born human being anyway.

Easy to love the fetus. No muss, no fuss.  No cost except for pre-natal care, which the I'm not sure how the Republicans feel about paying for for poor women, but I can guess.  Obamacare, as we are all now calling it, is a truly pro-life program.  Just ask that mom of the little girl with the heart condition who won't be kicked off her insurance plan by the time she's five - unless Romney is elected.  

Two Faced Republicans

I guess flip flopping and contradictions are natural to Republicans. Romney was for Obamacare, when it was called Romneycare, and he instituted it in Massachusetts, before he was against it, and Paul Ryan, who is ready to disembowel Obamacare if he and Romney are elected, in 2010 requested a grant that would be funded from that program for his own State.  What's that old song from the cold war era - the era the Republicans want to take us back to?  Oh yeah, "Two Faces Have I" 

Invisible Antics at the Democratic National Convention

Watching the Republican Convention last week, when Clint Eastwood chatted with an empty chair supposedly occupied by an invisible Obama (by the way, little did he know that Obama really was in that chair, wearing his Superhero cloak of invisibility and taking it all very well!), I got to thinking how the Democrats can use the same trick in Charlotte. It was a show stopper you have to admit.

Here are a few ideas for how using a chair as a prop can boost ratings and poll numbers for Obama:

• 1.       Stephen Colbert interviews invisible Romney, asking him to explain his varying positions on women’s right to choose, health care, social security and other social issues from when he was Governor. Of course, you’d need two chairs for that, one on each side of the stage, and you’d probably need an invisible traffic cop to keep the two invisible Romneys from attacking each other.

• 2.       Obama interviews a copy of the Romney health care plan propped up in a chair, while an invisible page turner points to the pertinent topics where the two plans are identical.

• 3.       A whole line up of Massachusetts women, senior citizens, moms with babies and workers stand up very visibly on stage and thank Romney for his health care plan and give brief anecdotes on how it helped them in their times of need. Not nearly so witty as the empty chair routine maybe, but I hear Convention crowds go wild for real people.

• 4.       Invisible Paul Ryan dodges and weaves an invisible Todd Akin as he tells people his own plan for limiting abortion and protecting Medicare.  Real senior citizens can pelt him with mock vouchers from the wings.

Romney was so proud of his own Romney Care in Massachusetts, he featured it in his official portrait.

Not exactly as they say on Wait,Wait Don’t Tell Me, if any of these things happen at the Democratic Convention, we’ll be in for a rip roaring good show. 

Soylant Green, is it on the Republican Menu yet?

From our friends at the Pundit Pie blog:

We thought we’d be served some red meat by Paul Ryan in his Convention speech last night, but I felt like I got my blood sucked instead.                                                                   

I can still feel the fang marks.  He not only looks like a vampire, his seductive blue eyes and deceptive boyish good looks are geared toward taking you by surprise when the fangs go in.  Soon we may all be a nation of the undead if the Republican have their way.    

                                         Separated at birth?  Ryan and Eddie Munster

The meat they offering is just pink slime dressed up in Republican red white and blue.  Or is it something worse?

No red meat, or even rattlesnake that tastes like chicken, they offer up a diet of lies, devoid of nutrition, but sold in Prime-Time to a nation hungry for answers to the question of why they can’t find work, their kids can’t afford school, their homes are about to be foreclosed on.   Why they can’t afford health insurance.  Ryan glibly says Trust us, we’ll save Medicare.   But they neglect to tell you their savings will cost you dearly when you get to the check- out line and find that you have to pick up more of a bill, despite paying into it all these years.

They say they will create 12 million jobs, but they don’t say how or where.  (And oh surprise, the projection of 12 million jobs is about right for the economy anyway, that is, nothing they do has anything to do with it, and if they really were the job creators, they’re figures would be way higher than average.) Not everyone can come out of a community college and go into investment banking. Will these jobs be in China? Maybe they’ll export American workers the way they exported their money.  Set up work camps in China where you can answer tech support questions for pennies a day and sleep five to a room.

Their biggest lie is that giving tax breaks to the rich makes them into “job creators.”  Well, where’s the beef?, as the little old lady used to say.  Mitt Romney says trust me to fix what’s wrong with this country; I’m a successful businessman.   But success to these parasites means something very different than it to does t the average American taxpayer.  According  to Rolling Stone, Bain Capital, which Romney boasts about, was nothing but another blood sucking corporation not interested in “creating jobs” but in looting the treasuries of the companies they gobbled up.  There’s the red meat, unfortunately the meat of the working families sucked dry in the wake of the Romney and his “successful” business dealings.  Successful for him.  Tragic for you and me.  Let’s listen between the lines of the right wing rhetoric as they try to tell us how being a successful business man translates into being a successful leader of a nation. 

Sure Romney was successful in business; his success comes at our expense. He got rich. You didn’t.  And another thing,  While he boasts about tithing to his church, he refuses to tell us how much (if anything) he’s  tithed to his Country over the past several years.    Show us the tax returns Mitt.

When will Americans wake up out of their dream of pulling themselves up by bootstraps they don’t have and into an economy that people like Romney have already shipped overseas?   These people are in for themselves. They get the meat, we get the trickled down juices that spill out of their bloodied mouths. Worse, we are the meat. They would be very happy to turn all of the working Americans into their own version of Soylent green.  It’s what for Republican dinner.

Cloning Jesus

It had to happen. After Dolly the sheep, a cow, assorted fruit flies, mice and other lower species, scientists would decide it was time to clone humans. In Italy a scientist has stated, against the tide of medical ethics, that if someone comes to him to be cloned, he’ll do it.

But that’s nothing. There’s now talk of cloning Jesus. I read it a few years back, and got to thinking maybe it's time to revive this thought. (Apparently the origin of this was a fake website now debunked by Snopes, but hey, a girl can dream right, especially one who went to a Christian college for a year.)  With all the blood and other relics purporting to be from the Son of God himself lying around in various churches, reliquaries and front yards of the devoted, it should be an easy task to scrape a few dried traces up for the test tube. If some of the blood isn’t actually authentic, we can probably still come up with a few minor saints and prophets.

And what a about the Virgin Mary? Can we take some tears running down the cheeks of a Brazilian Madonna on Easter morning and reproduce her? We can have the whole family, back together again! The Holy Ghost might be a problem. I don’t think ghosts have DNA, but maybe we can just conjure him up out of the aether.

What would a modern day Jesus be like? He’d have to dress differently if he wanted to minister to the 21^st century If he turned up in robes and sandals, he’d be directed to Berkeley, and if he showed up with a cross and stigmata, he’d be picked up on a 72 hour hold.

A modern day Messiah would need a BMW and a line of gab.  Definitely a website, a Blog and a Facebook page.  He’d have to have hair by Yosh and clothes by Armani. Or maybe Calvin, so as not to appear snobbish. But really, no one is going to listen to him if he goes all humble and dresses like a bricklayer. Not even the bricklayers.

And he has to have a TV Ministry.  One with one of those mega churches. So it has to be in the South or one of the desert area, like LA, or Las Vegas, maybe Arizona, but no one in  northern climes ever goes to them, so far as I can tell. You can really pack them in and then the rest of your followers can watch you on TV and then send in their alms or tithe online.

But he needs a body of water nearby to walk on and a temple to drive the moneychangers out of. What is money changer anyway?  I’m guessing sort of like a loan shark. 

And can you imagine the Easter services, when he climb out of tomb and actually ascends into Heaven, maybe Mary and the Holy Ghost can accompany him each year up through the clouds and past the Pearly gates.  The whole crucifixion thing may have to go, too violent , maybe he can just take to the cave and pop out in three days, with all the ladies in their finery and men in the Sunday best waiting outside for the show to start.

I bet Jesus even gets scalpers for that!

Debra Saunders - Half Right

So, in today's Chronicle, Debra Saunders got it half-right.  Her column concerned dunderheaded Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin and his (as Saunders put it) "inglorious answer: 'From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist and not attacking the child.'" 

Truly awful, anti-woman, anti-science, inhumane and really, really stupid.  When he tried to backtrack, he just made it worse, revealing incredible ignorance and misogyny.  Again in Saunders' words, his lame apology and stated empathy for women who are raped was "Too late. I think voters know exactly what Akin thinks of rape victims: If they get pregnant, they wanted it."

So far so good, right?  But wait, there's more, as they say on the infomercials for spray on hair and slice and dice-o-matics.  Debra Saunders cannot miss an opportunity to stick it to Democrats, and she gets in her jabs here. 

After making disparaging remarks about Obama, Barbara Boxer and Akin's opponent in the Senate race, sitting Senator Claire McCaskill, she says: "The so-called Republican "war on women" is a crock - a cynical ploy to gin up the Dems' distaff base."  say what?  Didn't you hear what you just said this creep Akin said?  If that's not fueling the Republican war on women, what is it?  He said that because there IS a war on women and he's just a less articulate soldier than his fellow Reps who are busy gutting abortion rights, defunding Planned Parenthood and even trying to take away birth control options.

If it walks and quacks and so forth, it is one genuine Baby Huey.  A big duck bill raspberry for Debra Saunders today.

 

 

Button, Button, Who needs a Button?

A recent article on the Winning Campaigns website urges campaigns to buy a button machine and create their own buttons.  If you must have buttons, this isn’t a bad way to go.  But the article goes on to compare the cost of buttons to the cost of other campaign elements, notably direct  mail, stating that most of this will never be opened or read as the voters have other things on their mind. Buttons, he states, by contrast, will be seen by those who meet your candidate or their volunteers at the door, a rally or a fundraiser.

And therein lies the rub.  Most voters are not ever going to meet the candidate or a volunteer, or even an eager supporter with a button, unless that candidate has done such a great job of promoting the campaign through other methods that they “go viral” with the button blast.

Just as we have learned that “yard signs don’t vote,” this caution is even more true about buttons. Yes, mail costs money and uses paper, and phone calls cost time, but they are guaranteed to reach the actual voters in their home, giving them an opportunity to see and hear the candidate’s name, and probably even to absorb on a subliminal level , if nothing else, the basic elements of the message.  A yard sign or a button (or a bumber sticker for that matter) is nothing but a reinforcement, not a substitute for these time proven methods of message delivery.

Candidates who have relied only on volunteers sporting buttons to deliver their message have been disappointed losers on election night, time and again.

So, if you think you need buttons, or are being pressured by volunteers who have seen other candidates’ buttons and wonder why you don’t have them, here are some guidelines.

•  
• Don’t pay for buttons.  If a volunteer who already has a button machine offers to make them, great.  Make enough for the office staff, your precinct walkers, your family and a few extra.  Ask for donations before handing them out to anyone else.
•  
•  Don’t stint on the real campaign materials, a winning message, enough mail to deliver it into the voters’ homes (yes, they will throw it out, but they have to look at it on the way to the recycling bin.  This is where a strong mail consultant comes in to assure a viable message delivered in an eye-catching way.)
•  
•  Use your volunteers wisely, on the phones (you reach more voters via phones , even in this day of cell phones, than by walking precincts , so if you have older volunteers or unwalkable but crucial precincts, make those phone calls) and in the crucial targeted precincts identified by your consultant. This is where your buttons may come in handy, but they are not crucial.  An eager, informed volunteer and a strong handout or door hanger is.
•  
• And of course, plan early, raise money sufficient for the campaign plan you have laid out, and  even if there’s no budget for buttons or signs, you know you have laid a strong foundation to add them later on, should your campaign message start gaining traction, and you have more money than you can use in the more traditional message delivery methods. 
•  
• Don’t forget the free things available to boost your name id:  social media, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube videos of rallies and speeches, and earned media – don’t neglect the press releases and other pr opportunities that might get your name in the press, both print and electronic. 

Buttons are great, but they don’t vote, they’ll be seen by only a handful of people, and they could siphon off much needed money and time from the all-important mail, media and grassroots efforts any winning campaign needs.