Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis How to get involved in the elections, hands on The horrid terrorist attacks on our most important memorial day should remind us that our enemies are reviving, and Americans have to draw together in defense. We individuals can still be influential in choosing the country’s leadership by talking directly to the voters. Do the Koch Bros with their $400M and Sheldon Adelman with his $100M campaign swing funds really know how the people feel? A day on the telephone, talking with voters, might tell them something, particularly about the rape of Democracy that they are committing. Talking to voters is an experience this family has shared in a number of election years since the 1960s. Some New Yorkers already know how the public reacts in 2012, by participating in collecting of signatures on petitions designating candidates in primaries. The big national November 6 event is still ahead, with campaign professionals making not only strategy but also policy decisions for candidates. Apart from the task of finding and developing donors (at a 15% commission, with quantity and emergency discounts), what do the campaign managers do? In the campaign activity we laypeople are most familiar with, calling or visiting voters, they find campaign quarters, with telephones and address lists, and recruit workers, mostly from political club membership, then direct the workers’ calls or visits to areas where persuasive calling is most needed. An extreme was in the 1968 legendary Chicago Convention free-for-all, when some campaign workers from our then club, the late Murray Hill Reform Democrats, paid their way to the Convention, to help influence the delegates, in hoping to select Eugene McCarthy for presidency, over the machine’s favorite, Hubert Humphrey. Some of group actually climbed down the hotel’s dangerous fire ladder and through a window, to join the NY delegation’s caucus, until found and thrown out. To repeat, the mechanism for lay people to have impact on politics was belonging to an active political club, in our case the Murrays, one of the anti-Tammany Hall upstarts (the Tilden Club is another one), which, moved by Eleanor Roosevelt and Gov. Herbert Lehman, managed to turn the Dem machine of Carmine DeSapio upside down. With dues money, the club leased an office/meeting room with a capacity of maybe 10 sitting or 30 standing. Candidates visited us, officially, to proclaim their programs and ask for votes (and for financial help , minor league, by members). Fund raising was mostly by holding dinners, and beholden candidates came and took entire tables. Managing of campaigns was voluntary, and our District Leader Charles Kinsolving managed a handful of campaigns, including Herman Badillo’s several shots at Mayorality, and George McGovern’s 1972 Presidential campaign, just locally. Phone campaigns were difficult in pre digital days, the club rustled up registered Democrats’ lists and sometimes borrowed a friendly office with phones, after hours, or members took the lists home. We also got together in members’ homes, to meet candidates , or in candidates apartments, and brought picnic baskets. Since the popularity of digital gear, phoning has improved and increased. There were and are small primaries – NYS Assembly on September 13 – in an upstate art gallery, to which we came, with phones, and were surptised to find the instruments , provided by a campaign professional. We were there to call Working Family registered voters, to inform them that the 103rd Assembly District primary date of September 11 had been moved by two days, to honor the memorial, and to mark their calendars that Assemblyperson Didi Barrett was approved by their party, and that she had been working toward increasing employment by cutting taxes and using bailout funds. We had sheets of names, addresses and phone numbers, and we graded responses, 1 t0 5, or circled codes, for Not Home, Message Left, Moved, Phone Discontinued, Wrong Number, and other no-success events. In two hours, I made 25 plus calls, slowly because many people were not home, and one should try to make the message meaningful. I do not know the numbers, but in our own 74th AD, Assemblyman Brian Kavanaugh’s preliminary score is 1,607 votes, vs Juan Pagan’s 945, no word about GOP’s perennial candidate Frank Scala running. This was reminiscent of what we did in 2000 (for Al Gore), and 2004 (for John Kerry), driving to Allentown PA and Bethlehem PA, where. as informed by party sources, Democrats would have a hard time. We arrived the day before election, rented a cheap room in a special priced hotel, then made phone calls from a crowded center, using land lines leased for the occasion, also forming lots of “where you from?” instant friendships. The responses were decent, encouraging. Next, election day, the pros handed us marked Xerox maps and name and address lists, and we walked, street by street by street, in pairs, keeping up the spirits despite being tired, and getting some ambivalent and suspicious responses, but enough good ones to feel that the effort was worth it. For the 2008 Obama elect ion, the calls we made were from a union hall, in the Broadway/Wall Street are. We used our own cell phones, and the target voters were all over the Eastern seaboard. We would also explain the polling stations, and offer rides (complicated). But we won! Other hands-on electioneering involves volunteering to hand out literature and buttons near the polling place, usually a school (watch the legal distance limit!). You can also be a poll-watcher or results reporter back to the clubhouse or whatever hall, where the faithful gather to celebrate or say “next time “ to each other As for advice to activists, keep a positive attitude, cheerful voice and know some facts. And be certain that the election headquartes, tiny or large, have a decent bathroom. If you are ringing doorbells, most homeowners will respond. Good luck! Wally Dobelis regrets the recent typos.ed

looking ahead by ally Dobelis Union Square, the birthplace of Labor Day; conventions Labor Day is really intimately connected to our area, particularly Union Square. It was in September 1882 that local labor leaders convened a major parade there, which eventually led to President Grower Cleveland signing the Labor Day holiday into law in 1894 (thank you, Jack Taylor). So we are all actually celebrating the 130th anniversary of the event that gave the name and characterized our neighborhood. And it continues, with Mayday celebrations annually spreading the word, whether it is“union forever,” Socialism or pure Americanism. interspersed with such impromptu events the as end of the Big War, the Rosenberg verdict, and Occupy Wall Street. The subject came up conversationally, as a senior businessman friend called to complain about Liberals leading this country to ruin. It was an opportunity of letting off steam for him, but this time I managed to lead the talk to uncover the causes. Well, it turned out that trade unions, food stamps and Socialist/Communist persuasions of President Obama drove this engine. Trade unionism was a big source of outright disasters for my correspondent, the fact that in most states, municipal governments are in near bankruptcy, having enacted over the years many retirement laws providing the government employees with health and pension benefits that were not funded, approved by politicians in search of support – municipal workers have families with voting members -, and besides, the rules that determine pensions are often based on last five years’ pay that also including overtime. That has driven the rates skyward. Some governors, such as Andrew Cuomo, have negotiated supplemental contributions and reductions, others, such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida are tampering with the rights of collective bargaining. AFL/CIO was also mentioned as having driven up labor costs, making manufacturers move offshore or perish. That is only partially true, there’s also unfair competition, and China , Japan etc buying treasuries, thus financing US purchases. Here’s where US government needs action; the GOP cutting taxes does not induce US manufacturers to build industries that will just lose the investment because of our high pay rates. Textiles, technical and hardware makers are forever losers to foreign competition (remember, manufacturing drop from 50% to 17%, this much for tax cuts since 1950s building jobs). Actually, government support is really needed for new industries, and this is being pooh-poohed by the GOP, who keep harping on a losing energy company that Obama backed. Meanwhile, the unions are also learning to adjust, under the threat of offshoring or bankruptcy (their membership is down from 35 to 11% of the work force, since 1950s). My correspondent apparently used food stamps as an example of the President’s bailout practice failing, pinpointing some of his neighbors driving very expensive cars to the grocery store to cash in their coupons. We did not even get to discussing his plaint of overly long unemployment insurance coverage and the purported fakers taking advantage of it. Our next topic was Communist and Socialist directions of the Obama government. The fact that Obama was a community organizer was highlighted, and his early Radical advisers noted. This led to a hinted comparison to the rise of Mussolini in Italy before WWII, and methods of dictators in overthrowing elected governments, a totally unexpected direction. At this point my correspondent closed the talk. This conversation left me quite disquietened, realizing that that an educated and highly professionally qualified individual can be carried away to these extremes by whatever personal objections he has against the Liberals and particularly the President . The arguments that careful fact finders have assembled from videos and records about the validity of Governor Mitt Romney’s and, particularly, Rep. Paul Ryan’s accusations against the Obama government just do not have a chance when logic is ignored. How can someone ignore the facts that Rep. Ryan falsely claims how Obama, not the GOP Congress, failed to promptly raise the debt ceiling, an event that caused the US credit rating drop from AAA to AA; and that the President failed to implement the Simpson-Bowles recommendations, when Ryan himself walked out of the meetings and his cohorts ignored the recommendations! Ryan’s budget plan also promises not to affect the current and near future Medicare recipients , but he wants to restore the Med program excess charges (e.g wasteful Advantage plans) removed by the President before 2010, which will increase the recipients’ costs by several thousand dollars a year, the cut them again in the same manner and use the money for new tax reductions for the rich and for budget savings . The arithmetic here is totally improbable. It may well be that the Democratic Convention, held early in September, cut some of the miracles offered by Romney, citing his job creation and business experience magic, and Ryan, with his math. Ex-President Clinton, by some GOP regulars now dubbed “the best Republican we’ve had recently,” with his background in paying off the budget debt (he ended his term with a positive budget balance of over $300 B, paying down $1.7Trillion of the debt), job creation, welfare reform and bank and finance decontrol experience (alas, he signed off the Glass-Steagall Act demise and approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act , freeing financial institution son their pillage of the subprime bond economy, resulting in the collapses of 2008), offered credibility in recounting President Obama’s early successes , before the election of 2000 cut the ground under him.. Only the mindless could ignore his explanations of how the Obama government , through TARP and bailout, saved the credit system and automobile industry, and saved the economy from collapsing. Her also identified 4 ½ million private sector jobs added by Obama in 2 2/2 years, mostly counterbalanced because of concurrent firings of civil servants by state governments. Obama’s own acceptance speech was essentially strongly positive, and offered hope for the 2nd term, by cooperation of both party supporters, acting in national interest. More of this anon.