OTTAWA—Two U.S. Democrats, behind-the-scenes strategists in President Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign, will be lending some advice to federal Liberals at their convention this month.

Rich Mintz, a vice-president of Blue State Digital, and Tom McMahon, a chief architect of the Democrats’ so-called “50-state strategy” leading up to their 2008 victory, will be panelists on Jan. 14, when Liberals meet for their big biennial gathering in Ottawa.

The session is titled “Lessons Learned” from the 2004 and 2008 Democratic campaigns. Both U.S. party operatives have extensive expertise in campaign skills that Liberals say they desperately need to climb back from last year’s crushing election defeat.

Scotty Greenwood of the Canadian American Business Council, who knows Democratic politics well in the U.S., says these political players can lend Liberals the nuts-and-bolts kind of talk that promises to dominate the convention this month.

“If the Grits are looking for work-session insights, as opposed to flashy keynote speakers, I think they made a good choice,” Greenwood said.

Obama and his campaign were widely credited for pioneering use of online technology to win the presidency in 2008, and Mintz’s firm, Blue State Digital, has boasted that it supplied the tools for that strategy.

At a conference last year in Edinburgh, Mintz talked about what Obama achieved in online fundraising in 2008.

“Let’s talk about what was actually achieved through that campaign. About $500,000,000 was raised online. All in donations smaller than about $2,500, which is the limit according to election law,” Mintz said at the Museum Next conference.

“Most people gave in relatively small amounts. There were about two million people who gave money through the online campaign and most people gave more than once. And significantly, I think, the average donor was older than you might think.”

Here in Canada, it’s been the Conservative party that’s seen to hold the real expertise in this campaign realm — especially in scooping up small donations — while federal Liberals have been playing a largely losing game of catch-up.

The Liberals will be at an even greater financial disadvantage when the Conservatives, as promised, phase out the public subsidies to political parties — a move that is estimated to cost the Liberals roughly $16 million over the next four years. (The money they would have had from the public purse by the next election, if subsidies had stayed in place.)

Elections Canada distributed allowances in the soon-to-be-extinct payments this week, which are based on how many votes each party receives in the previous election. Conservatives received $2.9 million this week; New Democrats got $2.2 million and the Liberals, after placing third for the first time in their history, received $1.4 million. The Bloc Québécois received $454,348 and the Green Party got $291,590.

The Liberals party’s national executive has proposed the setup of a $2.5 million, permanent “national call centre,” which Liberal president Alf Apps has said is crucial to “professionalize” fundraising and compete on the same terrain as the Conservatives.

McMahon, meanwhile, was executive vice-president of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, while that party was in a rebuilding project culminating in a return to power in 2008.

The 50-state strategy was a bid to revitalize the party even in areas where it traditionally had been weak. Here in Canada, Liberals have been criticized in recent years for devoting too much energy to protecting their traditional turf in Central Canada and the Atlantic region.

Greenwood, who was also a former chief of staff in the U.S. embassy in Ottawa when Gordon Giffin was ambassador, has worked with McMahon in Democratic politics south of the border.

She calls him a “rock star . . . one of the most talented political operatives in our country” and says he’s known for an understated manner and sense of humour, “not to mention his insights into how to rebuild a national party apparatus.”

McMahon was also deputy campaign manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign bid in the Democratic Party — which was also seen to be one of the early, grand successes in modern fundraising.

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Dean himself gave the keynote address to the Liberals’ 2006 leadership convention, when he said that U.S. Democrats and Canadian Liberals had a lot in common — and that they had to stick up for shared principles in the face of threats from conservative adversaries.

“When my party was wandering in the wilderness, there were those who said we should change direction, that we should become more like the Republican Party whose policies and priorities we disagreed with,” Dean told the Liberals in 2006.

“When you say that, in essence, you are arguing that our basic and guiding principles can be altered or modified. More than that, you’re conceding that those principles may be wrong. They are not.”

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