Building Trust Is About Building Understanding.

During the primary and caucus cycle, I sat on several phone calls with campaigns. These included localized campaigns, federal campaigns, and presidential campaigns. In a phone call with one of the presidential campaigns, a staffer said this: “The advantage is we know the rules and we can make sure they work for us.” No, that wasn’t the Hillary campaign. But the point wasn’t wrong. The Sanders campaign worked hard to try and understand the rules and get people out to turn out.

The statement was a great one about what campaigns knew. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that people like me, the kind of people who would get involved in those phone calls? We didn’t do much to explain the rules to people who would participate months or years ahead of time. In fact, too many people like me, and including me, sat on the sidelines with knowledge that should have been distributed a year in advance. It just never dawned on us to make sure people understood. We didn’t do even remotely enough to provide people the resources to know what the heck is going on in their own party. By the time I published a guide on the way caucus strategy works, we were days away from caucus season. I knew months in advance people didn’t understand caucus. But it just wasn’t a priority to explain it. Whoops.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard from several of the potential candidates to the DNC Chair position. They all talk about growing the party, a lot of platitudes that are great, and many I strongly agree with. In a conversation with staff for a candidate, I was told “We’re going to start from the bottom and build up. We need to triple the number of precinct persons we have in America.” I thought: that’s great. But you know what is missing? We tell people to run for precinct person and they have absolutely no idea what being a precinct person even means, what their job is, if they have a job, what their responsibilities are, or what they are supposed to do. They don’t know the difference between a good precinct person and a bad one.

We tell people we need more candidates to run for office. We provide them no insight on what they should do as a candidate or the expectations we have for them. The Sanders campaign promoted 7,000 new down ballot candidates! I talked to several of them, and found that many filed having absolutely no idea what they had gotten themselves into when they decided to run. The candidates quickly discovered party leaders were overwhelmed or seemingly disinterested in helping them figure it out. Many candidates didn’t know what to ask of their party leadership, and some party leaders didn’t even know what to tell them. We tossed everyone into the deep end.

Throughout the caucus and primary seasons, we had bitter disputes over whether or not systems were rigged, if there was unfair pressure put on, why did primaries run the way they did, and so on. The fact is, party leaders had spent the last few years promoting campaigns and winning that we forgot the basics: we did absolutely nothing to fill in the void of civics education to help give voters and advocates an understanding of how the system worked. If more people understood in advance, we could have helped prevent people from thinking “this is all rigged” instead we would have had advocates who could have helped people navigate the system and made it work for them and their candidates.

Now here’s the part where I mea culpa: in the early 2000s, I dropped away from politics. Friends who still worked in the system knew me, and when they needed me they would send me content to edit, speeches to review or mail to review. I could do it from home while I worried about my first son, who was born with a disability. I thought: it’s OK, we’ll figure this out. In 2004, a lot of the knowledge I knew from the 90s on the Republican side was now completely gone from the Republican and Democratic sides. Republicans had become very machine oriented, major interest fueled. Democratic parties had eliminated basic knowledge from party members, and all the information was held by a few party insiders who kept track of rules and were recognized as the “funds of knowledge”. These individuals became the power brokers you had to visit if you wanted to get anywhere inside the party.

I received an email from someone at DK in 2004 who remembered me from work I had done years earlier and asked me to get back involved. So, I did.. somewhat. But I came to DailyKos and I just read or posted about the rah-rah and issues of the day. For years. Until 2008, when realization hit me. OFA went through America and absolutely no one knew the rules. Past experience told me that people who know the rules can pretty much take over the system because other people just don’t know the real rules of how to make things work. Period.

In 2013, with my son headed into High School, I decided: OK, it is time to put the knowledge of the rules in play. It took me less than 4 years to rise from a nobody outsider in the party to the person representing Kansas on the DNC committee. It is because I worked harder, sure, but also because I knew the old rules and other people didn’t.

Hurray for me, right? Sure. Except one giant problem: nowhere along the way did I think: I need to teach other people the rules. I knew the system was a mess and people didn’t understand the rules of what it took to be successful, but I didn't take enough time to teach others how it worked. I didn’t think I had time to do it, and I was too focused on either winning or other things, but I never circled back to correct the problems I found.

I’m not alone, however. The problem is, party leadership around the country has done a miserable job of providing tools to standard Democratic party members. I’m not talking about votebuilder or consultants, I’m talking about a crash course for people who just want to be a good volunteer or precinct person. A single handbook that says “here is how you can help”.

Many who want to help have no idea what to do, how to do it well, or what they could do to be successful inside the party. No one wants to join an organization where they think they are being held back, can never rise up, or will always fail and be blamed. But we aren’t giving anyone the tools they need to feel like they succeeded.

People like me? We screwed you. We all knew it was going on, and it just seemed too hard to try and teach civics to people who wouldn’t run for office and wouldn’t serve in a role greater than a county vice chair or a precinct person. We told ourselves the focus had to be winning elections, so we put the blinders on to the problems and we thought about only winning. When we trained canvass or we talked to people about what we needed, it was only about immediate need with no long term thought. We didn’t focus at all on how to make you, an average Democratic voter and volunteer, feel appreciated. We should have taken every effort to make you feel as though you understood what we wanted from you and make sure you knew we appreciated you for your service and we wanted you to stay.

And for that, I’m sorry. No, I wasn’t a super delegate at the convention. Yes, I worked on the Sanders campaign and repped him at the convention. Yes, I’ve worked campaigns and all of that. I’ve tried to do these things, but I had a platform here on DailyKos and elsewhere, and I didn’t grab a bullhorn and yell a warning when I could clearly see the train coming down the tracks. It was important that people like me, and even other leaders here on Daily Kos started shouting: “Stop, hold up, we have to do this.”

In 2013, I proposed a panel for Netroots Nation centered around this idea (it was not accepted) and I couldn’t find a way to push it. I should have pushed for this anywhere else. We started something along this lines here at Daily Kos called “Crowdsourcing the 50 State Strategy”, but I couldn’t get attention enough to it. I should have kept at it.

The Commitment To Be Better Must Start Today.

Knowing what I know I can tell you we have to get better at making people aware of the rules. Sitting in the back of a meeting at a central district forum, a local progressive stood up and yelled “Point of Order!” They had read Robert’s Rules of Order and thought this was the way to be heard. They didn’t understand that they didn’t have any standing, so the chair could just ignore them and keep moving on. In some meetings, I watched people pull similar parliamentary stops and confuse chairs and vice chairs who also didn’t know the rules.

This cannot go on. It is obvious that there are many members in our community who want to participate, they just don't know how. On Saturdays, I’ve been writing “Nuts & Bolts: A Guide to Democratic Campaigns” which was aimed at giving people who couldn’t afford PCCC, Wellstone camp, travel or research the basics of what a small campaign is really like. So, today, I’m putting myself on an “Improvement Plan” to take from older Human Resource programs, and on this plan are a few points:

For Candidates who want, I have a bundled version of the last year of Nuts & Bolts, provided in PDF, I will offer freely to anyone as to how to run a small ticket race. Email me. You need a conference call with a state house candidate in a long shot race in any state in America? I will find you someone who will talk to you for free to help them understand what they are getting into.

For counties who want, working with other groups including counties in Colorado, California, North Carolina, and elsewhere, we are going to start sharing information openly about our successes, failures and what we learn. Even if you aren’t a commenter on Daily Kos, if you are a Democratic county chair or vice chair anywhere in the country and you want help, we will try to connect you with people who can help you. And if you have issues that need an advocate in the national committee, I want to hear about it. I don’t give a darn if they get no “recs”, I do care that when someone types a strategy into google later they can find out what other counties know.

For people who are thinking about becoming precinct leaders or county e-board officers or if you just want to talk to someone about how you can help, here is my email: tmservo433@gmail.com. Let me know where you are at, and I will try to help you get the resources you need.

If you are a leader in your Democratic party locally, I urge you in the strongest way to take a session, at least once a year, to offer new members a way to learn and engage the rules. It isn’t about campaigning. Don’t talk about candidates. Talk about how you can help a democratic party member who will never run for office be successful and valued within the party. Build relationships, friendships and talk to them about what we expect from them and what we don’t. We have to start taking the information we have about how our party works and give it to the people who need it. One day, they may be the people we need to run it. No more black boxes of information or “Super Democrats” who are the repositories of truth.

to take a session, at least once a year, to offer new members a way to learn and engage the rules. It isn’t about campaigning. Don’t talk about candidates. Talk about how you can help a democratic party member who will never run for office be successful and valued within the party. Build relationships, friendships and talk to them about what we expect from them and what we don’t. We have to start taking the information we have about how our party works and give it to the people who need it. One day, they may be the people we need to run it. No more black boxes of information or “Super Democrats” who are the repositories of truth. Beginning this Saturday, Nuts & Bolts will refocus in an off year on what we need from you, and how you can start making your community better. Not four years from now. Not two years from now. But how you can start making things better tomorrow.

Several members here understand that this is the role we have now. We have to do everything we can to not just resist the administration but to give everyone the tools to know how. That’s our job. From Randallt and DocDawg in North Carolina to Peregrine Kate in Michigan and even our friends in California, it is what we have to do if we want to get better.

Priorities Need To Change.

I often read “party elites” and see quotes about it. Hell, now that I’m listed on the DNC site as a member, I get email about it now and again. I’ve had comments made into diaries here attacking me for being a member of the DNC. You know what, maybe at times it is well deserved.

I signed up for this knowing that kind of thing was possible. When I became a DNC member, there was no “guidebook” “rulebook” or thought on what I should or shouldn’t do. There wasn’t an instruction set on “here is what makes a good DNC member and a poor one”. Again, thrown into the deep end. For me, the challenge was to be remembered as a “good” one. But what makes a good DNC member to me? It means that I have to keep in mind that I am not the “elite” of the party, I am only a single member who has a responsibility to all others to work on their behalf as hard as I can to help them succeed.

In other words, it isn’t my job to be “elite”, it is my job to be the best servant I can be. Everyone in Kansas needs to remember this: I ran for this not to be a muckety muck, I ran for this because I want you to have a voice. I ran for it because I thought you deserved an effort that you could always think worked on your behalf. And if I'm failing in that role, you have every right to call me, email me, yell at me and make your case. We won’t always agree, but my job is to listen. When I fail, I deserve to be told so. When I succeed, it is only because I’m following what you want. If you succeed, then I’ve done my job.

We have to move beyond the idea that having standing within the party means that you are a better Democratic party member than someone else. It doesn’t. In the end, we both have one vote in an election. People who serve chose to do it; it is our responsibility to try and do it well. Far too many Democratic members view getting party offices as important to them because, frankly, it will appear in their obituary. Party leadership roles have become honoraries that are given to symbolize dedication to a party or funds raised. When someone passes, they can be remembered as “Joe Schmoe, executive, father, Big wig democrat”. We have to move beyond this. You run for position in the party because you want to help people. The only thing I give a damn about being on my obituary is this: “Chris Reeves, IT person, father of two, generally good person”. Being remembered as a party person is just not important; being remembered as someone who was a decent guy is very important to me.

As I read through the materials and comments coming from those running for national chair, I’m reminded of exactly how much we have actually lost as a party in regards to stewardship. It is of course important that we discuss firewall and technology software and how we improve our databases and how we interact with state chairs. These are all very important things. But I’m waiting with baited breath for someone to say: “my job is to serve YOU.”

Final Thoughts.

While Democratic party members are fascinated about who becomes national chair, and the race of candidates, I believe we must focus a lot closer to our hearts.

How do we build a party of the future? By making sure the future knows how to take the baton and run with it.

How do we build a party of the future? By making sure people know that people like me give a damn and take things seriously.

How do we build a party of the future? By realizing the future is tomorrow and not four years from now. That the future may be 50 minutes from now for a person who needs it, it could be a nightmare in a month or two. It might be an election on December 10 in Louisiana or a precinct training meeting in December. It could be a reorganization meeting.

This series:

Part 1: Rural Outreach

Part 2: Ending Business As Usual