Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
Chapter Five
Activities For Every Libertarian Political Group
The strategy that will take us to political victory is Local Organization. Local activism and local groups will be the centerpiece of our final success in enacting the Libertarian agenda. In putting local organizations at the forefront of the Local Organization strategy, I am not saying that we should only have local organizations. That would be silly. National, state, and special-interest groups all have well-defined, mission-critical roles within the Local Organization Strategy.
Some actions should be performed by every Libertarian party organization, national, state, and local. Other activities are especially appropriate at one of these levels. Within this Chapter, I'll consider things that we should all be doing.
Our ultimate objective is political victory. To get to victory, we must develop a large voter base and strong party organization, so that we can elect and re-elect huge numbers of Libertarians to political office. On the road toward these objectives, we have intermediate goals:
ACTIVITIES FOR EVERY LEVEL
This chapter presents activities that should be performed by Libertarian political groups at every level, from the national to the block committee. I'll talk about Developing the Voter Base, Incitement, Information Management, Outreach, The Importance of Keeping Promises, and Fund-Raising. I'll even mention some activities that every group should avoid. Each group performs these activities in different ways, but every activity discussed below is important to Libertarians working anywhere in our party structure.
DEVELOPING THE VOTER BASE
A fundamental objective of every Libertarian party organization is to develop a strong Libertarian voter base. Until a strong voter base is obtained, political victory will not happen. The path to a strong voter base is Local Organization.
Why do we need a voter base? Every political party faces three groups of voters. Your voter base is the people who will support your party no matter what. People in the middle can be persuaded to vote for you. Some people will never vote for your party. The first group is your voter base. The last group is the other guy's voter base. Money only changes the votes of the people in the middle.
These groups are soft at the edges. With two strong, well-supported candidates, the middle shrinks way down. Between Carter and Reagan, the Anderson and Clark campaigns only had a few percent of the electorate to work with. A really weak candidate, a Bob Dole or a Walter Mondale, still holds 30% or 40% of the electorate. Reform Party Governor Jesse Ventura faced two extremely weak opponents and took full advantage of Minnesota election laws to register new Reform Party voters. Ventura captured an extremely wide middle, brought many new voters with him, and in winning only captured a modest fraction of the vote.
Advertising takes the Party beyond its base vote to capture uncommitted voters. Only voters not committed to a party are moved by advertising. A great success of Libertarian advertising (he still lost) was Jon Coon's State Representative campaign, which spent $160,000 -- twice what the Democrat spent -- to capture 16% of the vote to the Democrat's 68%. That's a Libertarian capturing the complete middle, every vote accessible to advertising, against a strong (incumbent) opponent. The Republican also captured 16% of the vote, while spending not a penny, purely on the strength of having run in the district before. That 16% is the Republican voter base that will stay loyal to its party in a heavily Democratic district.
Note a basic principle: Dollars per vote formulas refer to the margin. Applying dollars per vote formulas to the entire voting population is mystic nonsense. Your Democratic opponent may have spent $10 a vote, but that was primarily to capture the last 5 or 10% of his voters. Your Democratic opponent got 40% or so of the total vote simply because he was a Democrat.
The Coon campaign demonstrates what every competent political strategist recognizes: Building a solid voter base is mandatory for political victory. Our voter base is the people who Vote Libertarian! simply because there is a Libertarian on the ballot. Without a large, solid Libertarian voter base, regular victories will be few and far between.
The Libertarian Party must gain a large voter base before it wins consistently. You can't buy a voter base. You can earn one. The Libertarian Party will earn a voter base when it:
In no more than 28 states representing about half the country, development of a voter base will be reflected by increases in how many voters have registered Libertarian. (22 states do not register by party; "Libertarian" is not available in all of the 28.) Registering Libertarian is a sign that someone has joined our voter base. Persuading people to register Libertarian -- as opposed to welcoming people who choose to register as Libertarians -- is basically meaningless except in states that link ballot status to the number of registered Libertarian voters. Persuading people to register Libertarian does not cause them to vote Libertarian. To paraphrase the tuna, we need people who vote Libertarian, not people who have Libertarian voter registration.
How do local, state, and national Libertarian organizations build the voter base the Libertarian party needs? How do we create the tools we need to assemble our voter base and campaign organizations? At the moment, the key process is
INCITEMENT
Incitement is the art of persuading people to do things that they had not planned on doing. Incitement is persuading people to organize, run for office, carry petitions, handle a campaign treasury, and stuff envelopes.
Why do we need to incite people? Except for the highest offices, people usually do not offer themselves as candidates. They run because they were asked to run, perhaps by being told they would do a better job than the incumbent. Other major parties view candidate recruitment as a major task. There are people who appeared to be prospective Democratic Senate candidates who have had the President of the United States himself telephone them, asking them to run. At the state level, people have run for State Representative because the Governor or Speaker of the State House called and asked them to run.
The Libertarian Party doesn't have a President to do calling. Yet. We do have national, state, and local Party groups. We have people with titles, people who have promised to spend their time helping the party. All these people should view candidate recruitment --- incitement to run --- as one of their most important duties.
Incitement is equally important to develop candidate staffs and to find more activists. A candidate without a staff is in a challenging position. Every Libertarian group could use more activist support. Persuading casual members to become more active in the party should be recognized as a mission for every activist.
How do we incite people? Incitement is based on personal contact. Incitement demands active local and regional groups, so Libertarian activists can meet potential Libertarian activists and incite them: Move beyond passive membership and Stand Up for Liberty!
How do we incite people to become active? You can preach all you want in the party newsletter about the merit of carrying signs, doing telephone banking, or stuffing envelopes. If you actually want someone to carry a sign, man a telephone, or stuff an envelope, there is no substitute for asking them personally. There is no substitute for putting them in a group in which everyone else announces that they will Stand Up For Liberty! and do some work.
Personal contact and group bonding are equally important at every level, not just the most local. On one hand, a national officer could telephone a state chair for the first time in the three years the state chair has been in office, and ask at the last possible moment if the state chair could possibly run a few more people for Congress. That's a very difficult request, from a person from whom the state chair has rarely heard and to whom the state chair owes no debts.
It is a very different situation if the national officer (i) had regularly talked with the state chair, (ii) had systematically persuaded state parties to unite in supporting a plan to run people for Congress, (iii) is suddenly in a predicament because a state party couldn't come through with promised candidates, and most important (iv) had previously given material support to the state party for the state's choice of projects, so that the state party is in the national officer's moral debt. In the first case, we have a phone call between near-strangers. In the second case, we have people who have worked together and done favors for each other, and now one of them needs one more favor. Extended personal contact and favor bonds open doors that would elsewise be closed.
What activities do we incite? A fundamental task of every group is to help activists organize, form local groups, and do better the things they are already doing. The National Party helps state organizations. State organizations help local groups. Every group helps people run for office.
What can go wrong with incitement? Note I said "help", not "persuade". Preaching is cheap. Providing concrete support is challenging. You can preach at people until they print up stationary and call themselves a Town Committee. You can preach at people who have never been active, never held petitions, and never run for office, until finally they get active, take out petitions, and try to run for office.
However, if you don't tell your newly-found candidates and staffers what they need to do, supply them with contacts to local activists, and give them meaningful support, you've prepared them to fail. You've prepared them to throw up their hands in disgust and quit. And then, when someone competent finally comes along with a serious plan to get people to run and a serious plan to give them the support they need along the way, the competent person has a little problem. The guy who persuaded people to run and then abandoned them has burned out the pool of potential candidates.
Preaching at people to get active and then abandoning them, leaving them to shift for themselves, is unethical and unwise. On the other hand, helping people to become active is a good thing. I mentioned earlier the Operation Everywhere document, which presents the Membership Recruitment strategy. One of the document's very strong positive features is its appendices, which give detailed instructions for doing things. You might ask if some of those things ought to be high-priority tasks, but stylistically the document shows how to describe an task in incredible detail so that a politically-naive would-be activist can perform it.
Helping new candidates and staffers by giving expert advice is not simple. Part of expert knowledge is expertise in teaching. It is not enough to know how someone else can get on the ballot. You need to be able to tell to the candidate what the candidate needs to do, in words the candidate understands and remembers, so that the prospective candidate and her staff will do the right things and get her on the ballot.
Why do we need to incite voters? Choosing a political party is like getting married. Most people do it once or twice in their entire life. The most reliable predictor of a person's political allegiance is the allegiance of the parents. You get very few meaningful chances, perhaps none at all in their whole life, to persuade anyone to change parties and Make Liberty Happen! and Vote Libertarian! Every Party group at every level has the same obligation to keep the Party's name in front of the public. We need to make sure: When someone realizes the duopoly parties are not for her, she will find the Libertarian Party and join us in Standing Up for Liberty!
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Information is the lamp the leads us through the political darkness. Information is the construction material for sound strategy, good tactics, and solid victories. Information is the one good that becomes more valuable when it is shared. Chapter 14 considers information management: how to collect information, what to do with information, and how to get that information to everyone who might use it. Information management is a task for every Libertarian group.
Internal information management unites groups and their people. Openness and transparency permit a group to develop sound ideas and build membership confidence in how operations are conducted. There is nothing wrong with friends polishing and developing an idea before running it up the flagpole. Many people rely on first impressions, so improving a proposal privately until it makes a good first impression is just common sense. However, groups that never talk to themselves or their neighbors, that make decisions in secret for the sake of secrecy, and that try to hide every leadership dispute behind a mask of pretended unanimity are basically sick. Sick groups will never build a healthy Libertarian Party, so Libertarians should avoid supporting them. There are plenty of other parts of the Libertarian movement that will welcome your time and energy.
OUTREACH
Outreach, going to people who are not committed Libertarians and moving them in a Libertarian direction, is the core activity for every Libertarian group. We're here to persuade other people to Vote Libertarian! time after time, not to reassure ourselves that it's OK for us to vote for ourselves. Running candidates for office is the most fundamental effective approach to outreach, but campaigning is linked to the election cycle: No election, no campaign.
Campaigns are discussed in Chapter 7. Political campaigns let us advertise libertarian positions to the body politic when they are likely to be listening. Campaigns let us do external outreach, going to people who are not Libertarian and convincing them that we are the political party they would prefer to support. Campaigns also let us do internal outreach. Through internal outreach, we go to Libertarians who vote but are not active in the party and persuade them to become activists.
Identifying and cultivating media contacts is something every Libertarian group should do. In practical terms, each group should focus on reporters and columnists whose work corresponds to the group's geographic range, including the closest major media markets.
Advertising is a fundamental process for outreach. Activist events, e.g., Libertarian speakers at supper clubs, are fine for reach people who have already become aware of the Libertarian movement. To reach people who have no inkling that they could choose to support the Libertarian movement, you need a method that puts our message onto media that they watch. This is advertising: Cable TV, radio, theater slides, and newspapers and magazines all put Libertarian ideas in front of people who would otherwise never hear about us. It is especially important to reach people who are not already committed to one of the duopoly parties. Libertarian groups and campaigns may have different budgets and cover different geographic areas, but all share a common responsibility to advertise Libertarian ideas to the general public.
The Internet and other wired media: A large fraction of the populace does not use electronic mail or the World Wide Web. For contacting people and asking their support, EMail is no substitute for personal contact and telephone calls. Enough people -- especially young people who have not yet chosen a political party -- use the Web that a solid web presence is still critical to any serious political group. To reach activists who use EMail, for speed and price nothing competes with a private electronic mail list.
It is appropriate, and easier every day, for local, state, national, and special-interest groups to field their own web pages and EMail lists. Especially at the local level, one must always remember *Many People Do Not Use Electronic Mail*. Many populist groups make effective use of telephone and fax trees. Almost everyone has a telephone, and lots of people can receive a fax. Phone trees are especially effective at the local level, where toll charges are avoided.
KEEPING PROMISES
Every Libertarian organization has certain nuts and bolts operations it absolutely must run correctly.
FUND-RAISING
Money is the lifeblood of politics. Main stream candidates spend half their time raising money. Fundraising is a necessity for every Libertarian group and every Libertarian campaign. Nonetheless, in the list of activities for all Libertarian organizations, I place fundraising last. Fundraising is important for most everything else we do, but fundraising is only a means, not an end in itself. Furthermore, because the Libertarian party differs from other major parties in opposing corporate and other welfare, we will never get the hundreds of millions in special interest moneys given to the duopoly by every group that wants to loot the Federal treasury. We have many places where we can beat the duopoly, but head to head fundraising is not one of them.
Fundraising is only good if the money is spent effectively. A group that makes spectacular promises and ties up a large part of the money available for Libertarian projects in a year might score a breakthrough. That group for sure makes it harder for all other Libertarians to fund the incremental gains needed to reach a broad-front victory.
A single Libertarian group that perpetually ties up a large part of the movement's available donations had for sure better be spending that money to strengthen the Libertarian movement as a whole. A group that locks down the bulk of Libertarian political spending had better not be spending that money primarily to pay staffers and raid the membership and donor lists of other parts of the Libertarian movement, as opposed to using it to advance the Party toward victory. The Libertarian movement is not a public relief project for political consultants. Shuffling members between Libertarian groups leaves the movement no stronger than it was before the members were shuffled. The Libertarian movement cannot afford a parasite that sucks the movement's life blood and leaves the movement weaker rather than stronger when it finishes feeding. Libertarians should insist that Libertarian money is well spent, and close their checkbooks when it is not.
WHAT TO AVOID
A new political party is much like a start-up firm. Someone and a couple of aprtners have found a product, solved their financial issues, and are going to go into business. All too often, start up firms go under because they make standard mistakes, mistakes that a knowing entrepreneur would instantly avoid. The mistakes are made by people who've worked in a company, perhaps several companies, but never really understood how their companies worked.
Working on limited capital, unsuccessful firms rent an office, hire a secretary to answer the phone, get some furniture, and hire a senior manager or executive officer to run the office. The question thhat is never asked is "what is the value added from this decision? Why can't we work in the garage, answer our own phone, and get the furniture from sale or the Salvation Army?" All too soon, the startup is out of cash and out of business.
The political equivalent is very similar. There is a temptation to rent an office, furnish it, and give the party its own paid Executive Director, without asking what value is added. That's a cash sink, not necessarily a good decision.
The rational alternative as the party grows is to recognize that there are certain sorts of clerical work that could be done by staff or contractor instead of volunteers. Instead of collating and folding the newsletter, applying stamps and mailing labels, and sending the new issue on its way, the newsletter printer masters, a computer disk, and money go to a professional mailing house. The editor edits. The printer professionally sends the issues. Eventually, you need clerical support to handle renewals, donations, and mailing of information packets. You start hiring staff who will have value added -- these are clerical staffers. The party chair, unpaid, speaks with each of them once a week or so, standard business practice. If you want people to be reliable and show initiative, you pay accordingly. Eventually the staff grows to the point that the party chair cannot keep track of them all. Now you need an office manager, not to be the party brain trust, but to keep the most routine of the multi-person tasks going. In the end, you have so many office managers that the party chair can't handle all of them. Now, finally, with an operation of 40 or 80 people and an operation in the five or ten million a year range, you actually do need an executive director and a professional financial officer, and have the resources to hire them.
The difference between hiring because it sounds prestigious and hiring because the employees add value should be instantly apparent.
SUMMARY
This Chapter has discussed activities that are equally important for any Libertarian group, whether national, state, or local. I've talked about Developing the Voter Base, Incitement, Information Management, Outreach, The Importance of Keeping Promises, and Fund-Raising. I also discussed some potential errors. The next chapter discusses tasks that are specifically appropriate at a single political level, and considers ethically-libertarian linkages between such groups.