Elsewhere

I’ve been canvassing for Grassroots, Inc. for about 3 weeks now. I’m based out of the Philadelphia Door office, and honestly now, I’ve had nothing but fun. My only complaint is that the intentionally cozy atmosphere of the office doesn’t quite click when someone not suited for canvassing gets fired in the midst of a fairly ‘corporate friendly’ environment.

Philadelphia is 1 of the largest offices, even being in a swing state. I’ve been with our directors in off-hours, and when questioned by a new recruit one of ours was honest with how ‘in the black’ we are with money. Truly, regardless of how effective (and inspiring) our door-to-door talks with people of all stripes are, we still do operate debt-free. And we don’t lie about that – in fact, it’s 1 of our coded responses – “send a message to the DNC to continue to dedicate resources to our grassroots effort in putting a face to the Democratic Party, since we do not (yet!) have a platform to speak it in Congress.”

Dana Fisher, on cursory examination of your hyperlinks, to be on the easy street of this idea – just like a small number of supportive Democrats who don’t contribute on account of disliking the 50-state strategy for whatever reason, she seems to just be grandstanding for attention. My knowledge of statistics is terribly naive, with my only safeguard being looking for the words “double-blind” somewhere, I can’t be too authoritative, but let me just say that the # of doors slammed in my face is close to nil compared to the # of contributors I’ve managed to convince to support the big new wave of progressivism, regardless of the pitch that brought them in. I confess I admit to suspecting nothing less than a Marshall Wittman in Fisher – a DLC DINO, if the former wasn’t in-joke enough.

Though, when all’s said and done, us canvassers could sure use some health insurance. We do this shit rain or shine, and the idea of unionizing is brilliant – otherwise it’s the pot calling the kettle black, etc. The very idea of this has launched itself immediately into my #2 pet peeve spot, after armchair Democrats with plenty of bumper stickers who don’t help us out.

I think that Henry meant Open Democracy, not Democracy Now. Democracy Now is a radical radio show hosted by Amy Goodman. Open Democracy is a website with funding from Swedish banks, etc. that has politics much more like Crooked Lumber.

Funding from Swedish banks?

The Glenn piece is exceedingly interesting.

On the one hand, Fisher is surely right that genuine organizing that engages people at a level beyond check-writing is fundamentally different from, and preferable to, canvassing. But is it really one or the other? How much of the failure to build a lasting Democratic infrastructure after 2004 (say) can you really blame on the PIRGs? Not much, I would think.

This passage seems right to me:

the Republicans’ local volunteer networks are valuable, Ms. Fisher adds, in ways that go beyond simply winning elections. She concedes that the Republicans’ model “is not the Valhalla of civic engagement,” but says it is closer to the type of healthy and diverse civic activity that Mr. Boyte celebrates in his current research.

But it is at this point, according to some critics, that Ms. Fisher and Mr. Boyte’s arguments become vaguely circular. Are they condemning professional canvass networks simply because they do not embody the idiosyncratic style of high-minded communitarian politics that they admire? “I think the primary purpose of interest groups is not to promote civic virtue,” says Jeffrey M. Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University who has studied political mobilization. “Their purpose is to advance the interests of their members. It’s naïve to expect them to adopt some new frame.”

Also, it’s not clear how much Fisher is criticizing canvassing per se, and how much she’s criticizing the contracting of canvasing to professional groups like the Fund. ACORN, for example, has canvasses all over the place, but they aren’t contracted out, and they canvassers tend to be drawn from a demographic much closer to the folks they represent. They also knock on a lot of doors in lower-income black neighborhoods that other canvasses avoid.

Another question is, are we talking about advocacy groups or political campaigns? The Chronicle piece implies both, but her argument seems a lot stronger as applied to the former. In the electoral world, the alternative to a paid cavnass is a lot more likely to be direct mail and TV ads than the kind of organizing she’d like to see.

Democrats don’t have effective volunteer organizations because they don’t have natural meeting places (such as churches) to congregate in. Organizing mass protests is relatively straightforward–you put up some fliers, people tell their friends. Organizing volunteer grass-roots canvassing and activism is more difficult.

The democrats need to be more creative in organizing their activism. The internet is useful for some forms of activism, but not all.

The democratic party doesn’t have churches, so it need to find a way to create gathering of democrats, and it need a way to keep track of large numbers of “pockets” of 6-10 democrats.
If the democrats want to challenge the republicans in grass-roots campaigning, they are going to revise their current approach to grassroots organizing.

I agree that ACORN, IAF, PICO and Gamaliel all do good work. Except for ACORN, tho, they don’t use paid canvasses, do they? — and IAF and Gamaliel, at least, quie consciously follow a very different model from the PIRGs and so on, focused on reaching people through leaders of churches and other existing organizations. So their effectiveness would seem to support fisher, no?

On the other hand, ACORN manages to combine paid canvasses with real base-building, so that cuts the other way. Here in New York, the Working Families Party has a paid canvass, but they also have a very close relationship to the unions — the Left’s traditional equivalent to churches. So again, that suggests that there’s no contradiction between canvasses and building more lasting infrastructure.

Peter Levin writes

We need organizations that are genuinely accountable to their members, that promote deliberations about what should be done, that develop people’s political skills, and that create effective local political networks. Fisher argues that paid canvassing substitutes for such an infrastructure on the left, thereby weakening the movement.

I agree withe first sentence, and the second sentence accurately summarizes Fisher’s argument as I understand it. But that’s a pretty weak reed to hang a word like “strangling” on, no? Everything takes resources, so any strategy is a “substitute” or “distraction” from some hypothetical superior strategy. Is there some good reason to single out paid canvassers as the problem?