Last weekend I got together with a group of progressive campaigners to celebrate Obama’s victory. A story emerged from the weekend that has been ricocheting around in my mind.

On Saturday night, after a great meal and perhaps a little too much wine, we started making toasts. One of those toasts turned into a semi-silly, semi-sober, semi-sonorous singing of This Land Is Your Land. The song came straight from our hearts. For a group of Gen-Xers steeped in irony and not given to public displays of patriotism, it was an unusual moment.

Right after the singing stopped, one of the singers felt an unexpected swell of emotion. The feeling was so strong, he told us later, that even though it was nearly midnight, he felt compelled to call his father. He got his Dad on the phone, and immediately thanked him. See, his Dad (and Mom) had immigrated to the U.S. from Columbia when he was three years old. They fled harsh violence, and sought opportunity. In many ways, a classic America story, reflected in the histories of so many millions of us.

For much of his life, our friend had taken his adopted country for granted. In fact, as a committed progressive, he had long felt critical of America’s shortcomings, especially under the Bush administration. But at the moment of singing This Land is Your Land, something broke through, a swell of pride and thankfulness. He couldn’t hold back from thanking his dad, for allowing him to grow up in a country where the son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother could become president.

This story stays with me, because I feel it too — pride, mixed with thanksgiving. I feel proud of my role leading Vote Today Ohio, and helping to elect our first African American president. I feel proud of America, for choosing hope over hate. And I finally feel the words that I sung on Saturday, that I’ve sung hundreds of times before — this land is my land.

Yes, this is a real photo, caught by a Reuters photographer. It’s just too funny NOT to post.

In my never-ending quest to make our government more progressive, I’ve gotten myself mixed up in an exciting new campaign. Actually, I’m running it.

It’s called Vote Today Ohio, and its an effort to turn out 10,000 new voters in Ohio during what we call the “Golden Week.”

What’s Golden Week? Two years ago, Ohio changed its voting laws to create a 7-day span — Sept 30 to Oct 6 — where Ohio residents can walk into an early voting center, register to vote, and vote on the spot. This has never been possible before.

Why does it matter? Because it takes what is normally a two-step process (register, wait a month, THEN vote) and turns it into a one-step process (register AND vote at the same time). For progressive organizers, that creates a much more efficient way to bring new voters into the process AND lock in their votes — before those votes can be manipulated, stolen or lost.

If you really want to make a difference this political season:

1. Donate via our Act Blue page. See if you can get your friends and family to join together a sponsor a van for the week ($750).

2. Spread the word. Tell friends, especially in Ohio, to check out our Facebook page.

3. Come to Ohio! Ideally, we need folks to arrive in Columbus on Sunday night, Sept 28 and stay until Oct 6. If you can do any part of that, fill out the Online Sign-Up Sheet and we’ll get in touch.

(Note: This is going to be a super-intense campaign, without much time to blog, much less eat or sleep. Forgive me if I go radio silent for a while.)

Here’s a fun way to represent a political scandal. Blogger Jed Lewison of the Jed Report has created a video of a Google Earth Tour of John McCain’s many homes. How many? Well, McCain doesn’t know.

When asked by Politico reporters how many homes he owns, McCain answered, “I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” he said. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

That’s right. John and Cindy McCain are so rich, they don’t even know what they own. This is the same guy who recently said that the “fundamentals of our economy are fine.” When you’ve got at least seven homes (maybe more!) worth over $14 million, well, yeah, the economy probably is doing okay for you.

Turn up your speakers and enjoy. (Or watch this Obama ad that capitalizes on the fury.)

On Friday I slid 300 letters under 300 doors in my Brooklyn Heights building. They were invitations for anyone in the neighborhood to come to a party I’m throwing on August 20 for a new friend, Daniel Squadron.

Daniel is a progressive candidate running for State Senate in my district. I met him a few weeks ago and was thoroughly impressed. He’s young, energetic, and blessed with new ideas that he wants to take to Albany. He has serious endorsements, a serious warchest, and serious supporters behind him (including Senator Chuck Schumer). My friends at the Working Families Party have chosen Daniel as one of their top races this year, because he could be a poster child for the WFP’s strategy of replacing “bad” Democrats (centrist, corporate, do-nothings) with “good” Democrats (progressive, responsive, high integrity).

If you live in Daniel’s district, you are welcome to come meet him. This party is NOT a fundraiser. It’s simply a chance to meet the guy who easily could become your next State Senator.

What: Drinks and snacks with Daniel Squadron

Where: Tate & Shawna’s place, probably in our courtyard – 110 Livingston St, Brooklyn

When: Wed, August 20, 8pm

Why: Mostly this is an excuse to get our friends together and have fun. But also New York’s Sept 9 primary is coming up, and Daniel Squadron wants your vote. So come talk with him about the issues facing Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.

RSVP by emailing me at tate – at – tatehausman d.o.t. com.

Twenty days until the election. They call this the homestretch, but since I’ve been sprinting since May, its hard to imagine running any harder.

After our overwhelming victory in the primary, national attention on our race has ratcheted up steadily. It helped that we blew away our primary opponents. It also helps that FoleyGate has landed on the incumbent’s doorstep like a stinking pile of poop. Turns out she was the chair of the Congressional Page Board when Foley’s harassment was first reported. So either she knew about it and did nothing, or she grossly neglected her duties — pick your poison, either way spells S-C-A-N-D-A-L.

(Not that Democrats haven’t had their own page scandals. Democrat Barney Frank, long the only openly gay Congressman, had a relationship with a page in the 80s, prompting this joke from Darcy, our field organizer / ex-stand-up comedienne:

“What did Mark Foley say to Barney Frank?”
“I dunno, what?”
“We may be on different sides of the aisle, but at least we’re on the same page.”

But I digress…)

More than sex scandals, our chances to beat the Republican incumbent seem bright because our primary turnout was double that of the last equivalent primary. That bodes extremely well for November. Democrats in our district are energized and ready to make change. The momentum coming off election day was palpable.

Nobody likes a campaign consultant to toot his own horn, but I feel justified taking at least partial credit for this resounding success. Our tremendous victory could not have happened without our volunteers. Almost 200 of them hit the ground and the phones on primary day, pulling out our voters and getting them to the polls. And our volunteer program was greatly facilitated by web-based systems that I set up.

The central system I’ve written about before [link to last diary] was the Home Team, an experiment in “distributed volunteerism” that enlisted geographically spread out supporters to make voter-to-voter calls. I spent hours upon hours getting it up and running. I wish I could brag that this technology was the key to our victory. It wasn’t. Only about 1/10 of our Primary Day calls were made by Home Teamers.

So what value did it have? Essentially, the Home Team was an excellent gateway drug. It got some really good people hooked on calling, and invested in the campaign. Almost 80% of people trained on the Home Team worked for us on Primary Day. Remember Iris and Dot? Neither of them made Home Team calls on Primary Day. Instead, they both came in to the district and joined one of our 12 centralized phone banks. Iris started dialing at 10:00 am and didn’t stop until the polls closed at 9:00 pm. That’s one dedicated activist — and her entry to the campaign was the web.

Dot & Iris live fairly close to the district, but we had activists come from as far away as Washington, DC. One of my most dedicated Home Teamers, Mike Furlong, came all the way in from Boston for the whole primary weekend. He recruited his brothers Dan and Bob, and the three of them spent all weekend plastering the district with lawn signs. That’s online-turned-offline activism at its best. Ironically, Mike’s long-distance enthusiasm for the campaign has infected his local brother, Dan, who has become a complete campaigning machine. In Mike’s words, “If we can get Dan out of the barn, we’ll never get him back in.” Hundreds of volunteer hours later, Dan has proven Mike right.

The Home Team was also an effective training mechanism. Making voter-to-voter calls isn’t easy for everyone. The wrong numbers, hang-ups and the occasional “you-Democrats-are-all-America-hating-commie-fuckers-get-a-job” response can take their toll on sensitive callers. Even tough cookies need time getting used to the scripts and interrupting a stranger’s afternoon. The Home Team helped hone those skills. And quite frankly, it also weeded out some of the very sensitive callers we wouldn’t have wanted to rely on on game day.

Now, with the primary behind us and the general heating up, we’re back to heavy Home Team recruitment. I train between one and three new Home Teamers a day. More than 150 callers have been trained, logged on and made at least one call. It’s a steady trickle. And they are finding us; we do little more than hang our website shingle and wait for new volunteers to knock.

Unfortunately, we face the age-old problem of every volunteer organizer in history — attrition. Without any real accountability to a campaign (ie, no paycheck), volunteers always leave in droves. Rule of thumb is 40% attrition with new volunteers. That attrition is dramatically worse with online volunteers. When you can’t shake someone’s hand or look them in the eye, the human connection and camaraderie that attracts many volunteers has much a weaker hold. Many well intentioned new volunteers sign up, make a night of calls, and then life happens — work gets busy, a parent gets sick, the roof springs a leak — and the weak bond established by the internet is easily forgotten.

So now the challenge is keeping this legion of trained volunteers actually engaged. I end up making lots of calls to “sleeping” volunteers, trying to wake them back up. Occasionally it works; they were just away for a short vacation, or they lost their login information. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Instead of 40% attrition, I’m looking at 80% to 85%. The lesson is obvious and clear — the loose ties of the web and the weakest.

Technical bugs compound the problem. We’re working with a new technology, that’s truly pushing the boundaries. Our campaign has essentially been providing QA (quality assurance) for the technology, tweaking and testing it with the developer, and molding it to our users’ needs. Others are following our lead. MoveOn (the “leader” in online organizing) launched its first beta test of a similar system just yesterday; we’ve got the drop on them by two months. Being the pioneer means being the first to stub your toe on the unseen rocks … and with a technology this complex, there are many rocks.

Ultimately, its worth all the stumbling and testing and training hours, because we simply have to build an activist base for election day. Our volunteers will need to make 60,000 calls on Nov. 7. Yes, with four zeros. In campaign parlance, we call that a “whole fuckload of calls.” Even if everyone I’ve trained made four hours of election day calls, we wouldn’t even hit half that target. That’s okay, though. As with any election, there will be an exponential spike in the final days. Two weeks before every E-day, you freak out that you don’t have enough bodies. But two days before E-day, you can’t cram everyone in.

It’s a classic scaling issue, and it happens literally every time. This year, the Home Team will hopefully help us avoid the problem. It’s nature as a web-based, infinitely scalable program should absorb exponential growth. Should being the operative word. Like every campaign with too little money, too much work and too many moving parts, there will be cracks in the system. My job in the next three weeks is to keep the cracks from becoming valleys.

Hard to believe, but today is election day. Primary election day, that is. The John Hall campaign and the Donna Edwards campaign are both turning out masses of voters, and right now, as we speak, we’re pretty much waiting for the polls to close and results to come in.

I’m up in Beacon, at Hall HQ. We laid out an incredibly ambitious GOTV program last night. We sliced turf, we assigned lists, we staged scenarios, we trained and equipped our captains. This morning at 6:00 am, we turned the plan loose.

Right now, the fact that today is so calm is actually a fantastic sign. It means the plan worked. It means the projections were within 10%, the volunteers showed up, the advance team hit the right visibility locations, etc etc. It worked. That’s a beautiful thing.

But my stomach is still in knots. After all, your program can work perfectly, and if your opponent’s program works perfectly +1, you lose. Remember 2004? We did our job perfectly. We pulled our people. I canvassed a rough part of Philly that day with ACT, and we pulled enough votes in Philly to carry the state. Unfortunately, their side did it perfectly +1.

Now, as the polls are almost closing, the familiar nerves set in, the pre-results butterflies, that won’t go away until at least 3 beers or the results are posted.

I’m off to pound a little more pavement here in Beacon. Wish me luck. Wish us all luck!

Iris and Dot are my new friends.

Iris is 74. She lives in Syracuse, NY. She has six grandchildren who delight her, but none of them live nearby. “Syracuse is driving the younger generation away,” she says. I think her husband died rich.

Dot is 62. She lives in White Plains. Dot doesn’t have grandkids, and her one grown son “isn’t the marrying kind.” Dot’s a little lonely these days – she recently lost her 13-year-old basset hound, Lucky. She’s got a great voice and a forceful personality; after 35 years as an actress in NY, “there are some things that stick with you.”

I’m 29. I live in Brooklyn. I won’t have grandkids for another 30 or 40 years. You wouldn’t say Dot, Iris, and I have a lot in common. We’ll probably never meet in person. We’ll never share a meal. I’ll never see the photos of Lucky I imagine sitting on Dot’s mantle.

But in the past two weeks, Dot and Iris and I have become friends, and more than friends – comrades-in-arms. Dot and Iris were the first two members of the Home Team, a volunteer program I’m running for my congressional candidate in upstate New York. The three of us share a passion for political change, and a belief that this year it can happen. Thanks to the beauty of the Web, we found each other easily. Or, more accurately, I hung out a shingle and they found me.

The Home Team is an experiment in the Holy Grail that all campaignsters like me are questing for – distributed activism. That is, using the Web to turn “armchair activists,” who are distributed across the town or state or country, into real world activists.

Needless to say, this is no easy task. It is (relatively) easy for Web users to connect with other Web users who share their values, or care about their campaign or issue. Where pre-Web it would have been hard for, say, a Jewish housewife in Provo to form a “Free Mumia” club, now she’s three clicks away from 20,000 new friends.

Yet most of the time the “activism” stops at the mousepad. Sure, I’ll send a petition to my Congressman. Yeah, I’ll fire off an angry form email to a greedy CEO. But get inspired enough to devote an afternoon to flyering my neighborhood or stuffing envelopes? Not usually. The Web is still an impersonal medium, and it doesn’t pack the emotional punch that moves people to real activism. No matter how good a MoveOn email reads, it has one-hundreth the motivational power of any meatspace appeal.

That’s one reason why the dividing line between online and offline activism has held fast. Traditional organizers brush off the Web as a distraction, or worse, as a palliative. Web nerds brush off traditional organizers as old school, pre-21st century neanderthals who don’t get it. The truth is somewhere in between. The only semi-proven political use of the Web – fundraising – keeps many a campaignster lucratively employed. Giving money is a form of activism, to be sure, but it ain’t no Molotov cocktail.

Enter Iris and Dot. As you can imagine from their demographics, neither are terribly Web proficient. But neither are they Luddites. I’d guess that both of them got their first computers from their children, maybe from their children’s children, and struggled their way through a few exasperated intergenerational lessons; “No, Ma, its a ‘mouse,’ not a ‘mole’…” Today, they both email with friends, and that’s how they came to me. Someone on my candidate’s email list forwarded them an appeal I’d sent out: “Make Calls to Take Back Congress from Your Home, on Our Dime.” This appealed to both of them. I got emails back from them within a day. They joined my first training call.

Our relationships started off tentatively. Our first date seemed solid; they followed me through the online lesson and said they understood everything. After we parted that first night, Iris made a few dozen calls. I listened in on a couple (the volunteer side of every call is recorded, which gives me a newfound respect for those “calls may be monitored for quality assurance” disclaimers). On her calls, Iris spoke confidently and seemed to be enjoying herself. She reached a number of sympathetic voters, and clearly won some hearts.

Seemed quite successful to me. But then, no more calls.

Dot didn’t get started for a solid week. I trained her on a Wednesday, and she didn’t make her first call until next Tuesday. Stage fright? I couldn’t figure it out. Like Iris, the few calls she did make sounded successful. Why did she drop out so quickly?

The ugly and obvious flipside of distributed activism was showing its head. Without the social interaction that binds so many activists to their causes, interest quickly wanes. We human are fickle creatures, and the next shiny object that passes draws our attention away from our loose, volunteer commitments. This is nothing new. Attrition is a constant factor for volunteer organizers. Without meatspace contact, the factor seems to triple.

Clearly, a special push was needed to keep these ladies involved. I tried emailing them both, full of pep talk and cajoling. Nothing. Granted, the end of August is a hard time to motivate a grandmother in upstate NY to do anything other than porch sit, but still. They seemed so enthusiastic on that first call … and hadn’t they contacted me? I tried calling, left messages. I just about wrote them both off.

I wish I could take credit for salvaging the relationships, but credit lies with necessity, not inspiration. I had scheduled another Home Team training call on a Friday, and had two other women signed up. Then I missed an airport connection and was forced into a flight that conflicted with the training call. No one else on my staff could cover. So as a last resort, I called Iris. This time I got her, and I asked her a big favor – if she would lead a training, just like the one she’d received herself. I gave her Dot’s number, and told her to call Dot if she wanted backup. She agreed.

The training went terribly. One of the two students bailed, and so it ended up being Dot and Iris and an older woman who had lots of political experience. “I think she was probably older than both of us, but smarter than both of us combined,” Dot joked. They started the training, ran into a technical glitch, and had no idea how to troubleshoot it. The student got frustrated and never made a single call.

And yet, the galvanizing effect on both Dot and Iris was remarkable. Their participation shot through the roof. They each started making a concerted series of calls, practically every night. I started get emails at 9:15 pm, just after our calling deadline. “Good night tonight; I got five 1’s in a row!” (In organizer-speak, a “1″ is a strong supporter.) Or a question: “What’s his [the candidate's] position on the second amendment? A caller asked me today, and I didn’t know what to say.” And thus, my relationships with both the women grew.

There’s a concept in campaignster circles called “pushing power to the edges.” De-centralize your authority, the theory goes, and you will attract more (and more dedicated) human capital. Trust the people at the edge of your movement, and you will build your movement.

Dot and Iris were my edges. When I pushed even the smallest bit of power to them, it paid me back handsomely.

I did pay a price. They didn’t do anywhere near as good a job as I could have done in training the older woman, and that lost us another potentially useful volunteer. Giving up control failed to produce the short-term desired result. But in the long term, Dot and Iris got hooked. They’ve each made as many phone calls as the 30 least productive callers combined. They’ve spoken to hundreds of voters on our behalf. If we win this primary on September 12, they can rightly claim a piece of the victory.

Now, if I just could meet more 65-year-old single women.