Left In Lowell

Being Frank About Our Win

4 Responses to “Being Frank About Our Win”

1. Ryan Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 5:50 pm

   Sometimes I think that what keeps people back in large projects is that they get stuck in a day-to-day mode and never look to doing something greater. They don’t have any ambitious plans that could work great or falter; it’s too hard to put a lot of work together in general, but on a new and ambitious plan?

   Part of the reason why I got so excited about Deval is the fact that I see some sort of visionary leadership. He not just looking toward the day to day running of the state, but actually wants to do something ambitious: start projects - or even ideas - that go beyond day to day operations. Some of them may fail - in fact, some probably will - but we’re damned if we don’t try and we may come up with something really brilliant that does great things for our state.

   It’s nice that we have Deval doing this, but he’s only one person. We need literally hundreds of new leaders who aren’t just concerned with the day to day stuff - we need true leaders, true visionaries, people who will shake things up and try something new - try something additional. We need these people at the local party apparatus; we need these people on Beacon Hill; we need these people everywhere.

2. waittilnextyr Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

   Good points, Ryan. Education will be the key, as it is not one great idea that we need, but an endless succession of good/great ideas to keep ahead of the game.

3. Zama Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 8:43 pm

   You know, what you’re describing is even worse in the smaller towns. I read Susan’s comments and nodded my head. In my town, we basically had three people working on the campaign, the local town coordinator, one other person, and me. I won’t say what county I’m in, but I think ours was poorly run compared to the others. I know our county coordinator was calling our town coordinator and getting on his back like it was his fault, but what could we do? Even in a smaller town, it’s hard to identify voters when you have three people calling the entire voter list. We had to organize around work and school, which meant a lot of the time we’d have to call when most people were not going to be home and just leave messages. We finally managed to find one volunteer in our town, only problem is she’d already called the campaign and they sent her to volunteer in another town.

   None of the local power people would help. The sad part is, they weren’t for other candidates, they were for Deval, but if they were doing anything it was for other races. We’d ask for help and people would agree and then not show up, they’d take call lists and then return them the day before the primary totally uncalled. I know people are busy, but they couldn’t let us know they weren’t going to be able to do it in advance so we could try to get it done ourselves? It wasn’t a secret that we didn’t exactly have a lot of help. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m concerned that it’s going to be even harder to find help next time as people get complacent about how well the campaign went even though they know they could have done a lot more personally.

4. Lynne Says:
   November 30th, 2006 at 6:39 pm

   Thanks Ryan, for your comment, and I think you’re on to something.

   Zama, sorry it went down like that.

   The people who might feel guilty reading my post are not bad people. I do think some of them are more interested in title than doing the work, but I suppose that’s natural. It’s fun being in the in-crowd! But it does get in the way of the rest of us trying to do good in the world.

   When I was president of an amature orchestra back in NH, I took on a LOT of work. In fact, I was the hardest working person on the 9-member board. If something didn’t happen - a concert programme was not printed, or the books of that year’s adbook wasn’t at the location we needed them to be - I was responsible. Granted, I was only president a year and that level of involvement is hard to keep up for decades (an argument for stepping the hell aside if there’s a good replacement) but I did what needed to get done, to advance the goals of the organization.

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