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  The Campaign Committee: You will have two campaign committees, the public or propaganda-purpose committee and the private or working committee; the first includes the second. The public committee will be as large as possible and will include everyone you can persuade to sign a card or a list which says, "I take pride in publicly endorsing the candidacy of Jonathan Upright for Congress," or some such, but does not say "and authorize the use of my name for advertising purposes" - or people won't sign it. You then use the list for advertising purposes anyhow for the suggested phrasing gives consent. The signers won't mind - it's just that the other phraseology looks too much like a contract Or you might say, "I take pleasure in serving on the campaign committee of- " with the explanation that the statement carries no explicit duties.

  (Once in a while some person who carries water on both shoulders will sign the endorsements of two competing candidates. It eventually causes him embarrassment; he will call up and demand that you destroy, for example, your entire stock of stationery. He may threaten legal action. If you hold his signed endorsement, brush him off. "We can't do that, old man, unless you are willing to pay for printing the new lot No, really - tell you what - we'll draw a line through your name in red ink and mark it, 'Renegged.' How would that do?" Don't help him out of his hole and don't surrender his signed statement.)

  This list of endorsers, the "committee," will be spread across the top, down the side, and eventually all over the back of your campaign stationery, and you may use it in display advertising. A personal endorsement from almost anyone is likely to drag in another vote or two. You may decide to suppress some names when you know that the persons concerned have numerous enemies and very few friends. This is legitimate; you have not contracted to use the names.

  If caught out, I would take refuge in a social fib. "Your name isn't on the list? It must have been skipped when the list was copied for the printer. It's too late to add it, I'm afraid-that printing bill was $26. But I certainly will tell Mr. Upright that you wanted your name on his committee."

  Follow your own conscience. My own will stand a few polite evasions when another person's feelings can be saved without damage to anyone.

  The public committee will be headed by officers whose duties are nominal unless they serve in the same capacity on the working committee. These de facto honorary officers should be selected to be as broadly representative as possible and for maximum prestige. The following set-up would be ideal for the typical American community:

  The Citizen's Committee for the Honorable Jonathan Upright, Candidate for Congress, Umpteenth District

  Dr. Colin MacDonald, Chairman

  Francis X. OToole, Secretary

  Isadore Weinstein, Treasurer

  Muriel T. Busybody, Field Director telephone Grant 0361

  Mrs. Busybody (yourself) is the only working member of this list, although the others are all loyal supporters. The names have been selected by you as being conspicuously Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. For maximum effect each gentleman should be very prominent, and highly respected in the community by all groups. If Dr. MacDonald is a prominent Presbyterian and Mason and a stylish physician noted for his charities, Mr. OTbole a distinguished lawyer and an active Knight of Columbus, and Mr. Weinstein both a Scout commissioner and well known in B'nai B'rith, then your cup runneth over.

  Special offices can be devised to permit other prestige names to stand out-chairman women's division, vice-chairman, director speakers' bureau, public relations, liaison, chairman finance committee, chairmen for various small communities in the district, director of research, chairman study groups, etc., without end.

  It is advisable to list the rest of the committee in strict alphabetical order to avoid hurt feelings.

  There is no reason why any of these prestige officers should not be active campaign executives. It is sometimes possible to get a busy, able person actively into the campaign by getting him first to agree to letting his name appear at the top of the letterhead, then calling him into war councils.

  The working committee consists of the following- by any titles: Candidate, manager, money raiser, publicity person, office girl, field supervisors, and precinct workers. Some of these people will double in brass and all of them should do some precinct work, in order to keep their roots down. The office girl and publicity person may be paid professionals-they certainly must be professionally skilled and experienced whether they are paid or not. There is no need for anyone else in the campaign to be paid anything.

  The best place for members of the candidate's family on the committee is the chairman of South America and the Eastern Hemisphere. The candidate may need and want a member of his family as a confidential secretary and this may be tolerated, but relatives of candidates are subject to an even more virulent form of candidatitis than are candidates - it is very discouraging to have to drop real campaigning in order to go around patching up gaps in your fences left by unpolitic relatives of your white hope.

  Headquarters: It does not matter in the least whether you have swank offices or good equipment; the voting public will neither know nor care. A telephone call from a private phone in a modest home soundsjust the same as one coming through a switchboard in a suite of fancy offices. You need a typewriter, file boxes for 3 x 5 cards (shoeboxes will do), a cheap letter file, a two-bit scrap book, the use (not the ownership) of a duplicating machine, a telephone which is not in reach of the casual dropper-in - and nothing else - nothing! Use furniture at hand, or improvise it out of scrap wood. Place the headquarters in any heated, rent-free space, your own spare bedroom, somebody's rumpus room, or a donated second-rate office over a store building.

  Campaigns customarily have public offices fronting on commercial streets. The usefulness of such so-called headquarters is questionable; the vote-getting power is not better than border line. If you can get an empty store building, or space in an occupied store belonging to a supporter, and in either case absolutely rent-free and if you can get someone to remain in such donated space to answer questions and hand out literature on an unpaid but faithful basis and if such person is unable or totally unwilling to do precinct work instead, it is then worthwhile to invest in signs and printing to advertise the campaign by advertising the space as a "headquarters." Otherwise it is better to wait until the final campaign when such space is more readily available for the entire ticket

  There are distinct advantages in not having public offices and in avoiding a swank, expensive appearance. Your campaign can be well advanced, almost unbeatable, before the opposition realizes that you are a serious threat. A Grass-Roots Campaign can be as silently insidious as cancer, as long as it doesn't look like much in the early stages. And if your offices are not expensive and comfortable you will be less bothered by the chap with his hand out and by the Headquarters Hound. The latter is a practically harmless but ubiquitous lower life form which clutters up political offices, occupying chairs, taking up working time, sounding off, and absorbing anything that is free, from ice water to signs. He is related to Sunday morning quarterbacks and arm-chair generals.

  If your headquarters is not in a private home, make sure that the only available telephone is a pay phone, or, if that cannot be obtained, put a lock on the telephone and take extreme precautions with the key, as well as establishing the practice of logging all outgoing calls and obtaining the charges, if a toll call, from the operator. (This will be regarded as outright tyranny by the Headquarters Hound, but it is utterly necessary if you are to avoid incredibly large deficits.)

  The telephone bills that can be incurred by an open telephone in a political office must be experienced to be believed. They are not necessary; the legitimate outgoing calls which cannot be made over private, unlimited phones are very few. The best arrangement is the pay phone and a petty cash account, locked up with the stamps, and for which the office girl is responsible.

  After taking such precautions, you may then, and should, make free use of the telephone. Your business will not
bankrupt the committee.

  An extension wired only for incoming calls may be added to a pay phone and placed on the desk of the office girl.

  The campaign funds should be kept in a bank account as the funds of an unincorporated, non-profit society. A respected group of three, none of whom have control over the funds, should be appointed to keep a running audit. The checks should require two signatures, that of the manager and either one of two others, let us say the campaign chairman and the chairman of the finance committee. The candidate should not sign checks, though he may reasonably insist on a veto as a condition of running-but let us hope not.

  The following categories of expense cannot be avoided:

  Filing fee

  Printing

  Postage

  Telephone tolls

  Refreshments for the election night

  party for the workers

  The following categories of expense are not indispensable but a strong campaign will include some and possibly all of them:

  Signboard rental

  Newspaper display advertising

  Professional distribution of literature

  Publicity person's salary

  Office girl's salary

  Lunch money and gasoline or carfare money for volunteers

  Radio spot plugs

  Candidate's extrapolitical expenses

  Manager's extrapolitical expenses Some of the expenses in the second list can be avoided by astute management, not by eliminating the type of campaigning indicated, but by getting what is needed free. An able, professional publicity person on at least a part-time basis is a sine qua non; if a volunteer supporter in this professional category cannot be found then one must be hired. If a volunteer typist, completely reliable and reasonably efficient, cannot be found, then she must be hired - but a volunteer is better.

  The other conditional expenses depend on local conditions. Form the habit of being extremely tight-fisted about expenses in both lists of categories, necessary and conditional.

  There are many other types of political expenditure; you are sure to have many well-meaning advisers who will assure you from experience that this or that must be done, which does not fall under one of the above headings. I believe that you will find in every case that the recommendation comes from experience with some other type of campaigning than the volunteer, Grass-Roots Campaign. Thereon? other types of campaigning - I have expended more than thirty thousand dollars (not my own money!) on a single campaign issue in less than thirty days-but no type of campaigning is as effective as the type here described and this type is almost without expense. The expenses

  are all incidental to the campaigning and are not property

  This is literally a case of "The Best Things in Life Are Free." It is easy to run a campaign with lots of money, but an expensive campaign can always be beaten by a properly organized campaign which can barely pay for printing and postage.

  In addition to a headquarters or intelligence center of some sort both the candidate and the manager need some sort of hideaway-two hideaways if the manager and candidate are of different sexes, to keep tongues from wagging. A spare room in the home of a friend is ideal, particularly if it is served by a phone through which messages can be left without waking the person who is resting. There will come times when an afternoon nap, or at least complete freedom from pressure, is necessary to preserve your balance, your judgment, or even your sanity.

  A remote back room in the building which houses the office will do. Don't try to use your own home for this.

  Precinct Organization-Training and Management: We assumed that the precinct organization had been built up through earlier club organization; that includes the assumption for a congressional campaign that the volunteer field organization is too numerous to be managed directly by the manager. Ten is about the highest number which can be managed directly; you want and need a hundred. Therefore you will have area managers.

  Talent is where you find it. The neat divisions you draw up on a precinct map can never be realized in practice for you will never have enough competent leaders to whom you can delegate authority. Many of your area leaders will be no more than messenger boys between you and the precinct worker.

  To make your contact with the precinct worker as direct as possible hold weekly get-togethers with all the organizations at a fixed time and a centrally located place. Serve coffee and doughnuts. See to it that the candidate has this as an all-evening "must" date; your purpose is not only to instruct and inform your workers - and to gain information from them - but to renew their enthusiasm by direct social contact with the man they are backing. Make it as informal as possible - no lined up chairs, no standing to speak-a family party.

  Another fixed weekly date which can precede or follow this one, or be held on another night, is the meeting of the working committee, for strategy, tactics, and business. It is a must for you, but not necessarily for the candidate.

  The volunteer precinct workers are by far the most valuable asset of your campaign and the one most difficult to get and keep. They are not merely the rosters of your clubs nor are they a list of people who have pledged themselves to "work one precinct." No such wooden approach creates a precinct organization.

  You will have winnowed out, from hundreds of political contacts made during two to four years of apprenticeship, a list of people who will back their convictions by work rather than by talk alone. Each time you find one you will treasure him (or her) and train him and encourage him, with loving care.

  Don't expect to find the majority of them after you decide to manage a campaign. Some candidates and some managers seem to think that precinct workers grow on trees! If you have not already built up a following of people who believe in you, look to you for political leadership, and will work, then you are not yet ready to tackle anything as difficult as the management of a congressional-sized campaign. You are still in the junior-officer stage of your political career.

  Even if you never have the time or the circumstances which will permit you to undertake the management of a major campaign this chapter is still for you. The principles discussed apply to the minor leader in a campaign quite as much as to the manager, and, as a minor leader, you can help to keep the manager on the right track by your counsel. In so doing you can be the factor which turns defeat into victory, as many a manager is energetic and intelligent but inexperienced.

  The volunteer precinct organization is never as perfect -on paper-as the paid organization of a political machine. But you can reasonably hope to have one good enough to swing an election.

  "The moral is to the physical in war as three is to one." - Napoleon.

  Napoleon was a piker. The principal advantage of the volunteer over the paid machine professional is his sincere enthusiasm. In politics the ratio expressed by Napoleon is nearer ten to one. The volunteer is campaigning twenty-four hours a day, not by intent, but because he can't help it. It gets in his blood. He is the guerilla warrior of politics, acting on his own initiative, harrying and demoralizing a force much larger, and arousing a despairing citizenry to new hope. Like the guerilla, he fights with the materials at hand and improvises what he lacks.

  It is your object to inspire and direct this enthusiasm.

  Leadership is not an esoteric matter. You don't need the whoop-t'do "enthusiasm" of a night dub master-of-ceremonies, a revivalist, or a radio announcer. You need two qualities only, sincerity and a willingness to work. The rest you will learn, in a fashion suited to your temperament. (A sort of leadership by default can come to those who lack sincerity but are energetic, since a group will accept any leadership in preference to none.)

  As a leader of political volunteers there is just one paramount rule to keep in mind: Men do not live by bread along.

  The personal pat on the back, the public praise for work well done, a button to wear on the lapel, the testimonial dinner, the letter of thanks, the election night party, a personal word with the candidate - these things are wort
h much more than cash or patronage. Unless he is actually starving, a man-any man and all men - is motivated primarily by "face," by intangibles of some sort which have to do with behaving in that fashion which he feels does credit to his own conception of what he is, or what he would like to be.

  You may not like the term "face" - if so, don't use it - but I think you will find that all human motivation other than the simplest animal aspects of belly hunger, sexual rut, and physical fear can be found in a need for intangibles which will satisfy the individual's ideal conception of himself- and even hunger, rut, and fear are feeble in comparison, else soldiers would not fight, rape would be as common as shaking hands, and dinner guests would fall on their food and rend it. Even the dollar is pursued more usually for this higher reason than for the simple reason of filling the belly - to do one's duty to the wife and kids, to provide for the education of children, to live in a finer house, or simply to feel successful because one's labors command a high price. These goals are all intangibles, no matter how concrete is the symbol for the goal.

  In politics this strongest of all human forces is tapped most easily by the pat on the back, in its various forms. Most people in this country like to think of themselves as "good citizens'" they have been brought up to consider it one of the important intangibles. You can convert this yearning into doorbell-punching by public and private acknowledgement that precinct work is the highest expression of good citizenship. (It probably is!)

  Let everyone know at all times that no other political work carries as much honor and prestige. Be emphatic that the precinct workers are the royalty of organization, the other types of workers - office workers, speakers, and such - only the nobility, and campaign contributors merely the gentry. Never let a mere contributor of money have a vote in policy; don't even pay as much attention to his advice as you do to that of the least of the precinct workers - the precinct worker knows what he is talking about, in his neighborhood; the cash contributor is merely theorizing.