Back In Time, Part II

A Window Into My Campaign Trail--
A Pack of Cats Like No Other

(the story continues...)

I didn’t know what to expect from the event. The timing was difficult—Senator Biden had a rally in Ocala the day before and that had to take precedence. Our regional team, my boss and the other field organizers, were over the moon to actually get Biden in our area; all hands were on deck for making the rally an overall success. My volunteers spent their call time in the days prior building for Biden. One day out, after we returned from Biden’s packed rally, my local field office was empty. I spent the remainder of my day solidifying details at the Savannah Center. In the five days we had known about Caroline Kennedy's gathering, not a single phone call was made out of my office solely to invite people to attend.

Looking back, we did nothing spectacular to guarantee a crowd. I sent an email to my volunteers. Details ran in the local papers, and even The Daily Sun mentioned that Caroline Kennedy was coming (albeit not on the front page). Most powerfully, though, I set the retiree grapevine loose—a major national surrogate was coming to their stomping grounds. Even more unbelievably, it was a member of the American Democratic Royalty who they had first seen as a little girl standing next to her beloved father. Because of who the speaker was, the significance of the location and the national temperature for the election, it created the perfect storm and this event built itself. There were no questions that we were going to fill the allotted 400 seats; the real question was how many people would we turn away.

My sole responsibility for the event was to fill every single seat; beyond that, all decisions were someone else’s call. The campaign had assigned Caroline Kennedy an advance staff to iron out the kinks. The advantage for me was they insure all aspects were positioned to Ms. Kennedy’s liking. The disadvantage was that they were unfamiliar with the politics of the locations and, in this case, the budget of the event. My advance team staffer, Paulette, arrived like a hurricane. She was dressed in bright turquoise over-sized straw hat covering rumpled long blonde hair, a Goofy t-shirt about a size too small, sandals, and an explanation of lost luggage. She came in with self-perceived bright, amazing ideas, talked a mile a minute combining demands with flattery, monopolized five and six hours of time for every meeting, and then flitted away to do another event. Paulette would leave one impression with the campaign scheduler and state staff, another with the Villages, and yet another with me. When the Villages staff changed their minds about the possibility of one of her brilliant ideas or when my Regional Field Director was told from higher up the chain that those ideas were not going to be funded, Paulette was gone. I was left alone to make the decisions—a daunting task considering I didn’t actually have the power to make any.

Paulette, the Villages event and recreation staff, and I met the morning of the event. The main reason for the meeting was to meet the Fire Marshall; the Villages staff was worried that our event would violate fire code because of the number of people who would want to attend. We had a strict order that we had to count the number of people who came in the doors of the grand ballroom—after 600, no more people could enter. It was at that moment that the Villages Staff also decided to spring one more snag into the operation—according to the finest print of our contract, at any point should a Village staffer decide that our event needed to be managed by professionals, they would call in their event staff, adding significant extra cost to the already high rental fees. Seemingly cooperative but highly suspicious of our ability to handle the inherent circus that this would be, they raised concerns over the entrance line, parking, seating, and overflow. Paulette just shrugged it off, spewing off a dozen or so things I for me to do in the interim instead, but sirens went off inside my head. I was keenly aware the campaign would not pay for any more expenses. I asserted we had volunteers who could help us—as many as 50 who were just waiting for my call who would help me manage the event. The number and my confidence, masking my terror of more bills, seemed to satisfy the Villages staff for the time being, though they didn’t hesitate to remind me that their event staff was already on-call.

I left the meeting at 11:30 and I needed to be back to at 1:00 with 50 volunteers on hand. There was only one small glitch. I had scheduled only seven to help with the event.

(story to be continued...)


Time: 21 minutes (Run 2/Walk 1)
Place: Steph's Front Yard
Weather: Snow fallin'
Distance: 1.83 miles
Feeling: Steep hills induce shortness of breath.
Overall grade: B-