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I'm sorry for being out of the loop as all the WVWV stuff broke yesterday. Today is the day I'm due to turn in my book manuscript, and I was intentionally staying away from my email and blogs so I could focus on the final round of edits. I guess the good news is that it let lots of other people involved with WVWV weigh in and clarify things. Since so much has already been written about this, I wanted to take a step back and provide some broader perspective about the nature of phone business, organizational decision making, and some thoughts on what this incident says about our broader progressive movement.
Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:
1. No doubt at all WVWV screwed this one up. The timing of sending these calls out in the middle of a deeply emotional primary, with any chance of there being confusion was a mistake. And WVWV's response to all this when the shit hit the fan, which was handicapped by Page Gardner being on a flight to the West Coast when this broke, and by a staff turnover issue they are going through was way too slow and disjointed. Our board needs to review carefully what happened here sequentially, and make it sure it doesn't happen again. I still have multiple questions about what exactly went on and why, since I'm not involved in the operations, and getting all my questions answered has been tough with Page at a meeting at a location with shoddy phone and email coverage.
Having said all that, I'll repeat what I wrote yesterday: I have total confidence in Page Gardner, who has been on the frontlines of voter registration and GOTV of under-represented groups for as long as I've known her. She is a person of great integrity, doing really important and incredibly unglamorous our work, and she and the organization deserve better then to have people leap to the worst possible assumption about their motives (the right wing can do that all on their own, we don't need to add gasoline to the fire).
2. The organization I run day-to-day, American Family Voices, runs a hell of a lot of calls. Since the 2000 cycle, we have probably commissioned over 40 million paid calls, some of them with live callers and some as robo-calls. When an organization like AFV or WVWV makes calls at this kind of volume, you will get complaints because - "shockingly" - not everyone enjoys getting phone calls about politics. Politicians frequently respond to their constituents complaining about something, and sometimes they are delighted to do it because they have a political ax to grind. For example, AFV has been "investigated" for making calls about Congressional members. So yes, WVWV has been "investigated" by authorities in Virginia and several other states, as all groups who do phone calls are. Sometimes these politicians will ask them to stop doing something even thought the group involved knows what they are doing is legal and effective, and so they keep doing it. And it is possible, although I know they are careful about trying to dot every "i" and cross every "t" regarding the law, that some WVWV vendor made a mistake somewhere that went over the legal line. But I honestly don't believe there was any bad intent.
3. When you deal with a high volume of calls or mail or voter registration or anything else in politics, mistakes do get made. Vendors screw up scripts and garble calls, proper timing gets thrown off by unexpected glitches, bags of mail get misplaced and show up weeks after they were sent. I've had vendors send the worng call into the wrong district, and I've seen opposition researchers mess up an important fact in the research about a call or mail piece. When you are doing mail and calls in 24-states, as WVWV was, the potential for mistakes multiplies. Any of you who have done field organizing in political campaigns know how easy it is for something to get thrown in terms of your plans. What you then have to do is clean those mistakes up ASAP, which as far as I can tell WVWV worked hard to do.
4. I've notice in some of the commentary people reacting very strongly to the Lamont Williams part of this, suggesting that is very different than the standard robo-call style, i.e. usually that is a famous person whose name is give. Well folks, I can tell you there is no "standard" robo-call format. You certainly don't always use famous people - I have used laid-off factory workers, waitresses, mothers of dead soldier, all kinds do people in calls. Sometimes you use professional voice people to record the calls, as WVWV did in this case, and sometimes you use the name and sometimes not. It all depends on the point of the call, what you are trying to get people to do, in terms of how personalized you make it. I'm not clear why there is anything wrong with that.
Another very strong point I want to make here is in response to some commentors on this subject: Why would people assume that a group focused on unmarried women would not want to register and turn out African-American unmarried women? WVWV has prioritized doing just that, along with Hispanic unmarried women. Why wouldn't they do that, since these are the under-represented demographic group in the electorate, and more likely to be progressive voters.
5. I want to echo what Matt and others have said, but of course, with my own perspective. It always bothers me when people immediately leap to the worst possible conclusion about either politicians or organizations with a good historical track record. Maybe that's inevitable in an emotional primary situation, but I think it's a real problem in our highly cynical culture. It doesn't matter that WVWV has registered hundreds of thousand of very tough to register voters? It doesn't matter that their leader has spent her life in the service of progressive causes rather than trying to get rich?
Going into immediate attack-mode happens way too much in our community in my opinion. Hold people accountable when they make mistakes? Absolutely. Raise question when something weird is going on? Go for it. But going immediately into hyper-paranoia-attack mode without even checking on the background of the people or group involved seems like more of what happened here.
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