Pearl River      With the US election less than four weeks away, it was timely to talk to the veteran progressive political organizer, Bob Creamer on Wade’s World.  As it happens, our paths have crossed many times over the last decades.  Before becoming a political organizer, Bob was a community organizer for many years based in Chicago.  Being originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, he would stop by ACORN’s office in Little Rock as he drove home for the holidays for several years.  That was then, and this is now, so the excuse for this visit was the publication of a new book that details a lot of the lessons he has won in campaign after campaign around the country under the auspices of his DC-based firm, Democracy Partners.  I’m very bullish on the book, and only part of the reason is because he named used the same handle, I had used early when I wrote Nuts and Bolts:  The ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing.  In his case, he called his book, Nuts and Bolts:  The Formula for Progressive Electoral Success. 

            A lot of us think we know a lot about political campaigns, but this book is chock full of the details about how the sausage is made from the viewpoint of a skilled practitioner on the inside, not the too many of trying to tough the elephant at different places from the outside.  When I say details, I mean details.  Having written about “organizing math” in my Nuts and Bolts, I loved the fact that Bob did the same thing when explaining how to slice and dice the voting file between what he called Persuadables and Mobilizables in order to concentrate a campaign’s resources and deploy its various tools.  Having the experience of doing media ad buys, which many of us might only dream about having the resources to handle in a campaign, he also gives the numbers on how many times a candidate would need to run a spot and how much it might cost depending on the market.  I’m nor saying that you can read this book and do all of this at home, but whether for beginning or veteran political organizers, this is a handbook worth keeping handy as a guide, refresher or reminder when running campaigns.

Bob doesn’t hold back.  He says a sample poll script.  He goes deep on what it takes to do effective communication.  He’s all about the doors and the voter canvass, just like we are.  It’s also about organizing, so some of the principles are near universal.  Looking at his tips for how a candidate needs to present themselves could as easily have been a crib sheet for what makes a good leader of any kind.

You don’t have to be looking for a job running a local political campaign to read this book, though it might help you, but you could be trying to organize almost anything, and you wouldn’t be wasting your time or money reading about the tradecraft that creates winners and Bob’s stories of how it all works.  One throwaway story about Jan’s Fans, a trick his wife, a member of Congress uses, of creating fans that people can use on parades and marches that deals with the heat and promotes her candidacy, is one I can hardly wait to borrow for ACORN’s next conventions in summers around the world.