Las Vegas Nights
by meta4
Tuesday November 23, 2004 at 05:32 PM
meta4@planet-save.com
The weekend before and the day of the General election, I worked at the UFCW Union hall to help get out the vote, to turn Nevada blue. I met several amazing activists from CA, one of whom wrote this about his experience- also at the UFCW Union hall. I received this via email from him, and feel it is worth sharing, as it is a thoughtful reflection on well, lots of things. Thanks for reading. from Genelle
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a member of either of the major political parties in this country, and on a systemic level I do not see electoral politics as a solution to the struggles that exist in this world between exploitive tendencies and sustainable dreams. However, what I intend to do here is describe my experience working on the Kerry/Edwards Campaign in Las Vegas, and to not only extract some useful lessons but also a vision of where we now stand as a movement and perhaps where we should see ourselves headed. In many ways the path that history now walks will make our organizing easier, in other ways it will make our fight all the more desperate. A fundamental character-sketch of the world has been laid out for us, and we must now digest it, gain what insight we can, and turn to face our collective burden.
While the campaign was going on, I was running a table for new volunteers. The atmosphere in the UFCW Union hall was very similar to that of a global-convergence space. Apparent bottom liners were set up around the building, running different aspects of the action: cutting turf, phone banking, issuing turf, reclaiming walked turf, welcoming volunteers, and, of course, dealing with lost people and random issues. These were not unofficial-officials, like we use, but paid interns. I was not an equal participant, just another volunteer. Still, the essential energy of the fight was there. Hundreds of out-of-state volunteers were streaming in through the doors every day. We had to feed them and find them housing. We had to help people find ways to plug in, and we had to do so with no time and too much happening all at once. In other words, aside from the closed-door meetings of people with nametags, I felt almost totally at home.
The tactic that the Democrats used could be summed up as “hit the streets.” On the Monday before the election, my group of 10 organizers sent out 130 volunteers, who knocked on approximately 12,000 doors in an 8-hour period. This truly impressed me. I thought that the literature we distributed could have been more effectively written. I also think we could have been more selective in our targeting of canvassing routes, if decisions had been made at a more local and decentralized level. However, I have never seen any outreach like this occur at a global convergence, and I don’t know why. I was sitting there, thinking to myself, as I assigned turfs to teams of 3 or 4, that if we had done this kind of outreach in Miami or San Francisco, we could have turned out thousands of more people. So, despite the many flaws in the Democrats organizing structure, the actual number of doors knocked on by a relatively small number of activists did inspire me.
On the actual day of the election, all energy was focused on getting out the vote. A team of 15-20 inside organizers sent out nearly 400 volunteers to hit the streets. Of course, there were many problems, like teams being sent to gated-communities that they could not access, or teams being sent to the same nationhood that others had already canvassed multiple times. The vote split in Nevada was in the tens-of-thousands, and we could easily have hit that many voters with better organization. I believe this would have been especially true if each satellite station had been more empowered to act. For instance, the day before the election we were looking for volunteers, and we only recruited about 3 by knocking on doors. However, my union hall sent out two small teams to the local mall, and in an hour they turned up 14 more volunteers. Why was this tactic not recognized and repeated? The answer is that the leaders at the top weren’t aware of and didn’t give the necessary directions. So, my belief in non-hierarchical organizing structures, and empowerment, was reaffirmed.
Many people who did volunteer did not want to canvass door-to-door. In fact, they had been told that they could drive voters to the polls. We were asking people if they needed rides, but not pro-actively. We had papers for them to fill out, with times and places, but people are hesitant to commit in this way. One suggestion might have been to set up local driving spots, say, at supermarket parking lots, where cars could be stationed all day. There would have been no problem paying for vans, or finding people to sit, wait, and drive. The media could have easily gotten out the word. What I am trying to say is that, given the resources the Democratic Party had in terms of finances and feet, they could have done much more to get those votes. The closed-door nature of their power structure reduced their creativity, thus causing them to miss out on ways of mobilizing large portions of their voter base. This idea is most clearly inhabited in the fact that only around one-in-five eligible voters in the 18-24 year-old category voted. I doubt that very many of the Democratic Organizers came from this age range, unlike many of the volunteers.
I believe that this is actually a hopeful analysis of the events because it implies that a large percentage of the left leaning population remains out there, ready to be mobilized. We could easily generate several million more votes Nation wide, but could they? Also, I believe now, more than ever, in the anarcho-creedo that “Creativity is our greatest resource.” We, collectively, know many ways to do the kind of work that needs to get done. If the Democratic Party had applied even a few of the modern activist ethics to their campaign, they could have won the election, at lease in Nevada.
A friend of mine who I had run with on the streets of San Francisco during the J8 Bio-tech Conference, and who had spent the last several months working for Kerry, originally called me into the Las Vegas Get-Out-The Vote action. Late Tuesday night, as the last polls were closing across the country, hundreds of volunteers left the union-hall, either to return to California or to party at the Rio Hotel’s Brazilian Ballroom. I remained with the last of the hardcore staffers, cleaning up. Hours before the state of Nevada would be painted red, we were throwing out literally dumpster after dumpster of campaign literature, flyers, door hangers, and trash. I was very irritated by this lack of sustainable practices, and so was my buddy. It was clear to both of us that, not only should there have been recycling at the site, or at least within the state of Nevada, but that some Democrat, or group there of, had made the decision to print up X number too many door hangers. Decisions like this, made from far above, without an understanding of what was happening at the local level, was one of the things that is wrong with hierarchical structures.
It was also clear to both of us that a synthesis had to occur. Somehow, as young activist organizers, we both instinctively felt that, for there to be a future for the left, we have to—take the energetic force displayed by the Democrats and their volunteers and combine that with our anarchist understanding of empowerment, horizontal organizing, and sustainable ethics.
The polls continued to close, and the night dragged slowly on. As the power of decentralized community based organizing, as demonstrated this time by the Right Wing church groups, trounced the Democrats and their large, once-every-four-years, attempt at coalition building, it became starkly apparent that we cannot close up shop until next time. The people who “got out the vote” for Bush did it through institutions that meet 52 weeks a year, are familiar with local turf, know the demographics and local issues, and recruit people 24/7. The unions used to do this for the left, but they have been withering under the clamp of neo-liberalism since Clinton passed NAFTA. The left, with its multiplicity of religious groups, ethnic flavors, class, race, sexual preference and worldviews, needs to see itself as a community that exists even in non-election years. If this doesn’t happen, the evangelical churches are going to continue dictating the national agenda.
After finally cleaning up our UFCW Union Hall, we made our exhausted way to the Rio Hotel, where we could finally start getting drunk while watching the country paint itself with war colors. Down in the belly of the hotel a great room full of big screen TVs seemed to be shrouded in depression. Small groups sat and talked; at other tables isolate individuals stared at the TV in numb amazement, shock, frustration, and desperation. My buddy, who had been on the Democratic payroll for the last three months and was, thus, not broke, paid for a round of tequila—we toasted to getting shitty in a shitty world. Then someone told us there was a staff room next door. This smaller room was much more cramped and talkative. It also had an open bar.
It was in this room, sitting at a round table with other young organizers, drinking bloody marries and Gin and Tonics, that it became clear that Bush was going to get his sought after Electoral College votes. The presidency was his. Then I remembered the words of Joe Hill, “Don’t morn, Organize.” A fire came to life in my belly. I realized I had been fighting Bush for the last four years, and I only spent one week of it in the Democratic camp. My brothers and sisters were fighting in the arms of the old-growth; they had been arrested in NYC, detained on peer 57, suffered rubber bullets in Miami, and were killed on the fences of Cancun. We forced the corporations out of Bolivia, and been killed by cops in Genoa. There is no way we are going to lie down and wait four more years to fight again. We don’t have the privilege of rest. As the older Democrats retired, or began to talk about running Hillary on ‘08, the youth in the room began to face the next real organizing issue—the streets of D.C. and the inauguration.
Suddenly, with something almost resembling a smile, I began to circulate around the hall, finding the organizers my age and asking them a simple question, “Do you know where your going to be in January.” Some looked at me with frozen faces, but most smiled and said, “hell yea, D.C.” We began trading emails, phone numbers, and plans. A vision was being born, of thousands of us surrounding the white house, sitting down in rows, and demanding representation. Someone spoke up and informed us that the District of Columbia had gone 90% Kerry. Another voice said “well, that’s a lot of friendly doors to knock on.” Someone mentioned that in 1991 30,000 Russians surrounded the Parliament building and changed the course of history. Yeah, we remembered—history and democracy are not won in the polling booth, but in the streets. That is what we were saying at the RNC in September, and it is all the more true now.
We need a broad coalition for this. Ninety percent of African Americans voted for Kerry, and are thus not represented in the government; almost any minority religion should feel threatened by Bush. There is no lack of possible allies in this struggle. This is, in fact, one of the ways in which Bush’s election can help us. If Kerry were in power, we would face a long protracted campaign to save the forests and fight the corporations, while most of our allies would be lulled back into complacency. Now we, as the left, not just the liberals, have no shortage of sympathetic ears, hands, and friends. We must capitalize on this as best we can: broaden our vision, sell it to the people door by door, and rock the streets as only we know how.
So I am sending this off to everyone I know: to all the activist list serves, to the young Democratic organizers I met in Las Vegas, to college kids and high school students, to anyone who can hear. We need to be in D.C. in numbers never before seen. We need an image of resistance the likes of which we never managed to generate in NYC, and we need to demand recognition. This is not a winner by 2% take-all world. Bush does not have a mandate from the people, just from the churches. We have two months to plan, to manifest, to stream across this country like we do for great concerts every summer. We must create a sense of a political happening, so that the average kid on the street knows this is what’s going down. We need to talk about it at parties and dream about it at night. We need to use all our passion and imagination to make something magical happen in D.C. so we can move into the next 4 years with, not only Bush as a clear enemy, but our movement as a clear force of opposition which can capture the imagination of America and build a community that is capable of opposing the right.
Right now I feel like I live, more than ever, in a crazy world. I feel the weight of the burden we carry and the work we have to do. I can feel the sorrow of all that has been lost, and the shock at the reality of how so many people actually think, and vote. But I also feel wiser, more capable, and energized to organize and fight. I send this letter out to you because you are my companions in this: you are my church, my temple, my grove, my mosque, my teepee and ashram. You are my family, my community, my lovers and my friends. If nothing else, the unity of the other side has demanded of us a broader sense of solidarity. Now we must turn to the next “battle ground state”: Washington D.C.