Rivers of Exile

Reconsidering the Zeese campaign for US Senate May 6, 2006

Posted by Delilah in : General, Maryland, US Congress , trackback

When assessing a candidate, most folks - myself included - are initially attracted (or more often, these days, repulsed) by the person’s stand on the issues and how they mesh with our own. We also try, to the extent possible, to gauge the person’s character in terms of leadership, management and communications skills that could deliver results once elected to office. In the end, that’s all a voter like me really cares about: can this person actually deliver if s/he were to be elected?

I regret to say, my short experience as a volunteer with this campaign has raised big old red flags as far as the latter. I’d involved myself, as a volunteer, to help alert Arabs and Muslims to a campaign that I felt spoke to our core issues. After just a few weeks, I am now reconsidering my support and definitely putting my involvement on hold. Several reasons, all boiling up to this point of weariness:

He is running as a Green, not an Independent, as I had initially thought and reported to everyone I know. I don’t mind if the Green or any other party unite behind him but he shouldn’t claim to be an Independent on his literature if he is registered as something else. Basing a whole campaign on a distortion - while going after the distortions of the Bush administration about war etc. - is not really a good place to start these days. Even the appearence of lying from a politician makes us edgy, with good reason.
My experience trying to help reach out to Arabs and Muslims has been that the casualness and ineptitude of this campaign operation can be - not just exceedingly tedious but, more importantly, damaging to the professional credibility of anyone from the outside who gets involved;
The campaign operations set-up is (perhaps terminally) self sabotaging. This is not, in my view, due to the lack of ressources - which could have been remedied, competence does bring in investors after all - but to an operational mindset that lacks basic professional skills and is simply too out to lunch to be effective in a race of such importance, at a time as critical as this - we’re in no mood to indulge the fancies of unserious, unprofessional candidates, period.
There seems to be no serious outreach to the African American and Hispanic communities - which is very problematic to me. My questions in that regard have largely remained unanswered beyond the tired old “we’d love to have more African Americans/Hispanics”. On this one, even Democrats are better than Greens and that says a lot right there.

So, people, for all those reasons - I am reconsidering. À bon entendeur, salut.