a sane political campaign

I have a lot to write about in the coming weeks. Especially around this past election. Given that no matter the subject, we each have our own different perspective because it is informed by our specific experiences. Since all of my commentary and thoughts are driven by my specific campaign, I should probably explain how it was unique.

Obviously I’m biased. But I believe this was the most sane campaign in the country. I’m sure my choice of words is influenced by Stewart’s Rally for Sanity, but so be it. Here are the main three:

1) The only clean-money campaign in the country.

The problem: Some unbelievably insane amount of money was spent on campaigns this election season — a number, I hear, that is in the billions. Seriously. When running for office becomes something that is so unfathomably expensive that only a certain, well-connected or uber-wealthy class of people would ever consider it, we’ve failed miserably.

Of all the major federal campaigns (US House and Senate), we were the only one to not take any special interest money or self-finance (think Meg Whitman and Linda McMahon). The only one. We raised a quarter million dollars in all individual donations, averaging $250.

2) An organic campaign, not a synthetic one.

The problem: There’s a huge trust gap in politics. That much is clear. When a politician tells us something, our first reaction is to assume that they are lying to us or to try and figure out how much of what they said was a lie. We impugn the motives and statements of politicians because we know how artificial they have become. Focus groups, poll-tested sound bites, consultants crafting everything — we get that these politicians and their campaigns don’t mean what they say. Like a consumer marketed bar of soap, everything has been fine tuned by the men behind the curtain to make us want it. They don’t mean it.

So I ran an organic campaign. There were no “rented suits” (consultants) or focus-grouped taglines. But more than anything, I wanted to show what a sane, human campaign could look like. What if the candidate ran his own campaign, kept the books, ran the fundraising, wrote the speeches, policy positions, planned the media, created the commercials, and all the rest. So I did. It’s also why I was really, really irritated when my statements and motives were impugned. It was frustrating because all of this work was really an extension of me — but realistically, until this becomes more commonplace — that campaigns are a true, honest reflection of the candidate and their views — the cynicism and resistance will persist.

3) Ideas, not sound bites.

The problem: Most politicians run for office without any ideas. Instead they rely on 2-3 sound bites which they repeat over and over. It’s so bad that there are even a slew of politicians who don’t even have positions on their website. My opponent, Jean Schmidt was one of them. You could basically look at photos of her or donate to her campaign. That’s it. After a year of dealing with this idiocy, I let loose in the debate on it and called it what it was: parrot politics. You could teach a parrot to say the names of a few diseases, that doesn’t make the parrot a doctor. You can teach a parrot to say “lower taxes” and “smaller government”, but that doesn’t make that parrot a conservative either. It’s infuriating.

So I laid out an aggressive policy platform on my website. I even went further to post about relevant policy news on The Huffington Post. I constantly updated the Facebook campaign page with relevant news articles & commentary. I answered emails every day on policy positions and where I stood on issues.

I’m extremely proud of these accomplishments. I’ll talk more about what I hope the long-term impact of this will be in future posts. But this is what was especially different about our campaign. I like to think it was a brief glimpse at sanity in an otherwise insane election year and political climate.