Why Bother?

1. This is why I choose to do something rather than nothing: because if I don't there are plenty of other people who want to do something, they will do it, if they do things not the way I would have done them and I wasn't there to try to oppose them then they'll keep on doing things I don't want them to do.

2. This is why I do electoral politics:
I'm almost 60 and I seem to have been politically aware to some degree for about 45 years.  This acorn didn't fall far from the tree: my parents were and remain leftish, I am too.  I became electorally active during the Kerry campaign because I realized that here in the USA we do elections instead of attempting to use force on each other.  Our system seems to allow elections to be to some degree bought but to me that is ever so much better than buying and using private armies.

I have become really fond of the electoral process and I want to keep it going as the way we pick some of our important people who do important things for us.  Without that periodic input from the people who don't participate in administration of the public part of their lives government would become the private operation of the people who do the jobs.  We know this is so because of the shapes of the corruption we see happen in every administration.  They are always the same: people take advantage of the system for personal gain.  That is the normal situation in all human cultures: people try to take advantage, they continue to try, there are always more of them coming along.  It is so great the elections have the possibility of meaning something in this country, I am so lucky to be living here.  Elections don't have to mean something, but they can.

In my precinct we have a precinct organization consisting of me and a few people my age.  All of the motivation for anything to happen comes from me.  If I drop the precinct chair job most likely none of them will pick up the tasks.  This hobby of mine is obviously a very rare behavior pattern.  Everyone is some kind of crank about something, most of us refuse to do anything about it.  For example: the Rips in the precinct don't seem to have an analog of me: an active precinct chair.

3. Why I work with the Dems:
My unpaid precinct chair job is to get people to vote for my party and its positions.  A party is supposed to be a coalition of like-minded people doing political work together.  Dems are not like that.  The Dems are a coalition of various smaller interest groups.  When elected they tend toward promoting tolerance of diversity within the rule of law.  Typically when Dems govern these past few decades there are no really happy interest groups because the tendency is to attempt to diffuse and share gains and losses throughout the population.  No group gets everything it wants, everyone grumbles.

The Rips, on the other hand, like to spend money on wars, make laws that allow people to cheat and steal things, neglect and destroy infrastructure and services, make vain & clumsy & wrongheaded attempts to make people behave in various ways.

I do a lot of history in my work (the things I do to make money).  What's happening now reminds me of 17th-18th century Poland.  The moneybags of the time (landowners) captured the government, ran the country for their own benefit, neglected the common weal, the country ended up disappearing for 120 years.  I see the Rips as the party of big money.  I'm sorry, Rips.  I do.  The Dems are into the money too, but you Rip guys think this is the way it should be, that money should rule.  I don't agree.  I'm a least-of-these guy.  That's what I'm into.

4. What about third party
It is an odd feeling working for the election of a lesser of evils.  Most elections have been like that for me.  My guy is some kind of fool or jerk, the Rip is always more so.  In my experience.  The Dem will ignore my political desires, where else can I go?  Every Rip will be worse for all of my positions.  It doesn't even matter if a long shot Rip presidential candidate shares a single policy position with me, I could never consider that one because the whole rest of the positions are no good for various reasons.  I have to vote for the less worse guy.

If there was a third party that could make a difference for my points of view that would be great.  But there isn't.  It would be the Greens or the Libertarians, the only third parties with any possibility of oomph.  The way things actually are I could only vote non-Dem if it truly didn't matter, these days it always does.  Rip policies are all versions of slash & burn, survival of the fittest, kick em when they're down.  I cannot afford to take an idealistic stand that would allow any of them to win.  I have to go Dem.  Let the Libs draw some votes from the Rips from the right.  Greens should elect local officers where they can.  I think it is not good to pull Dem votes away from the left at this historical moment (the last three decades).  That's why I don't put energy into the Greens.

I don't know what I'd do if I lived in Walter Jones' district.  But then again the Rips there are trying to get rid of him.

I know that my candidates will proceed to ignore me more or less after they get elected.  They really are the only game in town.  Politicians - can't live with em, can't live without em.

And I don't want to be one either.  Terrible job.  Spending lots of time hunting money, dealing with lowlifes of various economic positions, boring meetings, bad food, terrible hours, no private life.  Yuck.  Let someone else do it.  My weakness.

5. The county party
I do my work as part of the Wake County Democratic Party.  There are a few paid positions but they don't pay enough to live on so essentially all of the work of the county party is done by volunteers or might as well be.  People bring various degrees of commitment and competency to the jobs they do for WakeDems, about on the level you'd expect to get if there was no money.  Skilled people with no time, unskilled people with more time.  Everyone has too much to do and it doesn't all get done.  Mistakes always getting made.  When made, the makers of the mistake respond with the usual range of human responses from taking the blame for everything to blaming someone else.  And a lot of turnover from burnout leading to continuous attrition of institutional memory.

To the extent that one might be tempted to say we often get our people elected only because the other side is essentially just as disorganized and incompetent most of the time.

When I do my precinct organizing the county party will sometimes help me do what I want to do.  My experience has been that if I try to follow their script I don't get results.  This year I am not getting my queries handled in a timely manner.  Each election cycle I've worked in has seemed to be less organized than the last one on the county level.  It is a real why bother situation.  But what I am not bothering with is trying to closely coordinate with an organization that doesn't much care about the precinct work and choosing instead to actually do that work.  Because this is where the voters are.  Because I want to.  County party gets to be useful we'll work more closely together.  Meanwhile I have work to do getting people to vote Dem.  Because the alternative is worse.

They really practice the Peter Principle at WakeDems.  People with aptitude are promoted until they get to a level they can't handle then they stay there.

6. The state party
I essentially have nothing to do with the state party.  To me it mostly looks like a moneyed remnant of the plantation Democrats of yore living the kind of rich person life they always have in coalition with the rest of the Dem interest groups and that's why we keep coming up with Dinos like Easley.  Country club Dems.  Land baron Dems.  And there is a remnant of NC Dems who are Dems because of Lincoln, they'll never vote Rip because of Lincoln, otherwise they'd be Rips.  A real coalition party.  FDR depended on them for his majorities.  We do too.

The state party pays essentially no attention to the county parties.  There is never any coordination.  State level officers like senators & governors are essentially unreachable by ordinary people most of the time.

A lot of the people who work in both the county and state parties are hoping to move up, that's what they think it is.  There may eventually be a job of some kind, or maybe they can run for something.  The state party reveals itself frequently as an organization staffed by incompetents too.  I ignore them, they ignore me.  The state party thinks of the county parties as the minors, the national party thinks the states are the same.  They try to poach the talent of the local parties whenever a competent one shows up.  Its amazing anything gets done.

7. Scandal - these things happen everywhere in all regimes.  Scandals are the visible result of a certain kind of incompetence.  Most incompetencies are private and minor.  Major public scandals are a good indication that someone has been promoted to a position beyond their competence.  In every organization there will be more people ("us") who trudge on through the task list regardless of the circus act that middle management has suddenly put on.  Sometimes an organization will become staffed by multiple levels of incompetents and the situation can get really out of hand.

I find that I like to imagine that Dem scandals are a bit more, um, interpersonal, while Rip scandals tend toward the financial, but a moment's reflection destroys that idea.  Rips are exactly as lewd as Dems.  People do stupid stuff because they want to get caught, right?  Eh, doesn't have anything to do with me.  I have work to do in the precinct.  Scandal or not I'm working to elect Dems.  Which bring me to:

8. compromise - in my political work every step of the way is a compromise.  I vote for people who do not have my positions because they are still better than the other one.  I know they're taking advantage of me but I do it anyway.  My time here has shown me that not to do it is worse.  Humphrey was better than Nixon, the revolutionary me of 1968 professed not to see the difference.  The Naderist position of 2000 that there was no difference between the Ds and the Rs was either a contributing cause or the cause of the outcome that year.  Never mind that in some ways it was and is true, like both of them are corruptly influenced by financial interests.

I must have a Dem president and a Dem senate for the next 4-8 years because I must have a 5th non-conservative supreme court justice.  Otherwise it will be what I consider mean and nasty.  This is no time for idealism.  Only the Dems can possibly hold back the Rips.  I'm totally fine with pushing for whatever policy point anyone wants.  Then they can go out and vote Dem.  Go ahead and elect a Green to local office.  We're not going to have a Green president, not even a Green congressperson.  A Dem is the best we're going to get.  Compromise.  Yuk.  Compromise.

That's what being grownup is about, right?  Most of the time.  Most of the time its cleanup and clerical.  Hero stuff hardly ever happens.  Right?  The real heroism is grinding through.  Right?

The difference is that the Dems, some of them, when they're doing well, try to open doors for people to be able to go through while Rips are all the time looking for hidden doors so they can nail them shut.  Go Dems.