Published: The Morning Call (June 16, 2014)
After more than two years as a political columnist for PolicyMic and other publications, I made the decision last month to undertake a career hiatus and work as the Northampton County field organizer for Tom Wolf’s gubernatorial campaign.
Although I knew this would probably be a temporary position, I embraced it not only to help the Democrats nominate the strongest possible candidate for governor but also to learn more about what it’s like to work at politics at the ground level — locally, where our elected leaders have the most immediate and direct impact on our lives.
Now that the Democratic primary is over and my position with Wolf has ended, I figured it would be fun to share three observations that apply to anyone — regardless of party or ideology — for whom professional politics is his line of work.
•1. You’re surrounded by idealists.
It is a quintessentially American impulse to dismiss those who work in politics as untrustworthy scum; one could expect little else from a nation that traces its genesis to a literal Declaration of Independence from a despotic monarch. There is some truth to this assumption, of course, as any glance at our daily headlines will quickly reinforce.
At the same time, one side of our political life that doesn’t receive much attention — mainly because it doesn’t sell papers — is the fundamental decency that is prevalent among its professionals. Sure, politics has more than its fair share of scoundrels and idiots, but a surprising number of your colleagues are intelligent, well-informed, and … well, kind of noble.
What else would you call the decision to work seven days a week, often for 10-12 hour days, making a quarter of what you could conceivably make in the legal or corporate world? Yes, many of them are also ambitious (a trait hardly limited to the political arena), but just as many aren’t, and both the ambitious and the humble have chosen a low-paying workaholic lifestyle because they want to devote their careers to a cause they believe is important. Left wing, right wing, centrist or radical, these men and women are reminders that in its own quiet way, civic duty is still alive and thriving.
•2. Voter nonparticipation is your main job complaint.
While I can’t speak for all political professionals on this one, I can say without hesitation that I grew to resent nonvoters far more than the ones who simply didn’t agree with me. Although interactions with people of opposing partisan and/or candidate loyalties could be unpleasant, they were still passionately participating in the same process to which I was devoting so much of my time, energy and money.
Nonvoters, on the other hand, were the worst. They were not only more likely to be disrespectful when I contacted them or to flake after committing to volunteer (both the biggest pains insofar as the requirements of my job were concerned) but also more likely to display a self-destructive attitude.
You see, for people who work in politics, their job is at its core a numbers game –— figuring out how to make sure their candidate and party get more votes than the opponents. If a citizen told me that he or she didn’t vote, I was professionally obligated to stop concerning myself with that person’s needs and opinions since they could literally do nothing to help or hurt my candidate.
This was especially upsetting when it would be someone who was poor or suffering from some form of injustice who would directly benefit if they and others like them were more involved but who, by their own choice, were invisible to the powers that be.
•3. You develop a sense of your (infinitesimally small) place in history.
Elections do matter. In this one, for instance, Democrats are trying to oust Republican Tom Corbett, one of the most unpopular governors in the nation, despite the fact that no Pennsylvania governor has ever lost a bid for re-election.
Throughout the nation, Republicans are trying to ride a tidal wave of optimistic expectations to success in the 2014 midterm elections, while Democrats are hoping to stave off, if not reverse, Republican gains. When you get involved, you play a part in making this history, no matter how small your role might seem to be.
As Robert Kennedy famously put it: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”