Doesn't get old as yet

So I'm sitting at my desk here in the Capitol, just plugging away on the net. Without keeping track of the people around me, I notice Sen. Joe Lieberman sitting across room joking around on the phone next to his chair. I also ran into our friend Rep. Katherine Harris hanging out in the hallway outside our office. I guess I haven't gotten over this whole thing... but it's crazy to see all these rockstar politicians in and out of the office.

How the West (and by west, I mean Ohio) was Won...

In today's Hotline, there was a brilliant clip of a New York Magazine story retelling the ground game in Ohio and the build up to the election. Since I'm a grassroots nerd, this story simply fascinates me. Here is the low-down on what happened on election day:

In the upcoming edition of the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai writes on spending Election Day in OH with ACT state dir. Steve Bouchard. That day, ACT and America Votes "would put hundreds of paid canvassers and some 20,000 volunteers" on the streets. "It had seemed to Bouchard, a year ago, that it would be impossible to get ordinary people to volunteer" for a 527. "After all, ACT represented a phenomenon that had never before been seen in presidential politics: a campaign without a candidate. Much of its staggering $125 million haul came from wealthy liberals" like George Soros and interest groups like the SEIU, "which was the single largest contributor in money and manpower." And the 527s "couldn't even make contact" with John Kerry's campaign. The group "existed separately as a massive door-to-door campaign without anything like the star quality of an actual, breathing politician."
But ACT had "evolved into something glamorous, a kind of sleek new political vehicle for the Volvo-driving set. Many of the volunteers were from New York, New England and California; among them, I met a book editor from Manhattan and a lawyer from Santa Barbara. A few nights earlier, in Cleveland, Bouchard and I had visited a basement-level phone bank where the ACT volunteers included the actors Matt Dillon and Timothy Hutton and the actress Eliza Dushku. ('Eliza who?' I had asked. 'Don't know,' Bouchard shrugged, prompting the actress herself, apparently blessed with good hearing, to turn around and appraise us coldly.)" Bouchard: "I don't care where these people are from as long as they're motivated." (Editor's note to Bai: Eliza Dushku starred recently in "Bring It On" but you might remember her as Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter in "True Lies").
By Election Day, ACT "claimed to have registered 85,000 new voters," while the America Votes coalition had registered 215,000. Those voters registered by ACT "were contacted as many as a dozen times" afterwards, "by phone or by mail or by a live canvasser." ACT "claimed to have knocked on 3.7 million doors and held more than 1.1 million phone conversations" in OH. The Kerry campaign had arrived in OH "after ACT and reported having knocked on about 585,000 doors just before" Election Day. Bouchard: "There's no way a party or a campaign could put on the ground the resources that we have. The fundamental truth is that we are a blunt instrument. We're trying to be as scientific as we can be. But the sheer numbers of doors we knock on and phone calls we make are just astounding."
ACT CEO Steve Rosenthal "had been loaned a private jet for the closing days of the campaign by one of the group's wealthy donors. He had touched down early in Cincinnati, and now he was driving his rental car from Dayton to Columbus." Rosenthal: "I'm just blown away by what I see everywhere I go. It's raining, but our people aren't deterred. They're voting. They're organizing. They're canvassing. It's amazing. I really think we could win by a substantial margin."
ACT "represented Rosenthal's vision more than anyone else's." Emily's List pres. Ellen Malcolm "had raised the most money" for the group, but Rosenthal "had earned his legendary status inside the party as a brilliant field strategist." A week before the election, Rosenthal had said: "For the life of me, I can't see how we could lose Ohio. The only way they win Ohio is to steal it like they did Florida four years ago."
Rosenthal explained "what he had learned as a union organizer. He had increased turnout among union members at a time when the union rolls themselves were shrinking, and he had done it by focusing on new registrants." The Dem party "had a different approach." Bai visited Kerry's OH HQs a day before. "It was only a five-minute drive from ACT's office, and yet so complete was the separation between the campaign and the 527s that no one in the ACT office seemed to know where it was." Kerry OH spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri said "that the only time Kerry operatives had stumbled across ACT's work in the state was when they went to rent vans for Election Day and found that ACT had beat them to it."
In talking with Palmieri "it was clear that the party and its candidate did not share Rosenthal's vision." Palmieri: "Field people generally feel that registering new voters isn't a good use of time. It takes a lot of energy and time to register new voters, and you know they don't come out to vote." Palmieri said that the campaign's OH effort "had adopted the old-fashioned strategy of counting 'hard yeses.' They found stalwart Democratic voters and pounded them with mail and visits to make sure they went to the polls." But ACT "reflected Rosenthal's dream: he could take what he had started in the labor movement, this push for new voters, and expand it into a national turnout program over which the party itself had no control."
For the Election Day push, the van drivers were "in charge." It was "the driver's job to make sure that the canvassing teams hit every door on their route, affixing a giant post-it note reminding residents to vote. (The post-it notes, it turned out, could only be used in the afternoon, because the morning dew caused them slip off.)" Rosenthal: "Once you do this, there's no going back. One of the by-products of this election is this whole new generation of organizers who know how to cut turf, develop lists, use them to target voters. They know how to do these things now. This is how politics changes."
Over lunch, Rosenthall received the first wave of exit polling. Kerry "was up by four points in Ohio and Florida. He led by 12 in Pennsylvania." Rosenthal: "These look great. I'll take these." But he "wondered why it was that they hadn't heard any anecdotal word of the vaunted Republican turnout effort." Challengers that GOPers had "successfully asked the Supreme Court to allow into the polls, so that they could challenge new voters with fraudulent registrations, had never shown up. Field offices weren't detecting any sign of Bush canvassers on the streets or at the polls. It was as if all this talk about the Republicans' volunteer-driven machine had been some kind of a strategic feint, rather than an actual plan."
The "traditional" Dem "formula for victory" in OH "centered on a handful of counties with a heavy concentration of minority voters: win the critical stronghold Cuyahoga County by a margin of more than 150,000 votes; stay close in Franklin County; and hold the Republicans to a margin of victory of fewer than 60,000 votes in Hamilton County, the area that encompasses Cincinnati." In the end, Dems in '04 "would easily meet these criteria, and then some. Kerry would win Cuyahoga by more than 217,000 votes, narrowly win Franklin, and he would lose to Bush by fewer than 25,000 votes in Hamilton."
Later exit poll numbers showed OH "tightening." And "with the lines at urban polling places came a new problem: in a few hours, the polls would close, and thousands of voters, most of them presumably Democrats, would be standing out in the rain until late at night, waiting to vote. They couldn't be allowed to just give up and go home. Bouchard ordered his staff at headquarters to send out volunteers with ponchos and meals for the voters waiting their turn."
Ronsenthal lieutenant Tommy Lindenfeld "worked out a deal." Lindenfeld told Bouchard: "We can feed some people." If ACT, "which was almost out of money, would write a check for $3,000 to McDonald's for van-loads of hot meals, the AFL-CIO would reimburse them." Bouchard "looked incredulous": "What? I'm not going to write a $3,000 check to 'feed some people.' What, is there some kind of new McSurf-and-Turf I don't know about?" Lindenfeld "snapped back": "But we're not paying for it." They "needed the food. The deal was done. What gnawed at Bouchard was that nowhere we went in Franklin County, which included Columbus and was a strongly contested swing county in Ohio, did we see any hint of a strong Republican presence -- no signs, no door-knockers, no Bush supporters handing out leaflets at the polls." Lindenfeld, on the GOPers: "What they talked about is a dream. We've got the reality. They're wishing they had what we've got."
But for Bouchard, "the silence was unsettling. How could there be such a thing as a stealth Get-Out-the-Vote drive? Bouchard decided that he wanted to drive to an outlying Republican area to see if their turnout was keeping pace with the city and if the campaign itself was waging a more visible effort in rural precincts. Obliging him, Lindenfeld punched a few keys on his in-dash navigation system and set a course for Delaware County, a fast-growing exurban tract north of Columbus where Republicans dominate."
Kerry's "early lead should have been widening as daytime turned to night; according to the time-honored rules of politics, Republicans vote in the morning, while Democrats vote late. Instead, the exit polls suggested that whatever lead the Democrats still had was slipping away, and the long delays at urban polling places, with the rain now bearing down, seemed to present a distinct disadvantage." Both Lindenfeld and Bouchard "worked their cell phones." Lindenfeld "barked" into his: "Listen, the latest poll numbers we heard showed Ohio dead even. So you need to get back on the cell phone and work the Nextel pagers and make sure no one comes back early and punks out on their routes. We need to work the shit out of it."
The pair stopped at a polling location in Delaware City and found it "empty." Lindenfeld: "Look at this. Does this look like a busy polling place? Look around. There's no one here." But "an investigation of the voter rolls, taped the wall outside the voting area, indicated that the polling place was dead for a less encouraging reason: most of the voters in the two precincts assigned to the recreation center had already voted." Election officials said "that 1,175 of the 1,730 registered voters on the rolls had cast their ballots. In other words, turnout in those precincts was up to an impressive 68 percent, and there were still two hours left before the polls closed." The county as a whole would end up with "an astounding turnout rate of 78 percent, with two out of three votes going to Bush.
Bai writes: "I was beginning to understand that the rules of the game were changing, confounding even the experts who seemed to have this business of voter turnout all figured out. For decades," Dems "had been virtually unchallenged by Republicans when it came to mobilizing voters, and during that time, they had come to rely on a certain set of underlying assumptions, all of them based on experience in urban areas. One was that the volume of activity at a polling place was a reliable measure of turnout; long lines meant higher turnout, and no lines meant disaster. Another was that the strength of a get-out-the-vote program could be gauged by the number of people canvassing city streets, the people holding signs in the rain, vans carrying voters to the polls."
But now GOPers "were learning to exploit their advantage in rapidly expanding rural areas that organizers like Lindenfeld, for all their technological innovation, just didn't understand. In shiny new townhouse communities, canvassing could be done quietly by neighbors; you didn't need vans and pagers. Polling places could accommodate all the voters in a precinct without ever giving the appearance of being overrun."
When NBC called OH for Bush, "a quiet disbelief descended on the room" at ACT's HQ. One volunteer "abruptly flipped channels," saying: "Folks, the reason we changed the channel is because NBC is the only network that called it." Bouchard: "I hear the PAX network hasn't called it either. Let's put that on." Bouchard's cell phone was ringing. "Preparations were being made for a recount. Moveon.org was already organizing a rally for later in the day. Bouchard knew the numbers better than anyone, and he already knew what the outcome would be: Ohio had cost Kerry the presidency. He looked like a man who wanted to be just about anywhere other than where he was."
Sitting in his office the next day, Bouchard "admitted that he was, more than anything else, baffled. It was impossible to know -- and would be for some time -- whether ACT's newly registered voters had come to the polls in the numbers Rosenthal had predicted. What was clear was that ACT had set goals for the vote total in each of its target counties in Ohio, and it had exceeded them. In Cuyahoga County, where ACT had set a target of 350,540 votes for Kerry, based on what each precinct could deliver, he received 433,262. In Franklin County, where the goal was 262,895 votes, Kerry had garnered 275,573. In fact, Kerry's 2.65 million votes in were the most ever by a Democrat in Ohio."
ACT "couldn't take credit for these numbers" but it was "hard to dispute that ACT had done its part, both in Ohio and nationally. Kerry received a total of 4,862,000 more votes than Gore did, and, according to ACT's breakdown, 58 percent of that increase came in the 12 battleground states that ACT had targeted. Results in some states seemed to bear out Rosenthal's theory on expanding the base." In FL, 13% of the votes "were cast by new voters, and a clear majority of them voted for Kerry."
So "why wasn't it enough? The Bush campaign had simply created an entirely new math in Ohio. It wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, or even four. But with so many white, conservative and religious voters now living in the brand new townhouses and McMansions in Ohio's growing ring counties, Republicans were able to mobilize a stunning turnout in areas where their support was more concentrated than in the past. Bush's operatives did precisely" what they said they would do "in these communities: they tapped into a volunteer network using local party organizations, union rolls, gun clubs and churches."
The GOP effort "wasn't visible" to Dems "because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, counties of which Democrats had some vague notion, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent." For Dems, "this new phenomenon" felt "like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out the hills and condo communities in numbers they never knew existed." Palmieri: "They just came in droves. We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans."
From the time of FDR, and "especially" after '00, Dems "operated on the premise that they were superior in numbers, if only because their supporters lived in such concentrated urban communities." If they could "mobilize" every Dem vote in the industrial centers -- "and in its populist heartland as well - then they would win on math alone. Not anymore." GOPers "now have their own concentrated vote, and it will continue to swell. Turnout operations like ACT can be remarkably successful at churning out the votes that exist, but turnout alone is no longer enough to win a national election. The Democrat who wins will be the one who changes minds."
Rosenthal: "I can't think of a thing in Ohio that we could have done more to boost our vote. The shortcoming in some ways is that the national Democratic Party has built this values wall between itself and a lot of voters out there, and the Republicans took advantage of it. The rude awakening here is that I always thought there were more of us out there. And this time there were more of them" (11/21 issue).

Do women make the best secretaries?

So it's official: Condi Rice for Secretary of State.

You know... maybe this politics stuff is getting old, but I'm just not surprised by this move. We all knew Powell on his way out, and I'm very relieved that the President picked Dr. Rice to step up. Imagine how crazy things would be if he had our friend Paul Wolfowitz take the helm of the State Dept. Fun Stuff. In fact, there were actually rumors of the Speaker leaving his post for the State department, but well... Pigs can't fly as yet.

Oh, and here's a funny line from my boy Ryan: "The nomination of Condi Rice proves that a black women can be just as evil as any white man." gotta love ryan.

Interesting bit of news that's not being reported widely out there, the House Republican Conference re-elected Rep. Dennis Hastert to a new term as House Speaker. Of course, it was a given that he would retain his position, but still welcome news to the folks here in the Capitol.

And on a personal note. We found our house. We're going in to sign the lease later this week, but we're moving in after thanksgiving. Also, I'm gearing up to head back home to Orlando for thanksgiving, so if anyone wants to chill, I'll be there from Saturday the 20th to the 27th.

Oh, and I got a message from that deaf girl... more on that come later.

O.D.B. (1968-2004): He Liked It Raw

So I was reading the news last night and came across this CNN.com article: Rapper O.D.B. dies at recording studio.

Yes, the dirt dog, Dirt McGrit, Big Baby Jesus, Osirus, Old Dirty Chinese Food Restaurant, O.D.B. himself has passed. Man, first Rick James then Old Dirty... Dave Chappelle is running out of comedic material quick.

So you ask me, 'Brian, are you saddened?'
Yes

'Depressed?'
A bit

'Surprised?'
no way.

In fact, I am a bit surprised that he didn't die on the toilet or something else extremely embarrassing. O.D.B. is a legend and I'm definitely a fan... have been since the original Wu-Tang album. But the guy is a walking blooper reel. Remember the time he had MTV news join him and his family (over 20+ illegitimate children throughout the years) on a trip in a limousine to pick up his new ration of food stamps? Oh yes, they gave it to him too!

And lest we not forget the little rant he made at the 1998 grammys. "Wu Tang is for the Children!!!"

For a synopsis of the recent and random events in O.D.B.'s hysterical life, please visit this site which labels him the number one trainwreck of a person. Not so far from the truth!

What's going on here???

Wow... this is ridiculous. There must be something going on behind the scenes. I can't believe this.

Potent Potables

So it looks like Pataki in '08 may be out of the question. Look what my connection to the Pataki crew said to a Israeli newspaper. Great stuff, ain't it?

Another funny story: I read the news yesterday morning and I realized my Orlando Magic were playing the Wizards here in D.C. Since the game was that evening, I checked if any cheap tickets were available through ticket master. I was ready to plunk down $40 bucks on a so-so ticket when I realized... "Hell, I'm here in the capitol. There has to be tickets to the game floating around." So I started to ask around and, sure enough, my friend in a member's office came through with 4 tickets, each worth $290! Got to hand it to those persistent lobbyists.

A few of us got together and made it to the game at the MCI Center. Sure enough, we were right on the floor. I'm talking Jack Nicholson seats! We even chatted up with Grant Hill for a while. It was tough being a Magic fan in the middle of a sea of Wizards fanatics, but we didn't care. We tried our best to cheer the team on, but of course the Magic failed once again. The one time I see them live this year, huh?

Feeling Sick on the inside?

Anybody has a case of post-election selection trauma?

By the way... I've got a few decisions to make. In fact, you may be able to help me out:

Q: Say you're me and you have to choose between three ways to spend the next year. What do you choose?

a) Staffing a new member (with huge potential) in the House of Representatives for little to so-so money.
b) Managing a software support center and designing a new version of a campaign manager software for pretty damn good money.
c) Hanging out with a consulting company and waiting for a potential presidential campaign from a little-known governor from N.Y. for unknown money.

What do you think? Be aware that money is pretty important to me right about now (if you know what I mean).

whadda happen?

wow... boy, was I wrong. this is ridiculous.

:: flying back to d.c. now ::