The Dean campaign is teeming with technically savvy volunteers anxious to do meaningful work to help elect the Guv. DeanCorps is a place to be a visible volunteer doing public service wearing T-Shirts and other ways of branding your righteous work as Dean-sponsored.
Based on the virtue of giving someone a pole rather than a fish, DeanCorps volunteers could teach their expertise to the underemployed, and rise to Dana Blankenhorn's worthy challenge (below) to show people how to upgrade their jobs and thereby win their votes. Dana wrote about the African-American community he knows, but this is a broader effort with a greater political reach.
The goal is to create a new, compelling metric to display on the Dean web site, something like:
Here's my vision for the program. We advertise the availability of expert DeanCorps tutors. Interested people are directed to a web site or 800 number to record their current job and the skills they think would help them earn a job upgrade. Simultaneously we register employers who agree to interview people after their skills have been upgraded. We build these numbers as fast as possible.
We create a new category of campaign services in addition to the current dozen or so (tabling, flyering, canvassing, etc.). The additional tutoring skills would be computer basics, Internet & email, MS Office, MS Windows, networking, telemarketing skills, and any other marketable discipline. Without using quotas, we obviously try to balance the needs of the chronically underemployed against those wanting to improve their security in a $100K/yr gig.
This is a campaign outreach program, so it's understandable that the emphasis would be in areas where the political impact would be greatest. Here are some themes and slogans that come to mind:
It will take some time for the DeanCorps Experts program to have a significant effect on national opinion; it's desirable for it to be in place for a full year before the election. We should launch the program at Internet speed. Here's a timetable at least as plausible as $5 million in the last 10 days of September:
A strategic use of the DeanCorps brand would be to continue it as a voluntary Peer-to-Peer training program after Dean's election. (Every candidate in history has been promise-rich and resource-poor, but Dean has an army of volunteers who will do anything to get him elected. Our enthusiasm seems able to expand on demand.)
After we the volunteers embrace the program, which is a certainty, the campaign can immediately boast its unique, unfair competitive advantage: mobilize this army to develop systems to support voluntary peer-to-peer small business and personal skills training. DeanCorps can pledge to continue our volunteer effort after Dean's elected by training others as our patriotic duty–AmeriCorps without the red tape.
This might become a Geek Corps program after Election day (just as we seem to need election monitoring here, we can use the formula that works overseas). DeanSpace tools can collect work pledges and skills inventories of our volunteers and publish the swelling pool of training resources which will be available as soon as our guy is elected.
That way we the volunteers are not just electing Dean to serve, we're also electing us to serve. Further, employers can make a commitment to interview people who have passed this skills training. Indeed, employers can describe the kinds of resources they're looking for. It will be an explicit understanding that people who have upgraded their skills through DeanCorps will start their new job at a higher pay scale than they are used to, but LESS than the typical pay scale for their new position. This makes it a personal upgrade but also a productivity boost.
Naturally they must reach parity within 1 year of hiring on. Dean Corps graduates will repay their training by training others to continue the righteous cycle.
Government cost: $0.
On October 4th and 6th, Dana Blankenhorn wrote eloquently on how to attract minority voters to the Dean campaign:
Dean’s "Black" Problem (10/4/03)
I’m white. Most of my neighbors are black. They’re good people. Some are great people. But my neighbors are not jumping up-and-down for Howard Dean like I am.
There may be one reason for both observations, Dean’s call that "you have the power."
My neighbors know better. Even when they have elected black officeholders, it was the politicians who had the power, not "them." To gain that power, compromises are required. Even then they often fail.
Blacks represent about one-third of the vote in Georgia, yet last year Democrats failed here. The same is true in South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Here blacks just need one-third of the white vote to win, but they can’t get it. And, in Georgia, they fell last year on the issue of the Confederate Battle Flag. Forty years after the Selma Bridge the KKK flag could still drag black people from any influence.
So excuse the cynicism. White folks here may respond to that "you have the power" stuff. Black folks know better.
The question remains, how do we break through? We have had successes. There are black faces at Dean Meetups in Georgia. There just aren’t many. The black folks I’ve seen at Dean meetings in the South are often young, always intelligent, usually professional.
What working class blacks are looking for, I think, is something more. They want to know, what’s in it for them? If we put this white dude in power, what do we get out of it? To these neighbors, power and justice are abstractions.
What they want are jobs. How will electing Howard Dean bring jobs to south Atlanta? Answer that question, for black leaders, and the next time Dean visits an AME church the pews will be filled with black faces.
Analog Power and Digital Power (10/6/03)Last week I wrote about the reticence of my black neighbors to support Howard Dean’s call, "You have the power."
I suggested they don’t believe it. Now I want to tell you why.
When Dean tells white supporters, "You have the power," he’s talking about it in the sense we learned it in school. Everyone who participates has some power. There are multiple power centers in the government. Even beyond that there are the press and public opinion – there is always a lever somewhere. Grab those levers, he says, and move the government toward a more hopeful direction.
This is analog power. This is the American system. Analog power is what has kept the American system alive for 200 years. Only once did it collapse, during the Civil War, and afterward it reconstituted itself, not as a collection of independent states but as a collection of states within a federal system.
Southern blacks don’t experience power this way. Either they’re in or they’re out, completely. When they’re in, then power might be wielded by good people, or bad people. But always, these are other people, an elite. When they’re out of power – as they are in this state and in nearly all states of the former Confederacy – they are truly out of power. They may have influence in their own local communities, but those communities are systematically starved by the states (and now by the national government).
Make no mistake. Racism is alive and very healthy throughout the American South. It creates a binary politics, with whites wedded to the Republican Party. When a state is 30% black, and those blacks vote in greater numbers than their population, yet the other party wins consistently, you know what is going on.
This binary politics has infected the general conservative movement. There is no such thing as compromise, just interim steps on the way toward the goal. That goal remains what it has always been, the utter, complete destruction of the liberal impulse, and its replacement by a permanent conservative elite.
White liberals don’t see power this way, but white conservatives do, and blacks certainly do. When Howard Dean calls "You have the power," my neighbors shrug it off as naivete. The only exceptions are those professionals who live in a white world, who have themselves gotten a taste of analog power in their lives.