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1/ My first job out of college was answering phones in the Senate.
2/ When someone wanted to influence an upcoming vote they did the same thing, flood the zone with advocacy driven calls.
3/ We had plenty of weeks like this with the phones ringing off the hook tying everything up.
4/ Orgs didn't have the internet to fire everyone up and dial calls were prohibitively expensive.
5/ So they sent cheerfully urgent mailers with our phone number and their message to voters all over the state. That was organizing.
6/ There are a million apps these days to help voters learn issues and contact their legislators. Ours were dead tree via bulk mail.
7/ Weekly or monthly mailers presented two different messages so the voter could pick one and then call us or mail it in.
8/ Postcards were delivered to our offices by the carton. They were ubiquitous, stacked in closets, blocking the hallways
9/ Some offices had to respond to the postcards but we didn't. My boss said, why remind them we don't agree with them?
10/ Often callers would decide the position they wanted us to take while we held on the phone.
11/ We were all ninjas at Minesweeper and Spider Sol. No internet to surf, remember?
12/ Thousands paid for this “advocacy” service. I hope the sadistic genius who dreamed up this brilliant scam is burning in a lake of fire
13/ We used landlines with long curly cords so we could walk to the bookshelf or the newsstand or the wall to look stuff up.
14/ We carried notepads of paper but usually not to take tallies. There wasn’t anything to tally.
15/ These people agreed with us. They just wanted to make sure we knew that.
16/ We kept meticulously handwritten logs of any key people who got through and anyone else who wanted a response.
17/ All day long we repeated, "Yes, you're right, this is just terrible. Yes, I'll tell him, he'll be so glad you called."
18/ Men would ask for the Senator by his childhood nickname whether they knew him or not. This is kind of awesome.
19/ Women would call from their church groups, garden clubs, and bridge clubs and pass the phone around
20/ so everyone there had a turn to give her name and address and read her post card. My own mom did this to me. Twice.
21/ So flash forward to today. If you're my counterpart, you do need a tally of your home state voters
22/ because the Senator needs to make a decision and tell the media who was calling and why
23/ Back then we had a lot of room for error, but in the era of Twitter it is critical to be lovely and attentive
24/ to every single person who calls, no matter where they live, even though it's a maddening waste of time.
25/ One false move and you'll offend a college friend of the wife of a county chair in Iowa, and then your boss can't run for President.
26/ So please, as you're organizing these next few weeks, have people call only their own Senator so others can get thru to theirs.
27/ If we focus on making calls that count, we maximize everyone's influence in their own state.
28/ We're all in this together, but we'll reach our own goals faster if we stay in our lanes.
It's like this: There's a finite number of hours in a day. Say staff can dispatch 50 calls per hour, and 10 are instate, 40 are not...
...Those 40 out of state calls are not tallied. They don't matter. So when someone asks how many supporters called, the answer is 10....
Those 40 calls kept instate calls from getting through. And only instate calls count. We need the tally to be 50/50
I didn't say they weren't fair game, their numbers are public record. I said you shouldn't call them.
29/ Let me clarify: If a staffer can dispatch 50 calls/hour, and she gets 40 from out of state and 10 from instate, and someone asks...
30/ If they ask how many supporters called, answer would be 10. We need it to be 50. Out ofstate calls tie up the lines for calls that count
