For the final results, check out Gotham Gazette Campaign 2005 - November 8, 2005 General Election Results [1]
I urge everybody to read Micah Sifry's post-mortem of the Rasiej campaing.
[via micah.sifry.com [2]]:
Emboldened by a sense that the Internet is enabling more people to participate, inspired by all the evidence of public disaffection with politics as usual, and motivated by a desire to push a 21st century vision of government and civic life, we dove in and tried to put into practice what many of us have been talking about. What follows is meant to be a continuation of that conversation, neither its beginning nor its end.
It's an amazingly candid and insightful review of not just what happened but what everybody in grassroots politics could be learn from their experiences. Awesome work that merits a third reading before I comment on it.
Ben over at The Policke [3]r talks about the retroness of the Bloomberg's campaign tactics in The Politicker: The Return of the Telephone - NYO [4]. I have to agree with him and I am going to go one further (because I already did here [5] : Bloomberg knew that Ferrer was going to hit the pavement and so he did as well. He used his money to buy himself a grassroots to destroy the Democrats effort. And contrary to what would be the obvious, many of these 'grassroots' by my own account were immigrant men from the Caribbean and Indian/Pakistan region. Or at least they were the ones who were unleashed on my kneck of the woods.
And of course, there is the level headed op-ed from Gigi E. Georges and Howard L. Wolfson, Singing the Blues in a Blue City [6] on the matter of campaign financing:
One way to avoid repeating this situation is to re-examine the city's campaign finance law. We do not think it wise to infuse more public money into campaigns, but when candidates who pay for their own campaigns significantly exceed the law's spending limits, opponents who stay within the system should be permitted to raise larger contributions.
And I can't believe Will over at OnNYTurf [7] posted a snippet of an email from a discussion a few of us had about the Ferrer campaign : Blame the campaign not the candidate [8]. Or as Mole wrote on that email :
"They started out HORRIBLY organized and improved to merely poorly organized. But a couple of days before the election, it seemed to me that the whole campaign was unraveling. I heard reports from organizers that their Ferrer contacts in essence threw up their hands and told our people that we were on our own. This meant that on election night, there was almost no Ferrer campaign presence. At PS 321, one of the highest turnout polling places in the city, from 5:30-7 PM I was the only Ferrer person there. No one was there before me from what I could tell, and when I called in to the people I knew covering the district I learned that because the Ferrer campaign had sent them no people, they couldn't cover PS 321 at all. Folks, that is SURRENDER by the Ferrer campaign. In the end, we did more for Ferrer than his own campaign did, I think."
I honestly believe that the people who were working for Ferrer fucked it up out of not just incompetence but lack of true support for him. Can we discuss career politickers for a moment? These consultants that go from campaign to campaign : Are they doing it just for the paycheck or are they working from a core set of liberal values? Because, honestly, I was slammed with a lot of cynicism from the Ferrer people.
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