Andrew Golis

For an explanation of what this series is all about, read here. For part 1 of the series, read here. For part 2 of the series, read here.

In keeping with ignoring previous requests and instead writing about things that spark my more immediate interest, I’m going indulge jernigan and write about our campaign staff and a little about our structure. Seeing as how he was one of the tie-wearers, I’m curious to what he thinks about all of this. Apologies to my brother for not writing in iambic pentameter

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Alright, so the question at hand is how the campaign itself (me, the structure, the staff, the decisions etc.) worked.

First, a few points on the staff and structure. When we designed the structure of the campaign, the goal was to take the traditional model used by past successful UC campaigns (Mahan, Rohit, Sujean) and give it a shot of steroids. The model that had essentially been handed down (usually because the candidate worked on the previous President’s campaign) for years essentially consisted of a campaign manager (the candidate himself in Rohit’s case) and an inner cabinet with loosely assigned personal responsibilities but that generally dealt with issues on an ad hoc basis. We started from the personal responsibilities and solidified them, while at the same time adding an expansive field team. The rest of the details of how all that worked are a trade secret to be passed on to the next generation in due time

Two fundamental goals drove the way I organized the campaign. First, my goal was that Matt and Clay would never have to think about a logistical aspect of the campaign. I knew that Matt’’s perfectionist tendencies meant that if he had to worry about anything other than being the candidate, he wouldn’t sleep at all for those two weeks. I’’m proud of the fact that neither of them ever designed a poster (they got drafts and approved or not), got copies, read a budget or scheduled a meeting. The staff knew to always email or call me rather than one of them with campaign questions unless it was really important. I was their filter. Their job was to be the candidates, to speak to voters and groups. My and the staff’s job was to make that as easy for them as we could.

Secondly, I wanted to staff to include as many people as possible. I knew that the more people that were actively engaged in the campaign the more excited surrogates we had around campus, telling their friends, roommates and classmates about what they were doing. That kind of energy and enthusiasm would act as a testament to the importance of the campaign. This was the primary motivation for creating what ended up being an amazing field team (with Schmidty leading it). Harvard students don’t follow the UC intensely, and tend to vote for whoever they trust tells them to. I met a lot of people during the campaign who said things to me like “oh man, EE is spending so much time on this, I’ll definitely vote for you guys because it must be important” or “if Schmidty’s with you than so am I.” Relationships matter, and we wanted as many as possible.

One of the advantages we had on this front was that, because a lot of our staff was recruited through the UC and not simply our immediate circle of close friends (who were also there and amazing), our social network was huge. Other campaign staffs relied on close friends or specific pre-existing groups. Because of this, it was harder for them to expand beyond that immediate circle. Another advantage that our campaign had was that we had a lot of amazing people who were willing to work their asses off, even when it wasn’t the sexiest job in the world. The night before the campaign started, staffers of ours saw both Ty and Teo and Samita in Kinkos making copies of their own posters. Our staff was not simply recruited to do the sexy parts of the campaign in public, they were willing to do the hard work in private. That’s a big deal.

So, that said about the structure, a few quick thoughts on my job. My job was to set all of this up and lead it. Getting everything in place, whether it was the website or the platform or the staff themselves, was my primary concern for the time before the campaign started. This allowed Matt and Clay to spend a lot of time working out their platform, meeting with people on the UC and recruiting the people that ended up being our staff. During the campaign, my job was to facilitate the madness. Whether that meant being on the phone with Matt telling him what his next meeting was or figuring out who could run over to kinkos for copies at 1 am, or figuring out the next day’s schedule, it was just pretty much my job to make sure the whole thing stayed on track.

Strategy was mostly limited to posters, deciding how to spend the candidate’s time, what to say in our Crimson editorial, things like that. Most of those decisions were made by Matt, Clay and myself, often with input from others (especially Greg and a few other indispensable advisors). The big decisions always included Matt and Clay, but random little decisions I would just take care of.

Ok, because it’s late I’m gonna stop here. I apologize for the randomness of this entry. Please comment and ask more questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 at 4:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.