Everyone has to be ready to have difficult conversations NOW
"Everyone has to be ready to have difficult conversations NOW," said Kate Kendall (Exective Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and one of the architects of the No On Prop 8 campaign) at an event last night that was a hybrid of town hall, panel discussion, and mass-group-therapy. She was talking about having challenging talks with potential allies who still need some winning-over, but she might as well have been referring to the event itself. It was, by the standards of consensus-happy San Francisco, a pretty tough room.
Onstage were a handful of folks who held varying levels of responsibility for Prop 8, and were now exhibiting varying levels of sheepishness. Mark Leno, Tom Ammiano, and Andrea Shorter kicked things off with some nice words -- particularly well-received was Mark's observation that since the vote a few years ago, gay marriage is now 18 points closer to being the official will of the people, and those are 18 points that our enemies will never get back. There was a short introduction of the moderators (two local journalists) and the panelists (Field Director Dan Hawes, Campaign Manager Steve Smith, Director of API Equality Tawal Panyacosit, NCLR's Kate Kendall, and Equality California's Geoff Kors), and then the floor was opened to the generally irate public.
Kate Kendall, in our opinion, was a real charmer -- identifying mistakes, apologizing, speaking honestly while still exorcising diplomacy. On the other side of the charm chart was probably Steve Smith, who was casual and calm but matter-of-fact and not particularly contrite. He was particularly prone to using a tense we've heard called the "Past Exonerative": mistakes were made. For example, "it should have taken 36 to 48 hours" to respond to the ads about education, he said, but instead, "it took nine days." Oh, really, that's good to know, Mister Campaign Manager.
Steve also mentioned that he managed the No On Prop 4 campaign at the same time that he was working on No On Prop 8. What a busy guy! We wonder how he could possibly have found the time to simultaneously manage both high-profile projects. Must be really good at multitasking, amirite?
After the jump: juicy gossip.
According to No On Prop 8's research, the best way to win people to the No side was by showing married gays. The opposition had similar data -- their article in Politics Magazine says that they found that attacking gay couples hurt their cause. So why didn't the No side use more gays in their ads? Nobody would really come clean about that. Steve employed the past exonerative tense, making reference to "decisions that were made" and "I wasn't in the room."
Steve danced around how exactly who WAS in the room -- who made the decision to exclude married gay couples from ads? After some prodding, he described an executive committee of six consultants -- Patrick Guerrero, Gail Kaufman, Rick Clausen, Chad Griffin, Nick Donatello, and Mark something (sounded like Armor?). "One of the biggest mistakes was that everything was turned over to consultants," Geoff added later.
The audience got pretty pissed off at those six consultants, once Steve named them (and estimated that probably only two were gay), but we have trouble believing that they were making bad decisions. Y'see, we're acquainted with a few of them -- outside of our duties for SFist, we chatted with one or two of those consultants about our side-project, Stop8.org, and we spent some time listening to each others' thoughts about strategy. And their heads seemed to be screwed on pretty darn tight. We only talked a few times, but we liked the conversations that we had. And they didn't use the past exonerative once. The audience last night was ready to blame the consultants for keeping gays in the closet; but having met some of them, that just doesn't pass the smell-test with us.
On to other matters: why was there no Get Out The Vote on the day of election, a moderator asked. Well, turns out there was -- the campaign sent people to polling stations instead of using the database that they amassed during phonebanking. (Compare that with the Yes side, which recently explained that their GOTV effort was a fucking MONTH long.) Asked if they would do it the same way again, Dan Hawes said they would.
And why didn't they use Obama's endorsement? Lack of money, said Steve. Any message that the No side put out, the Yes side could have countered, and they could have done it louder, he explained. So they decided to wait until the right moment to mention that Obama was opposed to Prop 8. And how did that go? Lousy. They waited until just a few days before the election -- after many people had already voted absentee -- and only mentioned Obama because the Yes side had put out a deceptive flyer about him. Once again, No's lengthy silence allowed Yes to frame the debate.
Responding to Mark Leno's complaint that his offers of help were rebuffed by the campaign, Geoff Kors admitted that the campaign lacked the bandwidth to accept volunteers' services. That's why they could only offer a lame one-side-fits-all phonebank. Kate said that this was the most painful mistake of the campaign. "I would have thrown open the doors and said, 'whoever wants to do anything -- ANYTHING -- can do whatever you want.'" This was later addressed by a frustrated volunteer who said that she wanted to take a week off of work, get training, and then go into a community that needed canvassers -- but nobody would return her calls or emails. "I'm sorry," Kate said, visibly dismayed by the story, "That's inexcusable. It's got to be corrected in the future." Steve agreed that they should have listened to volunteers. But they didn't. He didn't say why.
One observation that stuck in our mind came when Steve was observing that they failed to talk to labor and minority leadership. "We're good at standing in a circle and talking to each other," he said, "but we needed to pivot 180 degrees and talk outward. It didn't happen." There's that past exonerative again.
Steve also admitted that he was opposed to the release of polling data that showed that they were losing. He'd never done anything like that in a campaign, he said, and he was convinced that it would lead their supporters to write them off. But instead, the opposite happened: a huge surge in money and support, probably because it caught so many people off guard.
"The rural parts of California need your enthusiasm," one speaker told the crowd. She explained that there's a lot of gay-gay-gay enthusiasm in cities, but out in Mendocino (for example) they need more help. To that end, a group in Fresno is asking Californians to "meet in the middle" for a day of outreach where outreach is needed most. We'll have more info about that as the day (March 7) approaches.
One of the most moving speakers was a 24-year-old law student and daughter of a lesbian mom. "We are ready to fight for our parents' rights," she said. Aww! So nice. And totally bewildering to most of the activists present: the children of baby-boomers have an approach to activism that is vastly different from the generations that preceeded them; with their Facebooks and their wikis and their cellular telegraphs, the old guard just doesn't know what to do with these kids.
And it was getting on past 8:30 when we had to duck out of the meeting. Most of the juicy stuff had already been said, the unheated room was fucking freezing, and in the interests of time the panel had just been asked to hold their explanations so the public could talk. The entire meeting was videotaped, though, and the video should be going up on Vimeo soon. Ha ha ha, just kidding! We have no idea what will happen to the videotape. Probably end up in a vault somewhere. But we'll keep nagging the organizers about making the video public, and we're sure Petrelis will do the same. We'll let you know what comes of that. The current organizers may not understand the Internets, but the kids who replace them will.
So. There you have it. Did you read all of that? It's dense, we know. But we'd love to hear your thoughts.