By Zachary Roth
We’ve been wondering lately how things are going on the ground in the swing states expected to determine the election. Detailed dispatches from these crucial areas have so far been few and far between this campaign season. Matt Bai begins to remedy that deficiency in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine — which is out on the streets of New York this morning — with a lengthy, fascinating piece on the Bush campaign’s developing grassroots operation in the exurban communities of Ohio, a swing state if ever there was one.
Bai argues that fast-growing exurban communities on the fringes of metropolitan areas likely will prove crucial in November. Because the struggling economy means Bush can’t count on rural counties to counter-balance the Democrats’ traditional advantage in industrial areas, he’s putting unprecedented energy into the exurbs, particularly those in the central and southern parts of the state, around Columbus and Cincinnati. But — this being a Karl Rove production — the ultimate goal goes well beyond 2004. The Bush campaign, according to Bai, is working to harness the power of the exurbs to create a permanent political operation, a New Economy version of the old urban Democratic machines.
Rove and campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Bai reports, have developed a rigid organizational system which dictates, among other things, the exact number of volunteers that leaders in each county across the country are expected to recruit (643 in Clark County, for example). Bai compares this structure to that used by Amway, the world’s most successful “Multi-Level Marketing” company, in which “each independent entrepreneur who joins the sales force … becomes a recruiter, responsible for bringing in new entrepreneurs beneath her.”
Bai notes that many of the local leaders of the campaign are drawn to the work as much for personal reasons as out of any undying devotion to the president and his policies. One county chair admits he’s looking to get ahead in local Republican circles, while another, twice-divorced, says he likes the “ready-made social network.” Bai doesn’t say so, but one can’t help noticing that these eager volunteers, searching for community in an era of isolation, aren’t so different from another group profiled by the Times Magazine late last year — the horde of rootless tech-savvy twenty-somethings who had descended on Burlington, Vermont to support a very different candidate.
Along the way, he captures some vivid lifestyle details. The fruit salad at the Clark County Republicans Lincoln Day Dinner, Bai tells us, contains “a generous helping of mayonnaise.” One exurban “community” features fake store windows, sporting names like “Old Stuff Antiques” which are “designed to create for residents the warm aura of a bustling town center,” Bai observes, “There was an inescapable political undertone to this new townhouse culture. The developers had designed communities of white nostalgia — theme parks for the conservative middle class.”
To be sure, the notion of using volunteers to recruit other volunteers is hardly revolutionary for a political campaign. And Bai perhaps assigns too much significance to quotes like the following from campaign manager Mehlman: “This campaign is more focused than most on measurement. If I have one kind of belief or philosophy, it’s that hope is not a strategy. And so you can’t say, ‘I hope we’ll get this done.’ We want to see what you’re getting done.” As Bai surely knows, that’s straight out of Grassroots Organizing 101.
What matters in the end, of course, is how well this elaborately-conceived plan delivers on Election Day. In that sense, the success of the operation remains an unknown. Bai declares that “There’s little doubt that the grassroots effort this fall will be the best Republicans have ever unleashed on the street” — quite a claim, given the success of Rove’s grassroots operation in 2002. But he also notes that not everything is going according to plan. Many volunteers haven’t used the Palm electronic organizers the campaign provided for canvassing, since they feel uncomfortable asking respondents for too many personal details. And the campaign recently backed off on recruiting “Bush Team Leaders” after finding that many potential volunteers are intimidated by the daunting list of required tasks. Bai closes, tellingly, with a quote from a county volunteer leader suggesting that her pyramid structure hasn’t gotten off the ground at all yet.
Bai also puts his finger on a critical tension at the heart of the campaign’s master plan: It aims to attract volunteers by giving them a sense of ownership — the feeling that they’re making their own decisions. But in fact, Bai reports, volunteers, like so many McDonald’s franchisees, aren’t empowered to make “even miniscule adjustments to the Plan.” In a fascinating moment, Bai recounts the reaction of the campaign’s Ohio Valley Regional Chair, responsible for overseeing four states, when he tells her that campaign higher-ups in Arlington have over-ruled her and prevented him from meeting with the campaign’s Ohio executive director: “She simply smiled in a kind, knowing way. She seemed to understand that these were not her decisions to make.”
The piece isn’t conclusive, nor could it be at this early date. But it is an on-the-ground report from a key battleground for the presidential vote, with a pronounced “you-are-there” quality to it. That’s the kind of reporting we haven’t seen enough of — and can’t get too much of.
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.