I wanted to respond to what Marvin and Marcie had said. Everything I am going to say is in a vacuum and is not said with any campaign in mind.

CAVEAT: These are my thoughts in regard to disability message within campaigns and to the need for constituency coordinators: there are lots of ways to do it well. I would not characterize one as better than another, but I believe that there is a middle ground of having full community participation, while also having someone who can function on the community's behalf within the campaign, and on the campaign's behalf within the community.

DEAN 2004: Marvin refers to how Dean worked; it evolved from community members loosely associated and building platform ideas, very well and with high energy, to a more structured approach that still included the same community activists but focused the efforts toward specific work assignments on a weekly basis. About every ten days we released a new, targeted policy piece for the two+ months I was there. Not everything we drafted got released, but most things did. I thought the community work was great, but that having a coordinator come in and channel it towards continual policy piece generation, was an advancement.

GORE 2000: The Gore work was mostly done before they hired a coordinator, and so the work for a disability constituency director was to help draft Q&A responses, with appropriate community involvement, draft disability memos for the principal candidates, and go out into the field for advocacy events. I think the field work is essential for bringing the campaign out to the voters in an issue-specific way. I don't think having the candidate integrate a disability component into his or her stump message is enough; it is a tremendous victory and an critical for the general public to hear (and for the candidates to hear themselves say), but I don't think it can replace having issue-specific staff surrogates at issue-specific forums, advocating against their counterpart from the other campaign(s). I am not suggesting that as a criticism of any candidate in this cycle; it doesn't normally happen in the primaries.

CONSTITUENCY DIRECTORS AS A WHOLE: My personal view is that campaigns need constituency directors for every major constituency - women, students, African-Americans, Individuals with Disabilities, Seniors, Latinos, Asian-Americans, the list goes on. I think constituency directors are essential to representing each respective constituency within the campaign, and to advocate against their counterpart from other campaigns. I have done general policy work on campaigns and constituency-specific work, and the energy is simply not the same without a campaign staffer dedicated to a specific issue and constituency.

DISABILITY POLICY CREATION: Regarding campaign disability policy drafting, sometimes the community and the campaign don not see 100% eye to eye on an issue, and sometimes the community activists assisting the campaign don't agree among themselves as to what a policy should be. HAVA enforcement and implementation is an easy example. Campaigns don't like conflict, and sometimes they will go silent when confronted with that. A constituency director serves a critical function to go between the community and the campaign and keep the dialogue alive and headed to a workable outcome or compromise. That is compared to having no disability constituency director, and instead having just a general policy campaign staffer assigned to disability issues, who may not understand the larger issues in play, and who may just give up on that dispute. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and without a constituency director being an advocate inside the campaign in those circumstance, the campaign's focus and attention will be less.

I come from the HIV community, with very aggressive disability/disease advocates. If there were not someone within a political campaign who understands the cause and temper community criticism and their input before passing the comments up the campaign chain, some campaigns would just turn off their ears. Which would lead to greater conflict and be a loss to everyone. In a way, a constituency director is an ambassador to the community, someone who can help organize community forums to communicate with the campaign and enlarge the community's voice within the campaign.

THE FIELD WORK/CAMPAIGN ADVOCACY: Regarding campaign advocacy, I suppose it is a holdover belief from college debate days, but I don't see how ideas are tested well unless in a contest with other ideas. Advocacy forums are the best way, in my opinion, to compare ideas and test them by the fire of questions about implementation, funding, competition with other administrative priorities, etc. I think the best way to do that is to have someone from each campaign, whether in the primaries or in the general election, take to the field and advocate for that candidate, against the other candidates' surrogates.

OVERALL: It is technically a very difficult thing for a campaign to maximize advocacy for disabilities issues and the constituent community without having someone inside the campaign office working on disabilities, all the time. If anyone I worked with on past efforts wonders, so far I haven't done it in this primary cycle for different reasons. I helped two Dem campaigns on their disability platforms, Q&A's, etc., and anticipate continuing that. But having worked on a number of campaigns, on both non-disability and disability issues, campaigns are cost-conscious machines with one direction - forward. They become increasingly, extremely focused as they go along. Anything perceived as unhelpful to a winning message is tossed.

Unless you have someone inside, continually working, sometimes creatively, to integrate disability issues into campaign message (disabilities integrated into general message about veterans, seniors and children, for instance) and working to get one or two disability events into the schedule of the candidates or their family members, disability issues get marginalized. There is a tremendous amount of balancing involved, and only a constituency director is going to take the time to answer all the emails and return the phone calls while still keeping the issue and events on the campaign's agenda until the end. It is just a fact of campaign life.

My opinion, anyway.

Jim Reed

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