Practical Matters: One Refund, Part Two

The friend who took me up on my invitation to attend the August 22 event called today to get a refund from the Obama campaign. She posted the story of her experience on her own blog, and I strongly encourage any committed Obama supporter who makes it here to read it.

The good news is that she was treated courteously, and assured that she would get her money back. She merely had to provide them with the same information that she'd written on a clipboard the night of the event. That was also the same information that she'd emailed to them at the NY Finance address a week ago in a message that hadn't received any reply a week later. She is the perfect example of why the Obama campaign should have been as well prepared for the Brooklyn event as you'd expect them to be for any big donor bash.

My friend is not terribly interested in politics (I've put this mildly compared to her own take on the subject). Which is not to say that she's indifferent to problems of policy, or lacks concern for her community, or society at large. In fact, she spends her professional life working on technology that makes more of the world accessible to people with disabilities. Not badly credentialed as a decent human being, I'd say.

My friend, however, has little stomach for the theater of politics. She is a computer programmer by trade, and her love of logic extends to an affinity for common sense, and a pretty strong disdain for gratuitous inefficiency. The sound-bite driven banality of modern American political life, with its endless repetition of obvious truths, does little to engage her.

In agreeing to check out my candidate, Barack Obama, she said that she was mainly looking for someone who wouldn't make any promises that were blatantly false, or disingenuously broad. Those weren't the exact words, but that was the spirit of her perspective: Don't do anything ridiculous, and I'll give you serious consideration. Not Bush, not conservative -- you're halfway there.

Did she think that overselling the event was the end of the world? No. But neither was she inclined to construe a loss of time and money, and subsequent unresponsiveness, as any sort of incentive to support the candidate.

Her first experience with the official campaign was one of poor event management. It was followed by poor customer service. As an open-minded person looking for cues to tell her about Barack Obama as a leader, she found poor organization.

When I spoke with the New York campaign office last week, I was asked near the end of the call how things could have been done differently. I began to provide some answers, but I didn't get any sense that the office was interested in thinking about how they still had the power to change the story that they'd created.

In my next post, I'll spend some time discussing how else that situation might have been handled, and hopefully will be in the future. I'll also focus on why it matters that we supporters, at the grassroots level and in the official campaign, need to listen and hear opinions that may seem unreasonable to us when they're based on direct, personal experience.

For example? Analogies between campaign management and governance. Today the campaign office, tomorrow FEMA.

If you don't like that story and don't want it to spread, you can't just drown people out with a sea of "Go Barack!" and "Obama '08!" postings. It requires listening, empathetic understanding, and real actions to change the story.