Tip Sheet for Presidential Campaigns: How to Interact with Single-Issue Advocates
Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 09:18 AM - Edit history (1)
Tip Sheet for Presidential Campaigns: How to Interact with Single-Issue Advocates, with AIDS as a Recent Example
From a facebook post by activist Peter Staley.
"5) Don't make promises you can't keep. Both campaigns led us to believe our meetings with the candidates would happen before the NY primary. As that date approached, both campaigns were threatened with demos at their headquarters. The Clinton campaign was threatened with possible heckling of the candidate (I sent their LGBT liaison a text saying "FYI, the coalition is actively discussing ways to up the pressure before the primary, including paying homage to Bob Rafsky (RIP) - Google ‘Bob Rafsky Bill Clinton’"
. To avoid the demos, both campaigns issued public statements the Friday before the NY primary offering firm commitments to meet the candidates (Sanders offering "first week of May"; Clinton offering May 13th in NYC).
6) Expect to pay a price when you break a promise. The Clinton campaign started active negotiations on the planning of their meeting (which was eventually moved up a day to May 12th). The Sanders campaign gave us 4 days notice for a meeting lasting only 30-minutes in Indianapolis, then canceled it less than 48 hours before it was set to start, leaving some in our group of 20 reps stuck with nonrefundable airline tickets. They inexplicably stopped answering emails. We gave them 5 days notice on a press release and social media campaign titled "Broken Promise," but they obviously decided to take the hit, and continued to ignore our daily emails. The campaign was launched, and it worked. Within a few hours of our meeting with Clinton, the Sanders campaign finally emailed us and promised a new meeting date -- May 25th, in CA.
7) When you finally meet, you obviously want to leave with some positive spin for your candidate, but in a way that does not conflict with the advocates' agenda. Fortunately, with our AIDS example, this isn't hard to do. There was considerable overlap in our goals and the candidates' HIV/AIDS plans. Clinton's team put out an innocuous press release with standard Obamaesque AIDS rhetoric. We also left with a firm commitment for an additional meeting with her senior policy staff to flesh out our harder asks.
And here's where the Sanders team made their second blunder. Instead of aligning their spin with the huge overlap of our agenda (and with what was actually discussed at the meeting), they used the meeting to highlight their endorsement of a California initiative they knew we had concerns about, with no reference to our concerns ("Sanders Backs California Ballot Initiative to Rein in Drug Prices at Meeting with HIV/AIDS Advocates" http://bit.ly/1XJM7nD). Sanders never raised his endorsement during his opening remarks or the remainder of the meeting. We raised it near the end of the meeting, only to point out that the CA groups in our coalition had been unsuccessful in their attempts to reach the campaign to discuss their concerns. Almost immediately, we got panicked calls from our CA partners thinking we had endorsed the initiative instead of raising their concerns. The ballot initiative was written and launched by Michael Weinstein at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and once he knew we wouldn’t go along with his spin on the meeting, he posted libelous attacks against “opponents” of the initiative."
https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-staley/tip-sheet-for-presidential-campaigns-how-to-interact-with-single-issue-advocates/10209807379920673
(Edited to add the author name)
