An invitation came from the liberal party the other day to sign up for Team Trudeau Campaign College. It is just $25 for the day and you have your choice of attending campaign management, official agent or a single stream covering the three areas of digital management, volunteer management and canvas management. I heartily recommend the three-part stream as better bang for the buck.
And teaching at these efforts can be a great experience in itself. I sometimes offered to talk about dirty tricks to get a bigger turnout to my classes. The time I told people that our text would be from Carl von Clausevitz’ On War, we had to get a larger hall. If you want people to remember, you have to make it memorable.
The only stipulation on these particular classes is that you have to be a registered liberal to even get an invitation. When running the ground game in a municipal campaign a few years back, I found I had the conflict of teaching local conservatives and NDPers as well liberals. In the 2015 federal campaign, the ground game for the conservative in the next riding was being run by one of my keener students. She actually phoned during the campaign to thank me for the training. Oh well, I liked the liberal she helped defeat, but he never listened to me anyway.
But memories in politics are short. I would not be of much help as a trainer today. Yet I miss it. I might be critical. Small things can annoy me. For example, they say ‘Team Trudeau’ in the logo and do not mention ‘Liberal.’ What is funnier is the stylized pencil the artist has drawn under the name ‘Trudeau.’ The pencil is designed to represent voting. The only problem is that a pencil such as that would never be used in a polling place. It has an eraser on it—which might just turn out to be a metaphor for the coming election.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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