Crunchtime

I’d been job searching without any promising leads for just long enough that I had to struggle to not anticipate rejection. I didn’t have any political organizing experience (when Josh asked what kind of leadership positions I’d had, I said that I’d been a counselor at summer camp…) and on the trip home I was counting the number of people in that room who’d mentioned working for this or that campaign. By that night, when I called Mark to tell him about the interview, he’d already heard news that L____ was hired. Right there on the spot.

So they were serious when they said they weren’t wasting time; I figured I would find out soon enough. But a day passed, and then another, and by the time I realized that after a typical job interview I should have sent a “Thank You” note – “of course you should have sent one, dummy,” Blake told me – I thought it was too late already.

But the office was right near my internship. After debating it for most of the third day, I decided just to go on by there during my lunch. As I walked up Lispenard street, I saw a bunch of people in bright blue shirts sitting on the rusted metal landing. L____ was there, eating a sandwich and talking to some of the other canvassers.

I instantly felt out of place, not uniformed nor interviewing, just a civilian, with no real reason to be there. I said hello to Lucas and mumbled something about trying to find Josh. Nobody was really in the office, at least no one I recognized from the interview. I left more discouraged.

I couldn’t know at the time that they were taking almost anyone who was young, intelligent and willing. And it wasn’t like a rigorous trial, a process of elimination; it was first come, first enlisted to serve. Josh and Laurie told me afterward that they’d known more or less right away that they would be hiring me; but the office lost my file, and that very well might have been the end of it. Josh was really mad when he heard that.

As a result, I learned a valuable lesson that any Career Center counselor could have told me: the follow up. (it was a lesson that I would be learning a lot in the next few months.) On the fourth day I sent a volley of emails, mostly to addresses listed on the Grassroots Campaigns website. “I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to learn about your operation…You are all doing such important work…It would be an honor to work with you…etc etc etc” Several emails bounced back, to my frustration; one must have made it through, because half an hour later I got the call.

Would I be able to start within the week?
Was I prepared to work 90-100 hours a week?
Was I ready to relocate?
OK.
I would be making $24000 a year, with health insurance.

Health insurance!!!

“I’m from Florida,” I told her.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Florida. You can send me there, I’m from there.” (In retrospect, the innocence of the statement is heartbreaking.)

“Oh don’t worry about that. Florida is covered, they’ve had people working there for months. But we’ll find a place where you’ll be useful, you can be sure of that.”

Blake and I had a good four days to contemplate the possibility of the job. The uncertainty of it made our conversations—about how we would handle living arrangements, about how we would handle us—were neither hypothetical nor conclusive. Though there was time yet to change things, those few days of uncertainty was enough to set our course.


* * *
A little less than a week later, on the night before I was to begin, I got one last call. Josh was on the line, I heard the office bustling in the background.

“So you’ll be here at 8 sharp tomorrow. Welcome aboard, I'm really looking forward to working with you. Wear some comfortable shoes.”

I’m sure Josh meant that, but it wasn't some special gesture. Josh was doing the 'follow-up,' which is almost as essential as the very first phone interview. Each a step in the procedure, which I was about to complete the next morning. There’s a word for this process: I had been ‘crunched.’ I was now activated, though that meant more (and, yes, less) than what I thought it to mean at the time. I would go on to do it myself to others, many times in the next few months, enough people so that I wouldn’t remember some of them if you lined them up in front of me.

* * *

Later on, I would find out from one of the girls in the recruiting office that my file had been ‘lost’ in the midst of the madness. She apologized profusely to me, but I didn’t even expect an apology – by that point I had learned that the follow-up was essential, regardless of whether it was a person or the company itself that had to be followed through.

Even later on than that, I asked a different recruiting girl what it was like in her office right then. Part of the transcript follows:

Recruiting girl: “We were originally recruiting just to fill GCI positions in the canvassing offices throughout the country.”
G: When did the MoveOn campaign begin?
"They’d started talking about [MoveOn] just after I started; there was just suddenly whispering around the office about MoveOn, MoveOn—nobody really knew what that meant, we just kept hearing MoveOn."
What changed when the campaign became official?
"Well, when it finally switched over, now we had to fill 500 positions in two weeks.
500 in 2 weeks—we thought it was a joke at first. But it wasn’t a joke. Much like everything else, it was just outrageous expectations. And we definitely didn’t get 500 in 2 weeks, it was more like 250 or 300. "
Even that seems really high – there were three of you doing all that recruiting?
"It was madness. You’d get resumes pouring in and just have to fly through them. We all had personal goals, and team goals… I remember being really panicked at that point."
Other than the number, what changed?
"It’s kind of blurry where [the campaigns] were divided. People would switch over [between them] and a couple times a week we would switch the rap. Were we GCI or MoveOn, DNC, or what? It was really unclear."...

* * *

From an interview with one of the directors in another office:

G: I heard it said a lot that the directors would know within a few minutes of talking to somebody, or even just within a few minutes of seeing the group, who they were gonna hire, who was good for the job. At the time it seemed like they could just tell, you know, who had that ‘spark’ in them, but after the fact it sort of seems like oh they would just take anybody as long as they were halfway competent and could string together two sentences. What were the criteria for hiring people?
"Yea, the biggest thing, really, was: ‘Can you give your life to this? Is there anything so serious in your life right now that you can’t drop it, or you’re not willing to?’
I would straight out ask people. Cause we had people who were married. 'Are you willing to take the next two and a half three months, and literally put your marriage aside? As crappy as it sounds, that’s what its gonna take for us to win the election. We need people to put everything aside.’ I’m sure you heard the word ‘scrappy’ thrown around a lot, ‘scrappy’ was such a huge thing. When we would meet afterwards to decide who we were going to hire, we would all ask, ‘who is truly scrappy?’ So it was ultimately like, do they have a semblance of qualification? Do they have a passion for beating Bush? … Are they relatively intelligent? Have they graduated high school? Even…education wasn’t necessarily the criterion. …
“But the people we were getting were also very highly educated people. We had some people who were just out of college, or hadn’t finished college, and then people who had masters, or who were lawyers… Everyone wanted to be apart of this.”
* * *

In February, I met up with Laurie in Central Park. She was launching new operations with Grassroots Campaigns, still working out of the same office. We walked through the Gates and talked for a couple of hours.

“We never lied to people in our interviews,” she said. I almost objected there, but I opted to hold my tongue. “The one big thing that we don’t tell them—and I don’t think it should be upon us to do so—is that no one is going to thank them for this. They are coming on to do this work because they want to see change in the world, and we are going to use that passion. We are going to use them. We are going to drive them and push them and use every last bit of energy that they have. And there’s no point at which anyone is going to show this great appreciation for what they’re doing, no reward for this sacrifice. For one thing, the work is never going to be finished. The job is never done. George Bush came and George Bush will go – later than we’d hoped, but still. That’s how it is. That’s the reality of our world, and the organization is very much in terms of that reality.”