Yikes!
Beating John Cornyn and reclaiming a U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats won’t be easy. It may even be impossible. But there are a couple of things you can do to improve your chances. The first is, Read this memo.
Alas, what was whispered in those phone calls was a different c word: “chaos.” You had already been through three campaign managers and two chief fund-raisers. You were spending money hand over fist, but your fund-raising efforts had gone belly-up. Then I spent primary day with you, traveling to various Houston polling places, and saw a campaign stalled at the fork between viability and Radnofsky Land. Here we were in your hometown, your political base, and nobody knew where you were going or how to get there. Your driver got lost more than once. We almost ran out of gas. Your advance team sent you to shake voters’ hands over lunch at an empty soul-food kitchen. Your spokesperson trumpeted the early returns from “Bex”-ar County. Then, at your victory party, at a Houston Heights-area bar—in a development that was in no way your fault but sure seemed to carry poetic import—the cable went out, and no one could watch the election returns. The night’s biggest applause came not when you announced that you’d avoided a runoff but when the TVs came back on. It became clear that both campaign and candidate were in a stage that could best be called nascent and that more appropriate than a profile would be some honest advice. That’s what this memo offers.
It’s based on the counsel of a great many politicos, a number of whom are still praying you win. They said it’s still early in the race, that you have time to turn things around. They also said this: The secret to running a successful campaign is no secret at all. A candidate first has to take an accurate read of the political landscape and then concentrate on the three m’s: message, money, and machine. Below are a few thoughts on how to make that happen.
More:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-07-01/feature4.php
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