When Women Win by Ellen R. Malcolm

Author:Ellen R. Malcolm [Malcolm, Ellen R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WE WERE CREATING OUR own full-service political operation. To that end, we took on as our new political director Mary Beth Cahill, a savvy political consultant from Boston who had worked for Rep. Robert Dornan (D-MA), Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and, most recently, Rep. Les AuCoin (D-OR) in his losing Senate campaign against Republican incumbent Bob Packwood. To help implement the program, Mary Beth also brought on two veterans of the AuCoin campaign, Joe Solmonese, a former aide to Michael Dukakis, as deputy political director, and Jeannie Duncan, a talented writer who worked with me on the newsletter and other marketing materials.

In August 1993, our new training director, Ellen Moran, launched our first Campaign Management Training School, with thirty-four prospective campaign managers from around the country coming to Washington to hone their political skills, paying particular attention to the dynamics of running a woman’s campaign. Attendees included staff for ten congresswomen who had been endorsed by EMILY’s List in 1992, as well as those working for 1994 senatorial and gubernatorial candidates.

“First, we trained people to be fund-raisers, since that was really our bailiwick,” said Mary Beth. “Then, we began training them to be campaign managers, field operators, researchers, and press secretaries. We had to teach them how to spend the money well, how to put together good campaigns and really compete.”

Ellen Moran developed a novel way to train new managers. A cornerstone of the training was building a campaign plan based on data from a campaign simulation in which fictitious candidate Helen Winter, a pro-choice Democrat, runs against fictitious Wally Schroeder, a Republican and a former football coach, for an open congressional seat in the state of Delusion, which happens to be situated between the states of Ambivalence and Denial. During the day, Ellen would bring in consultants who would describe how their roles in campaigns worked. For example, campaign professionals such as pollster Celinda Lake taught trainees how to read and use a poll. Then, at night, the trainees used that day’s newly learned expertise—whether it was how to target the voters they wanted to reach, what messages to send them, or how to raise the money to fund their plan—to build a campaign plan for their fictional candidate.

Before long, the trainees were completely immersed in developing winning strategies for this fictional candidate. Playing the role of Helen Winter, I let them know just how difficult some candidates could be. I refused to approve an adequate budget, make fund-raising calls, or agree to what the campaign’s message should be—just as candidates do in real life. Before the 1994 election cycle was out, no fewer than 125 fund-raisers, 59 campaign managers, and 40 press secretaries had enrolled in our training sessions. By the end of long days and nights, the teams were exhausted but had more than a rudimentary sense of how a campaign should operate.

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