The latest "not mea culpa" from the leaders of the failed "No on 8" campaign.
"When I look at what was the biggest mistake, when I lie awake at night prepping my e-mails I'm going to send to all of you and I think about the biggest mistake that we made, it's that we've turned everything over to political experts and political consultants," said Equality California Executive Director Geoff Kors. "And I would never ever do that again. You know, when we started Equality California, everyone was, like, 'Hire professional lobbyists to go lobby on LGBT issues,' and I was, like: 'You gotta be kidding. We're going to do our own lobbying because it's about our lives and we know what we're talking about and we know how to do this.' One thing, you know, that I would never do again ... we should have been in the strategy room and part of those (consultants') conversations, and that was a huge mistake."Shorter "No on 8" (my rendition):
We abdicated all responsibility from the beginning and had nothing to do with any decision after that, so please don't blame us. Oh yeah, and professional lobbyists don't know how to lobby, we should have used people with no experience.And in case you didn't think this was a new CYA talking point, another leader for the No on 8 battle, Lorri Jean, uses the exact same talking point:
"How could we have realized earlier that professional, high-paid consultants were not delivering product?" Jean asked. "I'm trying to say this and not be too provocative, since we have so many professional political campaign consultants in the room. But, you know, there is an approach that people who are professionals use to do this. And I think one of our challenges as a community, given that issues of relevance to our community are different than anything else that goes on the ballot because of the emotion and the other things that are associated with them, we have got to find a completely different way than business as usual to do this work."Yes, hiring professionals - what a wacky idea. Obviously THAT was the problem with the No on 8 campaign, they had too many experts, people with proven experience winning at the ballot box, working on it. Next time, let's have some runaway kid from San Francisco figuring out what media markets we advertise in, and a retired PFLAG mom can create our lobbying strategy and run the get-out-the-vote effort (when she's not volunteering at the senior center). Not to mention, does the "kill all the people with glasses" - I mean, "professionals" - theory apply to the professional homosexuals running the campaign?
