Read Part I First

My immediate reaction when Dan asked me to be his campaign manager was, “No.” It really made no sense, and there were several major factors against me. The two biggest ones were:
1. I have absolutely no political experience, and have no idea how to run a campaign.
2. I was already struggling to keep up with the requirements of my four part-time jobs, I couldn’t imagine having the time to add the responsibilities required of a campaign manager.

I told Dan that it was a great honor for him to ask me. I told him that had I known three months earlier that this opportunity was going to arise, I would have cleared my schedule. And I told him that if I agreed to do it, I would just be holding him (and the campaign) back. I didn’t want to turn it down, but I had to.

There really isn’t a good explanation for what happened over the course of the next few months, but some how, some way, I accidentally became Dan’s campaign manager anyway. It started because we were filling out a form for an event that required some information about the campaign. Naturally, there was a place to write in the name of Dan’s campaign manager. We decided to put my name there, but it was understood that I would only hold that title temporarily – until someone else was found to fill that role. But that “someone else” never came, and so I was it.

Quite honestly, I don’t really have a good grasp of what a campaign manager does. I have learned a great deal through the process, but I still have a very long way to go. All of us working on the campaign were volunteers – people with full-time jobs and other responsibilities. We were only able to schedule about one campaign meeting a week, and we never had everybody at any one meeting. I had a good idea of the kinds of things we needed to do, so I just let my natural management instincts kick in and I did my best to hold all the pieces together and keep the ship headed in the right direction.

One thing Dan and I agreed on from the beginning was that it just didn’t make sense for me to stay in the role of campaign manager for very long. From the earliest days of campaign planning, we discussed what kinds of things we would need to do strategically – especially focusing on what we would need to do after we won the primary. On the top of the list was hiring a campaign manager and/or other paid staff to take on the bulk of the workload that I had on my plate. We were making things happen with me in that role, but we knew that it would be insufficient to make it to November with only volunteers.

I suppose the biggest lesson learned in all of this is that money really does drive just about everything else in the campaign. If we had raised more money earlier, we would have been able to hire staff. And, of course, hiring staff (done the right way) would have allowed us to raise even more money. I’ll probably address why money is so important in a later post … But the point I am trying to make here is that it takes money to hire staff, and (more often than not) it takes a paid staff to run a successful campaign. I was doing the best I could, and all of our volunteers were also. And we did have quite a bit of success – we won Wake County and we finished just about 4% out of first place. But I think that if we had paid staff in addition to all of our hard-working volunteers, we would have won.

Coming up in Part III: The Republican Machine

Thanks for reading!

So in the next several ‘blog entries, I wanted to tell my “story.” I don’t really think my story is all that special … and that is part of the point. I hope that my story takes away some of the mystery and misconceptions surrounding politics, and perhaps provide some motivation for others like me to take action.

Looking for a Candidate

Like many voters, I was motivated to action in the wake of the 2008 election. I decided it was time for me to get personally involved in politics to try to make a difference in our country. I started looking for a candidate I could support to replace Brad Miller – the arrogant politician who currently occupies the congressional seat for my district. Going into the Fall of 2009, I began trying to find information about GOP candidates who would be vying for the nomination to run against Miller in November of 2010. At the time, only Bill Randall had declared his candidacy.

I did some research on Randall – the normal things – I read the information on his website, I watched all the YouTube videos he had posted. I quickly came to this conclusion: Randall is not ideal, but if he is the candidate we have, I’ll support him. Based on what I have learned since then, I gather that many people around the district had that same reaction. So I fired off a quick e-mail to his campaign, asking for more information and expressing my interest in being involved. Being wrapped up in my four part-time jobs, I didn’t really have time to pursue it further.

An Unexpected Call

Early in January I was driving home from Winston-Salem and got a call from my wife. I knew it was an unusual call, because we skipped all the normal pleasantries, and she said excitedly, “Rich, you have to call Dan Huffman!”

“Why?” I replied.

“Because he is running for congress!”

That changed everything for me. My reaction with Randall was “Well, if that is our candidate, I’ll support him.” This was different. I knew Dan Huffman. I knew his character, his integrity. I knew I could really trust him, and I could support him enthusiastically.

Just a week or so later, Dan was sitting in my living room and we were chatting about public policy and his campaign platform. I told him I would love to help in his campaign, and so he invited me to the campaign meeting that week.

The meeting was fun. It wasn’t at all what I expected. Nobody at the table had experience with politics or how to run a campaign … and that was part of the appeal for me. The last thing I wanted to do was become a cog in some kind of political machine. I wanted to get involved so that I could help Dan make a real difference in our country. The last thing I wanted was “politics as usual.”

But a Republican??

For readers of my old ‘blog … I know what some of you are thinking; so I better clear up some of the unusual details.

Dan is a Republican and ran as a Republican. For those of you who don’t know me very well, that may not seem like a big deal. But it was me – yes, your one an only Rich Holland – who exclaimed proudly in 2003: “I’ll probably never vote for a Republican again!” I am a self-described libertarian (notice the small “l”), and I have never been overly impressed with the Republican party. After McCain-Feingold, I was doubly discouraged and convinced that the Republicans were just as bad as the Democrats.

My political journey has had some interesting turns. I started by abandoning the GOP – the “default” party of my young adulthood. Next stop was the Constitution Party. That didn’t last long, especially considering that some of their leaders think that the US Government flew jet air planes by remote control (sans passengers) into the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. Then came the Libertarian Party. They sounded good on the surface, but I was shocked to see how inconsistent their platform was on key matters related to individual liberty and rights. On top of that, all the LP candidates seem to be one-issue candidates – legalize pot.

So late in 2007, I came full circle. I actually downloaded and read the entire GOP national party platform. The shocking thing that I discovered was that it was more consistently libertarian than the Libertarian Party platform (at least on some issues that are important to me). The second thing I noticed was that it more closely matched my own political philosophy than any other party platform that I had read.

The Really Unexpected Call

A day or two after that first campaign meeting (which was held at a Dunkin Donuts, by the way), Dan called me. I was still excited from the meeting. I loved talking strategy … I so much enjoyed working with the other volunteers at the table. We came up with some very good ideas and I was already hard at work on several of them when the phone rang.

It was Dan.

After some small talk, he asked pointedly, “Rich, would you consider being my campaign manager?”

… stay tuned for more …