Torie Osborn, former executive director of Liberty Hill and adviser to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — as well as a campaign leader against the LaRouche initiative in 1986 — has been analyzing what went wrong on Proposition 8 from the no side's perspective at the Liberty Hill blog. In part five, her final critique:

Never again should our EDs [executive directors] run our political campaigns! Next time, let’s engage our community’s nonprofit leaders as grass roots leaders, mobilizing their membership, staff and constituencies, and NOT as professional political campaign operatives....

Believe me, the skill-set of a nonprofit executive is NOT the same as that required to run a political campaign. We need to hire the best, toughest political campaign consultant and let them go, not constrain them with a web of bureaucracy: No on 8 had a big committee of 93, then a smaller committee of 25 and, finally, an “executive committee” of seven representatives of nonprofit groups. The tragedy is that this unwieldy structure precluded BOTH a topflight political campaign and a powerful grassroots campaign...

She began part one by writing, "Defeat requires honest, humility and long-term movement building strategy. It's time to learn from others."

More: Politics
© 2003-2009   •  About LA Observed  •  Email the editor
LA Biz Observed
4:03 PM Fri | CBS and ABC have far bigger fish to fry - namely whether their stations can get back the auto and retail advertising that fell off a cliff in 2009.
Native Intelligence
Phil Wallace | Searching for answers after a third loss this year.
Deanne Stillman | Jihad and cash offers meet American soldiers during the Gulf War, and beyond.
Iris Schneider | After a tough year financially, the Museum of Contemporary Art put on a gala party to celebrate with 1,000 of its closest friends.
Bill Boyarsky
One of the last of Doug Ring’s many good deeds was a visit to the Los Angeles Times editorial board with members of Housing LA, an organization advocating affordable housing for the thousands of residents being forced out of the city by high rents.
Jenny Burman
Thinking more about buying less.
Here in Malibu
The close-up.
Sponsors
Jewish Journal logo
The California Wellness Foundation
Playa Vista ad
Blogads

Blogads Los Angeles network

Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.




Add to Google