| Below is my interview with Glen Maxey, who is running for Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. Earlier this afternoon, I posted my interview with Boyd Richie. Both interviews were sit-down interviews that lasted about an hour. They are long, but I think they both give great insight into both Richie's and Maxey's vision for the TDP.
Leininger spent millions of dollars in the last primary race. He has a history of throwing money at campaigns and using the dirtiest tactics available. Many Democratic elected officials have counties that voted 80-90% in favor of banning gay marriage last November. The concern is that Leininger sends out thousands of mail pieces with a picture of the candidate, a picture of you, and the headline that says, "Democrat X and his Gay State Chair, Glen Maxey do not represent your values." I wanted to ask if you could address those concerns.
That doomsday kind of thought… if they wanted to do that today, they could say, "Democrat X and the Democratic Party who's platform supports all of this…" or "Democrat X and the Democratic Party that endorse this…". They can do that anyway.
I spent twelve years in the Legislature, and I know a lot of those guys with those concerns. And I fully hope they do whatever they need to win their campaigns. I'm pragmatic, I know how to play this game, and I'm not going to hang any of these people out to dry. As a Party Chair, my job isn't to run people out of office. It's to build an infrastructure that will elect Democrats today, tomorrow, and for years to come.
I know that as Party Chair my job right now would be to rebuild the infrastructure of the Party for the state and for the county operations of those members in those more conservative districts. It is not my job to be campaigning in their district. It is my job to give them the tools.
Do you believe the Party Chair should be the spokesperson for the TDP?
I'd be the Party Chairperson - not the Party spokesperson. There are people who say that for 100 years, the job of the State Party Chair is to raise money and be the poster child for the Party on TV. That's what they believe. We don't have the infrastructure anymore. I will have to say, that I can't do that poster child work. I don't need to do it, and I'm not going to do it.
The face of the party has to be Allan Ritter, and Abel Herrero, and Senfronia Thompson. The face of this party has to be our candidates, because quite frankly the Party doesn't bring much. A Party Chair giving a speech in any of those districts will not win anybody an election. We should be electing a state party chair for every commissioner, JP, and constable in this state. We should elect a state party chair that helps every county chair build an infrastructure that exists when the chair walks away.
For the rest of the interview, please click on the "There's More" button. |
| You've certainly stood out as one of the top organizers in both the grassroots and "netroots" community in Texas. How did you learn about that, and how do you want to grow what you've done here in Travis County and implement it across the other 253 counties in the state of Texas?
When you're doing campaigns, you give people the ability to go do things. You don't try to micromanage and say, "today, you can only do this project, or you can only call these people only." One thing that became very evident to me is that there are a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me, and have a lot broader grasp on new and innovative kinds of ways to do things. I believe that you must create an environment for the most people to offer their talents to do the most good. I watched it in the Howard Dean campaign, and we give them credit for it, but I would say that it happened to Howard Dean - he didn't necessarily cause it.
The Dean Campaign had a mindset that people could go off and do their own things. It's sort of like becoming Howard Dean's coordinator in Texas. I would call with questions about Texas, and they'd say that, "we're not going to do anything about Texas for six months." I told them that we were worried about Texas today, I'll be the coordinator, and you can fire me when you find one. We didn't wait for anyone to give us an OK to go; we just went out and did it. Most of the technology I learned, somebody had brought it to me and said, "Let's do this." It's really easy that way. You don't need to go out and hire a company and say go create and wait for it to come. Even if you just look at the open source kind of net stuff, we'd be doing better.
The fact is that every SDEC committee member and every precinct chair in this state doesn't feed through a server, so we're not in the situation of people not finding the folks they need…it's just so easy to build those kind of communication tools, and there are thousands of more things like that we can and should be doing.
What kind of new technologies do you believe the TDP should be utilizing?
I'd be willing to sit down and try and get the TDP to at least what they were doing, technology wise, in the 1980's. If we could just get there, it'd be a revolution. The fact that there is not an accessible web page for every county in this party - something we could build for nothing - is inexcusable. I had a hosting company, somebody I know, call me and tell me that if I become state party chair, they'd give free hosting to every Democrat in the state and the TDP. They'd work that out as an in-kind contribution to the candidates.
More than anything else, in organizing, I find people saying, "I don't know who to talk to, I don't know where to go." If I go to the TDP website, there is not a link to tell people how to register a voter or become a deputy registrar. There are all sort of those nitty-gritty things -- what I like to call a "Campaign in a box" -- best tools that you can use to organize your county and your precinct. A precinct chair here in Travis County has created a tool where every precinct chair in the county can go list their volunteers and sign-up online. Once you build a tool like that, it's real easy to make that go statewide. The vote by mail project that we just used for Senator Radnofsky allows folks from outside the state -- people who may be at school or otherwise gone during the election season -- to easily vote by mail. That tool, for example, can revolutionize what a grassroots organizer can tell anyone when they go door-to-door.
Then there's the online phone banking, where you can build a list at one level and use it for any other race. It used to be, that when you did phone banking, you had to go to a vendor and purchase boxes of hard-copy lists. Now, those lists can be easily updated and maintained online, and the people don't have to be calling out of the same office. You can have a volunteer in El Paso calling for the Nick Lampson race in CD 22. You can identify what people have been called, who haven't, you know what kind of calls are being made -- and you have an immediate report on everything.
It doesn't take away that human touch, of course. You still need people to knock on doors, hand out leaflets, and everything like that. But you can supplement it with things like online phone banking. I got a call from a woman during the Howard Dean campaign from a woman in the Panhandle, and she told me it had been about 30 years since someone gave her the ability to actually do something for a candidate.
Let me ask you: why do you feel the TDP hasn't grown in the past few years?
It's beyond me. I kept saying that we needed to do these things, but it always fell on deaf ears. Even though it's incredibly cheap to do. I have a $500 server in my office that has the whole state voter file on that one server. It's not an expensive process at all. I can contact ten people in Austin, and they'd be willing to donate almost all of these tools for free, because they want to give something to the Party. But nobody has given them the platform or the arena to do it. At every training meeting I've been to in the past ten years, I've had somebody say, "What we really need is a campaign in a box. What do you need to be a JP candidate? What do we need to do for that?" That's the kind of thing the Party needs to be doing for candidates across the state.
Well, you can't run the same kind of race you run in East Texas or West Texas as you do in Austin, or Laredo, or Dallas.
Well, I'm going to tell you that I think you can. Go back and think about what we did in Travis County. You block-walk, you do voter ID, and you do voter registration. Mark Strama won his race based on being a great candidate, having good issues having a poor opponent, raising a lot of money…all those kinds of things. But he also had 8,000 people that were registered to vote in his district in the sixty days before that election, and he won by 500 votes.
We registered 85,000 voters by going door-to-door in Travis County in 2004, and then we won the races because we changed the equation. The coordinated campaign in Travis County, between now and November in HD 47, 48, and 50, will do voter registration, door-to-door, and putting voter registration cards under those doors. If anybody went into Dallas, Texas and did nothing except registering voters and getting them to the polls, Democrats would win every judicial race in Dallas.
We need to change the equation. Instead of going to Highland Park and trying to convince an independent to vote one way or the other, why not just register 1,000 people in apartments in East Dallas. The issue is not, right now, about how many people are registered. It's about where they are and if they know where to vote. Over the last thirty years, I've been a part of it because I've been a candidate, and a consultant, and we've continuously said let's get those voters that came out last time and turn them out. Next election cycle, we used the same formula. That kind of thinking worked back then, but it doesn't today. We have targeted ourselves out of a pool of voters to talk to.
What are your plans for raising money across the state?
You ask, you ask, you ask. People will give money to the candidates that they believe in, or a cause they believe in or a product they support. You have to tell people that this is what we're going to do, and this is how we'll do it. People will pay money for a product they trust, but right now, most of the small donors in this state are not willing to write a check for the Texas Democratic Party because they don't know what the TDP is doing.
I know how to fundraise. I know more about direct mail fundraising than any candidate that's ever run for State Party Chair. I know more about internet fundraising than any candidate that's ever run for State Party Chair. I ran for office and I raised $86,000 in six weeks in a district that nobody thought I could win.
There's some concern that some of the higher dollar, more traditional donors to the Part may no longer donate money if you become Chair.
Well, if anybody thinks that the TDP can become a viable fundraising operation just on the persona of the person who is Chair, they're sadly mistaken.
I have no problem working with the traditional donors of the party, and they have nothing to fear from me because all we are going to be doing is adding on. Nothing is going to be thrown out with the TDP, things will only be added. I understand large dollar fundraising and how to do that. What brings money through the door are people who create a program and make donors comfortable that the money they give will go towards electing Democrats.
You were a State Representative for 12 years, during which time and especially since that time, you've stayed incredibly involved. Why? What made you want to stay so focused and determined in Democratic politics?
I think it comes back to a pattern in my life. I began my politics in high school and college, staying active during the Vietnam War and the environmental movements and all those political actions in the late 60s and early 70s. Through that experience, I really saw how the basic political process is where you have to make a great deal of change. I got my grounding in politics dealing with an unpopular. I got my grounding in Huntsville, Texas as a student, in the Civil Rights movement, participating in a sit-in in a café because they still weren't allowing Blacks come into the café -- in 1970. That kind of thing seers into your brain, that there are inequities in society.
Did that lead to your involvement in campaigns?
Absolutely. My first campaigns that I worked were to elect an African-American to a school board in Huntsville and then helping get a student elected to the City Council in Huntsville. Dealing with those kinds of issues, and seeing how the political process often times is very corrupt against those outside the system…it's become a lifelong commitment, for me, to improve that system and get rid of those inequities.
Throughout the 70s and 80s I worked as a teacher, then joined campaigns and worked, alternately, as a staffer in the Legislature and then, in the off-years, on campaigns. Then, I became a State Legislator and took those experiences with me to office. There's not been an election cycle since 1972 that I haven't helped work -- either as a staffer, or a campaign manager, or a candidate.
Why do I do this? It's what I do. Sometimes people define themselves by their occupation. I define myself in my mind as a political worker. My whole life I've been someone who cares deeply about the political process. It's not just a gig or a job -- it's a very real and deep part of who I am.
What campaign have you worked on that you're most proud of?
In 1980, working with Kent Caperton, who was 32 years old and running against Bill Moore, a 30-year State Senator. Moore was almost the definition of one of those good old-boys, racist, old timer elected officials of a foregone era, and Caperton was this young, smart guy taking him on. I was teaching elementary school at the time in Navasota, and spent my nights and weekends that whole fall and spring helping manage his campaign. And when Kent won, I knew that a lot of that victory came from the kind of nuts-and-bolts type of grassroots work that I had put together; it was a real proud moment for me and for our campaign. It was a real expensive campaign on both sides, to be sure, but I really got to see the power of grassroots people coming together to win in that election.
I've also got to say that my first race as State Representative was also very important to me. I had everything against me; I wouldn't be able to raise money, all the establishment thought I would be a great Representative but that the fact that I was gay would torpedo my campaign. By winning that election, taking that oath of office, and -- more importantly -- getting there was only half the challenge. I became an example, a role model, and a person everyone would judge. If I failed, it wouldn't just be me that failed, but the gay community would have failed.
Therefore, one of my proudest moments was when I was able to stand at the front mike and give a personal privilege speech, of sorts, when we passed the Children Health Insurance Program. The day at that mike, I told everyone that most of you all will not understand what I am saying here, but I need to say out loud that I'm doing the most important thing I will ever do for the gay and lesbian community when I cast a vote for CHIP, because I know that a bipartisan group here worked together and did good work and my sexual orientation never came into this debate. Because of that, I've achieved my major goal of being a legislator -- to not have that characteristic define what I could do or what anyone could do. |
