OK, here's the deal. I strongly support Tim Kaine. I like Tim Kaine a lot. I badly want Tim Kaine to be our next governor. I firmly believe Tim Kaine would be an infinitely better governor of Virginia than Jerry Kilgore. I will fight hard to help Kaine defeat Kilgore (and Potts) this November. And, for those very reasons, I am fully supportive of Tim Kaine "lay[ing] into his staff" at the Salem Fair, if the advance work was as badly botched as "John Behan"/Chad Dotson describes. In fact, I would go significantly further than that. If the Kaine campaign truly is filled with a bunch of "resume padding campaign monkeys," , as Waldo Jaquith famously calls them, then it's time for Tim Kaine to fire them all and let God sort 'em out. I say, Gov. Kaine, get the "monkeys" off your campaign's back, and get people in there who: a) want to win; b) know how to win; c) will do what it takes to win; and d) did I mention "win?"
By the way, screwups by these "campaign monkeys" at fairs, parades, etc. are not exactly a big secret at this point. Many Democrats -- bloggers, candidates, others who are focused on the gubernatorial race -- have noticed this phenomenon for months, but have bitten their lips and generally kept quiet, out of fear of hurting Tim Kaine. However, it is the middle of summer now and time to end the "cone of silence" around this issue. What we Virgiinians need is Tim Kaine as our next governor. What we do NOT need are the "monkeys" who have latched onto his campaign. And neither does Tim Kaine.
Personally, I witnessed a major screwup/missed opportunity by the "monkeys" at the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Alexandria on March 5. At the time, if you recall, Tim Kaine was pushing hard to gather 30,000 petition signatures. Where better to collect those signatures than along a parade route lined with hundreds, if not thousands, of Democrats (in Old Town Alexandria, one can safely assume that it's 70%-80% Democratic). Yet, it turned out that the particular "monkey" in charge of that event (and also one of the main petition collectors for Kaine) had not brought any petitions, clipboards, or other supplies for the 20 or so volunteers to collect those signatures. When I questioned him on this, his response was sort of a befuddled "uh, we're here to march in the parade." Yeah, dude, but BEFORE and AFTER the parade you could collect hundreds, if not thousands, of signatures at one fell swoop. Hello?!?
Unfortunately, Tim Kaine was not at the Old Town parade to witness this sorry spectacle by one particular "monkey." I say this because if Kaine HAD been there, he might have had his purported "meltdown" earlier, fired a bunch of these people, and proceeded with his campaign on far firmer footing. And, given that the name of my group is "RaisingKAINE," not "RaisingMonkeys," I believe it would have been a great thing if that had happened.
Sadly, there have been many other examples of this "monkey" phenomenon -- missed opportunities, poor advance work, inadequate (or unhelpful) communications -- over the past few months, but I will mention just one more for the time being. For a long time now, I have been signed up for mailing lists from both the Kilgore and Kaine campaigns. So have a lot of my friends in the Virginia political blogosphere and elsewhere. And guess what? Just about every week, more frequently when an event is coming up, I get e-mails from Hunter Kurtz of the Kilgore campaign letting me know exactly WHERE and WHEN volunteers are needed, exactly WHO to contact about the event, and exactly WHY the event is important.
In contrast, I never -- EVER -- receive e-mails like this from the Kaine campaign. Neither do any of my friends, in the blosophere and elsewhere. I mean, hell, we are Tim Kaine's biggest supporters and even WE don't know what's going on most of the time. So how would the average person/grassroots activist/concerned citizen know? Answer: they wouldn't.
Now, here's where I differ big-time from "John Behan"/Chad Dotson: I see Tim Kaine's public "meltdown," if it did indeed occur, as a GOOD thing. Often, candidates are so busy, so focused, and so "in a bubble" (kept that way, frequently, by those same "campaign monkeys" we've been talking about) that they don't realize when problems crop up. Perhaps July 4 was the moment when Tim Kaine saw for himself some serious problems in his campaign and began to move to correct them. If so, in January 2006 we may look back at July 4th as Tim Kaine's personal "Independence Day" from "resume padding campaign monkeys." We may look back on the Salem event as the turning point in the campaign. And, ironically, we may have a Republican named "John Behan"/Chad Dotson in part to thank for it.