Reshma Saujani has had three bumper quarters in a row. During Q4 of 2009 she raised twice as much as Maloney. Reshma has been raising money like she were an incumbent. The powers that be will have you believe she has raised her $1.2 million so far from maybe four or five Wall StreetPACs. That is the lie that is being circulated over and over again. She has not taken a dime in PAC money, either from Wall Street or from any other industry. Maloney on the other hand has taken a ton of Wall Street PAC money, including through some fundraisers that might have been ethics violations. All of Reshma's money has come from individual contributions. Some people working on Wall Street might have given the legal max, and their spouses might have given the legal max, but mostly Reshma has been riding on the strength of small donors spread across the district.
(Laxmi, by the way, would be the Hindu goddess for wealth.)
She did work on Wall Street. But she did not invent it. I wish she had. We would not have had the meltdown we just had. Maloney, on the other hand, was in Congress when Congress passed all those deregulatory laws that brought about the meltdown. Maloney is responsible for the Great Recession.
Reshma has been for Wall Street reform from day one. She has stood with Barack Obama on this one. Carolyn Maloney voted for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. She used to be a Bush Democrat. Now suddenly I am to think she has become an Obama Democrat? I have my suspicions. I was one of Obama's earliest supporters in New York City. I know an Obama Democrat when I see one. Maloney is not one.
Carolyn Maloney has not been for Wall Street reform. She might have voted with the herd, but she has been responsible for some of the watering down of the reform efforts that has been going on behind the scenes.
To reform Wall Street, you have to understand how it works. Maloney does not understand how it works. Reshma does.
What Reshma has been opposed to is a wholescale demonization of Wall Street. That she has opposed. That she opposes. Carolyn Maloney on the other hand has exhibited multiple personalities on the issue. She has participated in a wholescale demonization of the bread and butter industry of the city she claims to represent, she has claimed she has been in some kind of a leadership role for Wall Street reform, she has worked behind the scenes to water down the reform efforts in exchange for campaign cash from Wall Street PACs. These conflicting tendencies come from political dishonesty, desperation in the face of a serious political challenge, and a fundamental lack of knowledge of an industry she does not really know what to make of. Heck, I don't know a whole lot about nano tech either. It's not just her.
raised nearly $400,000 in the last quarter, for the third straight period. ..... $373,333 is money for the primary, which is the strongest quarter she's had so far in terms of money for the pre-general matchup. She raised $394,000 overall this quarter, and $1.2 million for the race. ....... 7,250 signatures ..... only 25 percent of her donors are affiliated with the banking industry. ...... Sixty-eight percent of donations this quarter were $250 or less. .....the first time in 18 years that Maloney will have a challenger on the primary ballot, and Saujani did it with volunteers, and no political clubs. .... Saujani's cash-on-hand is $426,000
I dropped by at the Reshma 2010 headquarters for a few hours earlier in the evening. It is on Madison Avenue between 31st and 32nd.
I made 100 phone calls. About 21 of them went through. Then I picked up some literature to go work a subway stop. Aaron suggested the 23rd Street stop. Once I got there though I decided on a change in plan. I walked over to Little India. I was going to leave the literature at the various stores. I was so impressed that the campaign had been all those places before me. The first store I walked into, they already had Reshma 2010 literature on full display. It is not often that an Indian American runs for Congress. And you could feel the quiet pride the people felt.
It was that same thing I felt talking to a lot of elderly white women on the phone. They said they were for Maloney. I respect that, I said each time, and meant it. These were women who would be home when others were at work.
Similarly I can see how Reshma appeals to young professional women, and to young professionals in general. I have been trying to figure out what the Reshma style is, for Obama that has been the new kind of politics, one that is about positivity. Reshma's style is in formation, sure. But I think it relies much on sheer excellence. You work very hard. You do the best work you can. You raise the most money. You flesh out the best policy proposals. That style can appeal to professionals in general, men and women alike. Her appeal is based on excellence.
Reshma is intellectually challenging in a way Maloney is not. Maloney is safely pro-choice. Reshma is pro-choice plus. Maloney's generation tried their best, and they did good work, but they have not achieved equality for women. Reshma's task begins where Maloney's ends. Maloney's best is but Reshma's foundation. This is not a race to demolish Maloney. This is a race to succeed Maloney. This race is about suggesting Maloney's best has not been good enough, and so a more capable, more energetic person needs to step in.
And that applies to more than gender. The thing to note is not that finally some work is being done on the Second Avenue subway line, but why it took so long. That subway line has been a work in progress the entire time Maloney has been in Congress. That is not my idea of excellence.
Maloney has been safely Democratic. The leaders in Congress have not had to fear she might go vote with the Republicans. But she has not been any sort of a guiding light. She has not been that Congressperson who Democrats in various parts of the country have quoted. She has been humho. She has been mediocre. She has been "ordinary," as the Washington Post article described her. Only today I realized that article in the Post was on its front page. I read it online, so I did not realize if it was on the front page, or where it was.
Not only is this Reshma-Maloney race the most talked about race in the state of New York, it also has attracted national attention.
At the Niagara falls, the water collects, and collects, and collects, and then the waterfall part happens. At this point we are in the water collecting part of the campaign. I suggested that metaphor to Aaron and to Reshma while at the office.
There is much joy in talking to voters on the phone: you hear all sorts of unexpected stuff. One voter said, I don't like to get my political information on the phone, can you please send it to me in the mail instead? Another said, I need a number I can call so I can get my information.
My final call went something like this.
"Have you heard of Reshma?"
"Yes."
"Will you be voting for her on September 14?"
"Yes."
There were quite a few people who said, I have heard of her, but I don't know enough about her to decide one way or the other.
There is much joy to meeting people in person.
And on my way out Aaron told me Reshma was on Bloomberg TV today. I need to get the YouTube clip for that, I said.
We did the petition thing, Megan said with quiet pride. You sure did. That was a lot of work.
I try to offer some strategic thinking digitally. And that is fun. But it is in talking to and meeting people where the big fun part is. I told Aaron I will try to show up once a week for that fun part.
There is a great article in the New York Times about BP. There is a panoramic feel to the article. It tries to look at BP from many different angles. I am going to quote from it at length, and I am going to comment on it.
Despite a catalog of crises and near misses in recent years, BP has been chronically unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes, an examination of its record shows. ...... In little more than a decade, BP grew from a middleweight into the industry’s second-largest company, behind only Exxon Mobil, with soaring profits, fat dividends and a share price to match. ...... From its base in London, the company struck bold deals in politically volatile areas like Angola and Azerbaijan and pushed technology to the limit in the remotest reaches of Alaska and the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico — “the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” as its chief executive, Tony Hayward, once put it. ....... an incredibly complicated set of events with individual decisions and equipment failures that led to a very complicated industrial accident ...... BP was born in 1908 when a rich Englishman named William Knox D’Arcy struck oil in Iran and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Treating the locals as little more than imperial subjects, the company, partly owned by the British government, expanded across the region, its fortunes intertwined with those of the British Empire. ........ Unlike some of his more cautious competitors, Mr. Browne ignored small projects and went after the riskiest, most expensive and potentially most lucrative ventures — “elephants,” in industry jargon. Under him, BP’s share price more than doubled and its cash dividend tripled, making it a darling of investors. ....... he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords ....... “I transformed a company, challenged a sector, and prompted political and business leaders to change.” ...... March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City. ...... A year later, there was a new calamity: 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. ....... The near sinking of Thunder Horse in 2005 was caused by a shockingly simple mistake: a check valve had been installed backward
My first reaction when the disaster struck was to try to put it on the geopolitical map. This was an environmental 9/11 with no Bin Laden in the picture. No one person could be blamed, but an entire civilization should be.
But I have only a layperson's knowledge of the details, of what has happened, of what all happened that led to the crisis in the first place.
This has been an accident. This is the magnitude of the Space Shuttle exploding. This was big. And when something like this happens, there is a lot of Monday quarterbacking. Cleaning up had to happen. BP needed to compensate those who needed to be compensated. But this disaster could not be measured in dollar terms.
Money is in the human realm. Money, stock prices, business cycles are human, they are artificial. What had happened was at that borderline where humanity interacts with Mother Nature. The entire pond that is the Gulf had been messed up for a long, long time. There is no cleaning that. There is no compensating that.
I have seen a lot of diagrams and a lot of amateur videos suggesting how best to unplug the leaks. They all have uniformly missed one fundamental point. The pressures at those depths are huge. You are not at sea level pressure.
We saw the oil that surfaced. But we will never account for the Amazon forests we have destroyed down there. We know much more about outer space than we do about our ocean depths.
Too bad this is how democracy works. We need a big accident like this one to jolt the population to seriously start thinking in terms of a zero emissions future. You need something this big, and this bad to finally make the emotional connect among people to do the right thing. We should be able to do better than that. Intellectual extrapolations should be good enough reason.
BP is responsible, and it needs to take responsibility. But this goes beyond BP. The Gulf Oil Spill is a civilization level incident.
a new cap that could contain all of the oil spewing from its out-of-control well in the Gulf of Mexico ..... If all goes as planned, the new cap will be lowered on top of the pipe and connected with a tight seal. ..... The new cap should eventually enable BP to contain all of the oil from the well, estimated at up to 60,000 barrels a day ..... a relief well that will be used to stop the leak and permanently seal the well was on pace to intercept the blown-out well at the end of the month, and that the procedure to stop the flow of oil by pumping mud into the well, followed by cement, could take several weeks after that.
effectively ending the three-month gusher. ..... there could be delays, especially if ice-like crystals of methane and water form when the new cap is put on. .... Given the number of engineering efforts that have failed .... the first relief well was now only about five feet away horizontally from the runaway well.
“People have to be motivated and give up some of these comforts,” said Janel Sterbentz, a 32-year-old demonstrator from San Jose who said she had never owned a car..... an opportunity to push the environmental movement further — beyond merely green, mass transit first, or pro-cycling. ...... For some, the mission now is anti-car. ..... “We need to use less fossil fuels,” he said. “We need to have simpler lives.” .... “We need to treat people who are addicted to their cars like people with an illness, people who are sick, rather than people who are intentionally destroying the planet,” he said. ...... He has not owned a car since 1999 and stopped flying in 2006 when he took trains and a cargo ship to travel to graduate school in England. ....... the toll automobiles take on society is greater than drivers pay. ...... “Would they have said to the abolitionists, ‘You should tone down the rhetoric?’ ”
But not everyone shares the dream. In June, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline “Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker,” noting that “in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians.” ...... The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that blacken tubs; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with the entire family. ...... In Engelberg, where a visitor is more likely to encounter a woman in a sari than hear the clang of a cowbell, some European tourists are unsettled. ..... “I can imagine that a German or a Dutchman might not imagine Switzerland this way,” Mr. Casanova said. “They want the Swiss pastoral idyll.”
Getting on Hardball is the next best thing to getting Maloney to debate you for all the exposure, but I lost a little respect for Chris Matthews when I watched the clip when he had Reshma on his show.
Basically he was saying to Reshma, you are Wall Street's candidate. And he read from a list of her donors. Many of them were people working for the various banks in New York City. Well, Chris, have you heard of the Upper East Side? There is a reason Democrats across the country come to the Upper East Side of New York City to raise money. There is a reason Obama and Pelosi had a fundraiser on the Upper East Side a few months back. There are a lot of moneyed people living on the Upper East Side. And that Upper East Side is part of District 14, the district Reshma is seeking to represent in Congress. If people in your district are making individual contributions to you, where is the mud in the picture?
The real story is as to how she has managed to raise all this money. During the last quarter of 2009, Reshma outraised Maloney two to one. She is obviously tapping into a hunger for leadership that a lot of Upper East Siders feel. Maloney comes across as vacuous to many of them.
Maloney on the other hand has been taking PAC money from Wall Street. T-h-a-t is Wall Street's candidate. Reshma has not taken a dime in PAC money. She has had hundreds of people who have given the legal max. But she also has hundreds of people donating to her small sums of 20 dollars and 60 dollars and 200 dollars. This has been a very grassroots effort. And if a house party in Astoria is grassroots, so is a house party on the Upper East Side.
Maloney has not only taken gobs of PAC money from Wall Street, she just might have crossed the line recently when she out and out organized a fundraiser among Wall Street people when at the same time she was supposed to be shaping Wall Street reform. There might have been an ethics violation. Where is the outrage? Where is the investigation?
And then there is the policy part. Reshma has been for reform for Wall Street from the very beginning. She stands with Obama on this one. And she feels like she is also standing for her constituents who work on Wall Street. Because only a reformed Wall Street has a bright future.
And then there is the issue of just knowing what you are talking about. Having worked on Wall Street for a few years after having earned degrees from three of the fanciest schools in the country - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard, Yale Law - when Reshma talks Wall Street reform, that is like a doctor talking medical issues. I trust Reshma on Wall Street reform like I trust Dr. Howard Dean on health care reform. Dean actually is a medical doctor. He would know a thing or two about health care. Don't you think? Maloney has none of the expertise but all the hot air on the topic. All of a sudden I am supposed to think Maloney is a woman of the people? Give me a break.
Reshma's Wall Street experience is a plus. That makes her informed.
She is the national leader to the tech sector. There her appeal is bi-coastal. Her appeal is national.
Maloney takes Wall Street PAC money, and Reshma does not, and she is the Wall Street's candidate? If we are going to blame Reshma for the Great Recession, we might as well blame her for the earthquake in Haiti. That is so misplaced that I am going to call it demonization. Maloney, on the other hand, can partly be blamed for the Gulf Oil Spill. She owns oil stocks. Don't tell me that did not shape her motivations when she voted the way she voted on oil over the past decade. Follow the damn money.
There is a term in Hindi: safed jhooth. Or, white lie. When someone looks straight in the eye, and says something utterly untrue, that is a white lie. Calling Reshma Wall Street's puppet candidate is a white lie.
And then there are people who make it sound like her having gone to Harvard and Yale is a bad thing. Obama went to Harvard. Clinton went to Yale. Reshma went to both. Look at it that way, because that is the only right way to look at it.
So stop demonizing Reshma Saujani and start instead asking as to why Maloney refuses to debate her. Debating is the essence of democracy. The people deserve an open discussion. The two candidates need to tell the people in the district as to where they stand on all the issues.
Reshma is not Wall Street's candidate. Reshma is a candidate for a district that a lot of Wall Street workers live in. Reshma is a candidate for Wall Street reform. Reshma is the only candidate in this race who has not taken PAC money. Stop spreading the white lie that Reshma is Wall Streets' candidate.
It is a sorry day for democracy when a reputed journalist like Chris Matthews repeats a white lie.
And you want me to tell you how Reshma Saujani and Carolyn Maloney are different from each other? Where do you want me to begin? I'd like to start with the brains part.
If this is the Reshma Saujani we are going to see on TV during her debates with Carolyn Maloney - i-f there are debates that is, and that is a big i-f, Maloney has been running scared, can you blame her? (Debating Is "Stunt" In A Maloney Democracy) - we win hands down. This woman is dynamo. This woman is brilliant. This woman is cutting edge. I have said this before and I will say this again, this woman is going to be hitting the national headlines on September 15.
Carolyn Maloney, dove, hawk or chicken? Dove on Wall Street reform. She has been taking all the Wall Street PAC money, has she not? Hawk on the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. I knew she was from North Jesse Helms Carolina, did you? Chicken on debating Reshma.
Carolyn Maloney, dove, hawk or chicken? All of the above.
Ugh, it's been a few weeks since my last Reshma event. There has been the World Cup. And there have been some stuff I have needed to work on. But I hope to stay in touch with the campaign, and I hope to keep volunteering.
My favored way of volunteering is digital. When people google up her name, I want them to come across my blog. So my blogging for Reshma 2010 is a gift that will keep giving. And I want to show up at the campaign office here and there, pick up some literature and go work the nearest subway stop. And, of course, I want to show up for all the key events. You got to party. When you are having fun is when you know you are winning.
The Democratic Party is on its way to an intellectual bankruptcy by the time Obama's eight years are over. Reshma Saujani is the party's insurance against that bankruptcy.
Carolyn Maloney is too "ordinary" - as described in the Washington Post article - to keep representing District 14. District 14 functions as the ATM for the entire Democratic Party, it is a solidly Democratic district. You need a Super Star Congressperson to represent this district. Reshma is that Super Star. She is dazzling. Check out the video above.
The idea that Reshma Saujani is Wall Street's candidate was a lie six months ago, and it is a lie today. She does recognize the fact that Wall Street is an integral part of the New York economy, and indeed the national and the global economy. Many people who work on Wall Street live in her district, many of them have made individual contributions to her. You have to wonder. She is the stronger between the two for Wall Street reform, and still so many people on Wall Street support her. Why? Because the truth is a lot of people on Wall Street themselves are for reform. They realize Wall Street needs to reinvent itself if it is going to see robust days ahead. And that is Reshma's point. Work for meaningful reform. But stop demonizing Wall Street wholescale. Reform the bad aspects, keep the good aspects, and let's see brighter days ahead. Carolyn Maloney is slow. She is thick. When Maloney talks Wall Street reform, she does not know what she is talking about. When Reshma talks Wall Street reform, that is like a doctor talking medical issues. She knows what she is talking about. She has the vocabulary.
Get the debates on, yo! I think Maloney should do it, a debate a week. It is like dipping your toe into cold water. It is daunting, but you can do it. Maloney, you can do it. Let's get the game on.
Carolyn Maloney has decided she is not going to debate Reshma. (Debating Is "Stunt" In A Maloney Democracy) I wish Maloney all the false confidence in the world. She is relying on a poll her campaign conducted before Reshma did her months of field work.
The most talked about race in the state of New York is not going to have any debates if Maloney will have her way.
Of all the races in all the state, why does this one have people so passionate?
Obama won Iowa. The polls did not show that he will win, and they did not show his eventual margin. Why? Because the pollsters kept calling up "likely voters," their name for people who voted four years ago. But what Obama had done was build an army of new, first time voters on the ground. And so the pollsters were left in the dust. And, mind you, these were not pollsters hired by the Edwards campaign.
And you have Maloney basking in the glory of early, internal polling. I wish her a ton of false self confidence. If this race were such a shoo-in for Maloney, why is it the most talked about race in the state? It is such a talked about race because it is a competitive race.
But asking Maloney to do two debates a month to election day is like asking the mullahs in Iran to hold a reelection: not gonna happen. (Iran: The World Has Wasted A Year)
So what do you do? While at the Reshma 2010 party last night, I thought about this a whole lot, at the party and after the party. (Reshma 2010 Party Tonight)
I think the answer is social media. The answer is new media.
There were about 100 people at the party, in and out. Victory lies at the 1,000 mark. Once the circle of core supporters expands from 100 to 1,000, we win. Because all we need is 30,000 votes to win.
There was so much positive energy in the room last night. You could feel the tremendous momentum.
Already the candidate is doing an average of three events per day, events big and small. That is a tremendous pace.
Why do we want debates? So we can air our views, and we can get media coverage. We get on local TV. Are there other ways of achieving the same goals? I believe there are. Social media does better what traditional media does pretty good.
I was at the party last night, so I saw what happened. What if I was not there but wanted to know what happened? If the campaign were to post 100 pictures from the event at its Facebook page, if the campaign were to post a five minute video clip from the party at its YouTube channel, I might get a feel for what happened at the party last night. The audience for that video might only be 500 strong right now, but that is what social media is all about: media for all audience sizes. Small audiences matter, small audiences are intimate.
I say do events and be your own media, cover all events. There should be at least one photo from each event, posted at the campaign's Facebook page. Short video clips are great. They are free to produce. Long live the Flip camera.
And we have to produce full length videos of Reshma giving speeches on all major issues. We asked for but did not get two debates per month with Maloney. But we could easily do one major speech per week on our own.
I am all about taking attendance with the camera. When you capture a candidate speech on camera, it is important to capture all faces in the room. It is not just about the candidate, but also the crowd.
Upload the full speech, and upload a shorter video of highlights. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, one speech a week keeps Maloney away.
Another strategy would be to keep going on TV and keep challenging Maloney to do the debates.
Social media is not an imitation of old media. Social media is more. Social media is much more than saying, okay, we are going to be our own C-Span.
Social media allows you to turn your organization into a jellyfish. I am using that metaphor to hint at transparency. There are things that are private, but then there are things that are not private. The private strategy session that decided on the new office space was not something that needed to stay private. A three minute video from that session would have been great. You do that for your core 1,000 supporters. You are not on the staff, you were not even in the office that day, but we want you to feel included.
How much of the internal operations can you video blog like that?
I am for uploading five minutes of video every single day. The whole exercise is free.
And then there are the giants: Facebook and Twitter. Most everyone on the East Side who will vote on September 14 is on Facebook. I am guessing that to be the case. The campaign Facebook page has to be taken to new heights.
For every event the candidate does, at least one photo with a brief description has to end up on the Facebook page. It should be super easy for our core supporters to follow the campaign, and the Facebook stream is perhaps the best way. The accompanying staffer, also armed with a Droid X, can perhaps take care of the social media part of events.
Post video clips on Facebook.
And this is key: retweeting and pressing that Like button. All staffers and interns need to do that. East tweet by the campaign has to start with 30 retweets right away. Each Facebook update has to be liked by 30 people within the hour. And for key articles shared by Reshma on Facebook, there have to be 30 comments by the end of the day. I don't know how you do this. Do you send out an internal email each time? But I do know this has to be done.
It has to feel like there is a lot of activity. And you soon enough get the snowball effect. This is not about faking it, this is about engaging the core of the organization.
And then there is going out there. Take the NYDailyNews.com for example. It is not like they push six Reshma articles per day. It is one every few weeks. But those articles generate a lot of comments. Well, we can make sure at least 30 of those comments come from Reshma supporters. And if we can do that, more supporters will come out of the woodworks. This digital engagement is important because it is free, and it is real. These are real people. Many more people read the comments than leave them. That is an interested crowd.
Maloney's perceived advantages from dodging debates can be neutralized through a thorough use of social media. If she opts for just one debate early in September, we have to turn that into a slam dunk. And we can do that if we make extensive use of social media in the weeks before that.
If a tree fell deep in the forest, and nobody heard it fall, did the tree fall? Social media is about making sure people hear the tree fall. One photo per event, I would think, is the absolute minimum. The goal has to be to capture every face that shows up for every event. This is as much about covering the candidate as the crowd.
The idea is to produce short, compelling video clips for the Facebook stream every other day, so compelling people go ahead and press the Share button. If we are not going to get the free media from debating, we have to fill up the gap by becoming our own media. New media is better media.
Image of Reshma Saujani
