As many of you know from reading my posts, Jeff Smith, a friend from grad school, ran for Dick Gephardt’s seat in 2006. It was a 10 way race with several current/former office holders running including Russ Carnahan. Jeff ran one of the best grass roots campaigns, but came up 1724 votes short in a race with 107,000 votes cast. Jeff actually won in St. Louis County and Saint Louis City, but didn’t produce enough votes in Jefferson County. I still walk around the City wondering if we hit specific blocks hard enough.
Somehow, filmmaker Frank Popper saw something early in that race and followed the campaign for a few months up until the August Primary in 2004. The result is Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? I won’t see it until the end of this month, but it was shown at the Washington DC Silverdocs film festival and won the audience award. I make a cameo in it, but everyone avoids telling me what I’m doing when I appear. This concerns me.
Fun moments that might have been included:
1) Me, a white guy from Central Illinois, and Artie Harris, the campaign press secretary and Jewish guy from Brooklyn, listening intently to the ads for black radio and determining which sounded the most authentic.
2) Jeff and I explaining the night before the election, pointing out micro-level neighborhood analysis of what to look for while the rest of the campaign folks site back and go, NOW, you are telling us this?
3) Artie and I having an argument about how to respond to the press about the count. This occurred at about 2 AM after many in the room had been up since 6 AM and working polls or otherwise and a fair amount of drinking had taken place. As I remember that moment, Frank had put down his camera so you’ll miss Josh Levin getting me to calm down.
4) Me sitting at the computer, swearing under my breath while I do calculations on vote totals and the proportion Jeff needed to win.
Fine missed moments by Frank include Artie, Nick and I driving through neighborhoods trying to rally supporters with a megaphone while trying to figure out where the hell the campaign volunteers went. Around the same time, walking around with some random guy who jumped on the bandwagon right there trying to find people outside on a 95 degree day. At one point Jeff was walking down the street dribbling a basketball and using the megaphone in about the only time he wasn’t at a poll or on the way to another.
As a bonus, I believe Iowa-02 Candidate David Loebsack makes a brief appearance in the film from election night–he came down to work on Jeff’s race.
From what I understand there are some truly awkward moments in the movie that deal with Jeff working on endorsements and running into institutions and people afraid to bet on what they perceived as a long shot.
For me, the film has two groups it’ll especially interest. The first are grassroots activists who, frankly, need a dose of reality. Jeff organized for Bill Bradley in Iowa, worked on several campaigns and had run some local campaigns. He knew how to raise money and he knew how to efficiently spend money and how to utilize volunteers. Before you crash the gate (and Jerome and Markos point this out), you have to have a plan and discipline to implement that plan.
The second group are people who are campaign pros, but are scared of the anything resembling mass participation. While the entire campaign was about defeating entrenched power, it was also about organizing and motivating a group of people who had not been that active in campaigns in the past.
While Jeff is often touted, and fairly so, as a candidate who worked the grassroots and almost pulled it off, his campaign wasn’t the amateurish, if we just speak the truth, they’ll listen. It was, these dumb bastards are ignoring us, so let’s sneak up on them and exploit every mistake they make. Ultimately, turnout spiked with the same sex marriage ban being on the primary ballot which threw all of the vote projections from early in the race out.
With that build-up, the let down is the film is only playing in Saint Louis and New York for now, but keep a look out for it wherever you are and I’ll certainly announce future engagements as the two producers are in frequent contact with me (okay, one lives like 3 blocks away-the other, maybe 10 blocks).
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