This week we met up with our campaign manager and our field coordinator on Tuesday to go over this weeks to do list and get a good idea of what we would be working on this week. The campaign had a full week with a house party, canvassing, phone banking and a last minute candidate forum. Unfortunately due to my school schedule and the rain I was unable to help canvass or attend the house party.
Since we do not have a campaign office, the planning of the phone bank was my first practical lesson in our first commandment, “improvise, adapt and overcome”. We had a few locations that we were throwing around as possibilities such as a realtor office and the Democratic headquarters here in Saint Pete. We had originally wanted to use the space at Democratic HQ because then we would have access to vote builder right at our fingertips and Mike wanted to show us how it worked but the space ended up being booked so the day before the meeting Steve and Mike let us all know via e-mail where we would be meeting. I’m sure we will see a lot more last minute change of plans before the campaign is over, especially when it comes to meeting places.
Another big lesson in this commandment came this week at the candidate forum. All three candidates had said that they were going to show up and when this was the case we wanted to video tape the forum to get good clips of Steve and maybe even catch some gaffe that we could pull out of our hats if need be. Upon learning that Angela Rousson was not going to attend we decided that it would be in everyones best interest not to tape, unless someone else was going to. When we arrived Steve Lapinski spoke with Ed Helm about not wanting to tape, because Angela was not in attendance, and fortunately for us, Ed objected and said he would only not tape the event should a candidate stand up at the beginning of the forum in front of the attendees and say that they did not want to be taped. Of course, this would look bad on the part of anyone who denied being taped, so we were not about to ask Steve to deny the request to tape. We ended up getting some great clips of Steve so in the end I feel it was a good decision to go with the flow and tape the forum.
