I Meet With Basic Rights Montgomery

Yesterday I posted a piece criticizing a presentation by Basic Rights Montgomery. Today I went to their office and had an interesting meeting with some of their managers. After some good discussion, I feel confident the organization will successfully manage the referendum campaign. Let me tell you about the meeting.

The Montgomery County Council passed a bill last year that prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and some extremists got up petitions for a referendum to rescind the law. There is a lawsuit, it's still under appeal, but at this point a referendum is in line for the elections in a little more than two months. Last night I attended a public presentation by Basic Rights Montgomery at a Unitarian Church in Rockville, where they were going to present their strategy for winning the referendum measure that will probably appear on the November ballot.

The meeting yesterday got off to a good enough start, there was some talk about how many votes we need to win, what kind of base we can count on, there was mention of some planned research to find out more about the voters and how to reach them, stuff about fund-raising and volunteering, it was all good.

But somewhere along the way the presentation ran off the rails. Pretty quickly, actually. People started asking questions and making comments -- there were about forty people in the room and at times it looked like most of them had their hands up. The presenters tried to play along but the meeting got disorganized, and a lot of things were said that they hadn't really intended to say. By the end of the meeting a lot of people were frustrated, including me.

I went home and blogged about it. There is no question where I stand here, I think the referendum is an embarrassment, our county needs to adopt the nondiscrimination law decisively and run the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever out of town on a rail. Basic Rights Montgomery is the group that will manage the campaign, and I want them to kick some butt. But ... you saw what I wrote.

I think stuff started happening this morning pretty early. The campaign staff at BRM started analyzing the presentation and what had gone wrong -- they didn't need me to tell them it had gone badly. They did see the blog and, not surprisingly, they weren't happy about it. A lot of phone calls were made, though interestingly none to me.

Eventually word got to me, and I decided to go down to their office to meet with the campaign managers, Opel Simmons and Eric Anthony, plus a couple other people. It's funny, I write about people on the blog but I usually don't have to deal with them afterwards. I knew they were unhappy with me, I was told that somebody had suggested taking the blog post down (not gonna happen), well I'm sure they didn't like what I said. My feeling about that is, if you don't want to have that kind of publicity, don't give that kind of presentation.

It turned out to be an amiable enough gathering. They explained to me some details of their strategy and activities so far, and things really are going well, especially when you consider they've been at it less than two weeks. Their fund-raising activities are indeed raising funds, they have plans for getting information to the community, the staff is coming together to support the campaign. They have clear plans about concrete things like mailings and phone banks, polls and message framing, and I have confidence that they will be successful in this. For them it's all something that builds up to election day, there are some activities that are important now, especially fund-raising, and there are other activities that will be more important as it comes down to the wire. They know how many votes they need, how many likely votes they have already, and their goal will be to reach those who will support the cause in the voting booth.

I told them that I want them to win and I am willing to cooperate with them toward that end but I'm not going to be a puppet. The credibility of this blog depends on us reporting the facts, warts and all. If you follow the comments here, you will see that I am called a liar once or twice a week for something or other, but if I really was a liar nobody would read this stuff. And the fact is, much as I agree with their aims, yesterday's presentation was not good, so that's what I wrote. I think by the end of the meeting we understood each other. I respect their abilities and professionalism and trust that they will run a winning campaign, and they know they have my support but I will criticize them if I think they are underperforming.

It appears to me that Basic Rights Montgomery is going to do everything right as far as getting people to vote Yes on C. Talking to them today without the distraction of people raising their hands and changing the subject every two or three minutes, you could see that these people are committed professionals who know what they're doing. The problem yesterday was really one of presenting themselves to the public. When you have a roomful of people who care passionately about a subject, they don't want to hear about polls you plan to conduct and problems with your web server. They want to talk about the issues, people want to talk about discrimination, gender identity, bigotry, the culture wars. Basic Rights Montgomery is fully prepared to fight the campaign we need here, and I'm afraid they simply didn't give enough thought to how they would present it to the public.

I know these guys weren't happy with me, but they were nice enough about it. I told them they were lucky it was me and not some reporter from one of the big newspapers. They understood before I got there that the problem was not my blogging, the problem was their meeting. Though, in fairness, they were not happy about my blogging. I asked them if I had any facts wrong and offered to fix them, but no.

I know that Basic Rights Montgomery managers are revising their approach to public presentations. It sounds like several things went wrong at this one, it was scheduled for too long, they were not permitted to bring in a speaker, a confluence of things resulted in an unsuccessful presentation and bad publicity. This is going to be a good campaign, it was just a presentation that got away from them. They are taking the lesson learned and making the best of it, and that's the most you can hope for.