"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" – Hunter S. Thompson.
In my opinion, politics is at its best when it's pro-am. By this, I mean that a balance is kept between those who do politics for a living and those who do politics out of their passion for causes.
As proud as I am of the two Gary Johnson presidential campaigns' success, I keep wondering if the consultants he brought along were holding us back with expensive infrastructure that evaporated with the campaign's end.
Mind you, to a degree, that infrastructure they provided was a must, as there weren't enough home-grown campaign staff to take it on in 2012.
And I'm sure the lack of funds that third parties always face was a major factor in Gary's insistence on having Bill Weld as his running mate in 2016 to try to overcome that.
However, one wonders what could have been done with a more efficient organization. Then again, Gary's consultants helped him win the New Mexico governor's race when the GOP establishment was telling him to run for a lesser seat in the legislature. Taking a chance on just LP volunteers was an unknown risk.
Which was while I was excited about Justin Amash joining the LP, I always hoped he'd hold back on a presidential run, and not seek the nomination in 2020. I wanted us to show the political world that we'd developed our talent pool and were able to run a professional campaign with home-grown talent on a much tighter budget.
Professionalism -noun
The competence or skill expected of a professional:"The key to quality and efficiency is professionalism."
–Apple Dictionary
That's why I was especially proud of the Jo Jorgensen campaign. It was staffed by a who's who of Libertarian Party activists from the past few decades. She not only got the second-highest vote total of any Libertarian presidential candidate, but her campaign was the most efficient in terms of dollars spent per vote, even before accounting for inflation.
In short, the amateurs went pro, keeping their passion for the cause in the process. I hope that if and when we recruit an established politician in the future, they rely much more heavily on LP activists.
But that's just the top of the ticket. Campaigns at all levels can use better, more effective staff. But we cannot afford the same kind of bloated campaigns that the Ds and Rs have.
We need to develop talent in-house for congressional, state, and local races, as well as party leadership itself. We had been doing that, which is in no small part why the Jorgensen campaign was so successful.
We need our activists to 'go pro,' not necessarily professional as paid staff or full-time (though the most capable are likely to be entrepreneurial enough to make it a job or career), but to embrace professionalism. And that is achieved through training.
The national party has sponsored various training efforts on and off over the years. My very first run for office was a result of one such training series in 1997. I had intended to train to be a volunteer on a Libertarian campaign but ended up being a candidate myself, given the lack of candidates in 1998.
I traveled to Massachusetts for that training and was so impressed by it that I lobbied for a similar one to be held in 1999 in Maine.
Over the years, various kinds of training have frequently been offered at national conventions.
The zenith of these efforts was the training programs put in place for 2021 regionally and 2022 at the national convention. The training itself had gone professional, with paid contractors and staff from within the Libertarian Party coordinating it.
But with the latest LNC. All that went away. To the extent the national office remained professional, it was merely on the spoils system, where all existing staff were treated with distrust and suspicion until they could be replaced.
The next LNC needs to try to restore that 2021-22 training plan. The national staff needs to be built back up to support it.
At the same time, we can't make the same mistakes as the prior LNC and dispose of everyone. Just because the leadership that hired them was poor does not mean that their hires are incapable of their jobs. That will require honest assessments of abilities, professionalism, and willingness to work with a new LNC.
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