Tales of campaigning battle-scars

by Ian Hayden
Presidency and the Press

Derek Scalia, Northeast Regional Field Director for Dennis Kucinich’s campaign, shared stores of some of the hard times working a campaign.

According to Derek, during the 2004 campaign there was an event held on Franklin Pierce’s campus that served as a house party for Dennis’ campaign. During this event, Derek was asked to escort a woman across the campus because she wasn’t familiar with where the parking lot was in relation to where the event was. While escorting her across the campus, they talked about a few political topics, including communism. It turned out that the woman was from ABC, and asked him if it was alright to use some of the things they talked about. Being young and inexperienced at the time, Derek consented, to find in the morning that he’d made the front page and his views on other subjects had been attributed to Kucinich. He says this was a powerful lesson for him to, “Be mindful of who your talking to and what your representing.”

Derek also spoke of another Kucinich event, this one in 2008, where he had to track down a reporter to correct an error in the reported attendance of the event. The reporter had said that only about 400 people had attended, when actually the attendance was closer to 600. The remaining 200 were wearing shirts marked with Kucinich’s slogan and campaign symbol, causing the reporter to mistake them for event staff. After some convincing, Derek finally convinced the reporter of his error and was able to have him correct it.

In the current campaign, Derek spends late nights going over the reports on the support for Kucinich in each household that his field operators have been to. Once the reports have all been sorted, he then has to participate in a conference call with the state campaign manager and the national campaign manager. “There’s alot of hard work involved in the campaign.”