This list of endorsers, the "committee," will be spread across the top, down the side, and eventually all over the back of your campaign stationery, and you may use it in display advertising. A personal endorsement from almost anyone is likely to drag in another vote or two. You may decide to suppress some names when you know that the persons concerned have numerous enemies and very few friends. This is legitimate; you have not contracted to use the names.
If caught out, I would take refuge in a social fib. "Your name isn't on the list? It must have been skipped when the list was copied for the printer. It's too late to add it, I'm afraid-that printing bill was $26. But I certainly will tell Mr. Upright that you wanted your name on his committee."
Follow your own conscience. My own will stand a few polite evasions when another person's feelings can be saved without damage to anyone.
The public committee will be headed by officers whose duties are nominal unless they serve in the same capacity on the working committee. These de facto honorary officers should be selected to be as broadly representative as possible and for maximum prestige. The following set-up would be ideal for the typical American community:
The Citizen's Committee for the Honorable Jonathan Upright, Candidate for Congress, Umpteenth District
Dr. Colin MacDonald, Chairman
Francis X. OToole, Secretary
Isadore Weinstein, Treasurer
Muriel T. Busybody, Field Director telephone Grant 0361
Mrs. Busybody (yourself) is the only working member of this list, although the others are all loyal supporters. The names have been selected by you as being conspicuously Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. For maximum effect each gentleman should be very prominent, and highly respected in the community by all groups. If Dr. MacDonald is a prominent Presbyterian and Mason and a stylish physician noted for his charities, Mr. OTbole a distinguished lawyer and an active Knight of Columbus, and Mr. Weinstein both a Scout commissioner and well known in B'nai B'rith, then your cup runneth over.
Special offices can be devised to permit other prestige names to stand out-chairman women's division, vice-chairman, director speakers' bureau, public relations, liaison, chairman finance committee, chairmen for various small communities in the district, director of research, chairman study groups, etc., without end.
It is advisable to list the rest of the committee in strict alphabetical order to avoid hurt feelings.
There is no reason why any of these prestige officers should not be active campaign executives. It is sometimes possible to get a busy, able person actively into the campaign by getting him first to agree to letting his name appear at the top of the letterhead, then calling him into war councils.
The working committee consists of the following- by any titles: Candidate, manager, money raiser, publicity person, office girl, field supervisors, and precinct workers. Some of these people will double in brass and all of them should do some precinct work, in order to keep their roots down. The office girl and publicity person may be paid professionals-they certainly must be professionally skilled and experienced whether they are paid or not. There is no need for anyone else in the campaign to be paid anything.
The best place for members of the candidate's family on the committee is the chairman of South America and the Eastern Hemisphere. The candidate may need and want a member of his family as a confidential secretary and this may be tolerated, but relatives of candidates are subject to an even more virulent form of candidatitis than are candidates - it is very discouraging to have to drop real campaigning in order to go around patching up gaps in your fences left by unpolitic relatives of your white hope.
Headquarters: It does not matter in the least whether you have swank offices or good equipment; the voting public will neither know nor care. A telephone call from a private phone in a modest home soundsjust the same as one coming through a switchboard in a suite of fancy offices. You need a typewriter, file boxes for 3 x 5 cards (shoeboxes will do), a cheap letter file, a two-bit scrap book, the use (not the ownership) of a duplicating machine, a telephone which is not in reach of the casual dropper-in - and nothing else - nothing! Use furniture at hand, or improvise it out of scrap wood. Place the headquarters in any heated, rent-free space, your own spare bedroom, somebody's rumpus room, or a donated second-rate office over a store building.
Campaigns customarily have public offices fronting on commercial streets. The usefulness of such so-called headquarters is questionable; the vote-getting power is not better than border line. If you can get an empty store building, or space in an occupied store belonging to a supporter, and in either case absolutely rent-free and if you can get someone to remain in such donated space to answer questions and hand out literature on an unpaid but faithful basis and if such person is unable or totally unwilling to do precinct work instead, it is then worthwhile to invest in signs and printing to advertise the campaign by advertising the space as a "headquarters." Otherwise it is better to wait until the final campaign when such space is more readily available for the entire ticket
There are distinct advantages in not having public offices and in avoiding a swank, expensive appearance. Your campaign can be well advanced, almost unbeatable, before the opposition realizes that you are a serious threat. A Grass-Roots Campaign can be as silently insidious as cancer, as long as it doesn't look like much in the early stages. And if your offices are not expensive and comfortable you will be less bothered by the chap with his hand out and by the Headquarters Hound. The latter is a practically harmless but ubiquitous lower life form which clutters up political offices, occupying chairs, taking up working time, sounding off, and absorbing anything that is free, from ice water to signs. He is related to Sunday morning quarterbacks and arm-chair generals.
If your headquarters is not in a private home, make sure that the only available telephone is a pay phone, or, if that cannot be obtained, put a lock on the telephone and take extreme precautions with the key, as well as establishing the practice of logging all outgoing calls and obtaining the charges, if a toll call, from the operator. (This will be regarded as outright tyranny by the Headquarters Hound, but it is utterly necessary if you are to avoid incredibly large deficits.)
The telephone bills that can be incurred by an open telephone in a political office must be experienced to be believed. They are not necessary; the legitimate outgoing calls which cannot be made over private, unlimited phones are very few. The best arrangement is the pay phone and a petty cash account, locked up with the stamps, and for which the office girl is responsible.
After taking such precautions, you may then, and should, make free use of the telephone. Your business will not bankrupt the committee.
An extension wired only for incoming calls may be added to a pay phone and placed on the desk of the office girl.
The campaign funds should be kept in a bank account as the funds of an unincorporated, non-profit society. A respected group of three, none of whom have control over the funds, should be appointed to keep a running audit. The checks should require two signatures, that of the manager and either one of two others, let us say the campaign chairman and the chairman of the finance committee. The candidate should not sign checks, though he may reasonably insist on a veto as a condition of running-but let us hope not.
The following categories of expense cannot be avoided:
Filing fee
Printing
Postage
Telephone tolls
Refreshments for the election night
party for the workers
The following categories of expense are not indispensable but a strong campaign will include some and possibly all of them: