[Lnc-business] Specialization is good

[Scott L.]

"When I was executive director of the LP Texas, I had one personal goal: run
as many candidates as possible. It's not all that I did, but it was by far
THE top priority. I made whatever database I needed to make that happen (or
got someone else too. :-)     And I raised whatever funds I needed to make
that happen.

We also greatly increased fundraising, membership, and elected Libertarians
in Texas. But much of that happened as a result of (or was improved as a
result of) my top priority, which was to run as many candidates as possible.

I'm expecting a broad range of goals for the national LP, with perhaps
funding IT-Committee projects being #1. But an example of a very focused set
of goals could be:

2015 goal: increase membership from 15,000 to 20,000.
2016 goal: run 1,000 candidates for office.



Wes Benedict, Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee, Inc."

 

 

The above e-mail helps confirm my belief that our Executive Director is
extremely good at coming up with an achievable goal, and then doing
"whatever it takes" to accomplish that goal.  That is a very good trait for
the COO (1) of the Libertarian Party to have.

I certainly welcome the ED's input into process of goal setting for the
organization.

I like to imagine what the end goal is like, and then work backwards from
that.  If we agree that we want a libertarian America, then we need to
figure out how to get there without a violent revolution.  Although changing
to a proportional representation system and the like might get us to that
goal faster, that is not the job of a political party - that is the job of
an advocacy group specifically set up for that purpose.

Since myself and much of the outside world believes that political parties
exist to enact legislation that fits their ideology, the question is - how
do we get to that point?

Increasing membership might make staff and the board happy, but does it help
us elect Libertarians to public office?  .  I maintain that although those
goals might be good tactical goals for the ED or for specific LNC
Committees, I don't think they quite fill the bill for a BHAG that I
described in an e-mail last night.

The advantages of 40 in 16 are:

1.      It is definitely achievable.

2.      It shows the major parties that we are serious when we say that we
are getting very close to being the 3rd major party in the United States.

3.      Given the amount of blood, sweat, tears, and money that our donors
have spent on ballot access over the past 4 decades, achieving this goal
will get us much closer to ballot-access nirvana.

4.      By definition, achieving this goal will have taught dozens of LP
candidates and volunteers across the country how to lift their vote
percentages for statewide offices from the low single digits to the high
single digits.  Remember - the marginal cost of getting votes is much lower
when you are trying to go from 3% to 5%, than it is to go from 30% to 32%.

 

Needless to say, Mr. Redpath's continued help with ballot access will be
invaluable if the LP wishes to achieve this goal, 

since 40 state ballot access in Dec 2016 will be impossible unless we have
48 to 50 state ballot access in October 2016.

 

    Scott Lieberman

1.  COO is my personal definition for the job description of the ED of the
LP.  It is not in any way an official or even semi-official description of
the ED position.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20140915/b06b66fa/attachment-0002.html>