Dear Political Candidate--This an open letter from your staff. It's pretty generic, so most candidates can and should relate.
- Your staff is comprised of political professionals. We come to work, do a job, and expect to be paid for doing the job. We may [in some cases] like you, we may 'believe' in you, but we still have bills to pay like everyone else. Notice all the hours we put in? That means we don't have other jobs and as such need to be paid by you in a timely manner. Thank you.
- Your job as a candidate is to raise money. When you decided to run for office, you probably envisioned yourself shaking hands on parade routes and engaging in interesting debates, not spending hours on the phone making calls. We're sorry you're disappointed, but you've probably already been told this by Party leadership, other elected officials, and other consultants. It's our job to insist you stay on the phone, please stop complaining when we do that.
- By and large, we're pretty much uninterested in the input of your friends. We don't like it when you start a sentence with the words "My friend so and so thinks...." If they don't do politics for a living they probably don't know what they're talking about. We don't care how smart they are or what they've done in their own professional lives that qualify them to give advice. This very much included telling us the poll we took is 'wrong' because your buddy says that people here really don't care about whatever.
- Do you let your spouse come to your regular office and abuse your employees? If not, please don't allow it on the campaign. It's demoralizing to us to have him or her boss us around. We work for YOUR CAMPAIGN, not for you personally and most definitely not for your spouse. Please keep him or her away from us unless they're here to do something constructive like make fundraising calls, pick up a walk list, or bring us food. If you ignore that rule we're going to spend valuable time talking about him or her and complaining.
- Before calling us after, say, 11:00 pm, ask yourself if the nature of your call is important. That somebody needs a bumper sticker or doesn't like a radio ad doesn't qualify.
- Please tell us when we begin working for you if you want employees or best friends and ego boosters. We consider it our responsibility to sometimes have to tell you things you don't want to hear or give you unpopular advice. That's our job, it's not our job to feed your ego or worry about making you personally happy. If you plan to fly off the handle because your feelings are easily hurt or you're running for office because you need to be the center of attention, tell us up front. We'll go work for somebody else.