How to Win a Local Election or Soldiers of Reason

How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

Author: Lawrence Grey

A must do guide for anyone starting out in the campaign process, detailing what they need to accomplish along the way in order to win. Includes information on planning and organizing the campaign, how to run as an independent candidate, campaign techniques, and marketing tips. This book also offers advice on financial reporting to campaign theme and strategy and is the most comprehensive do-it-yourself guide to running and winning one of the 500,000 local offices.

Michael O. Eshleman - Library Journal

Grey, who has won his share of local elections-he was an Ohio county prosecutor and appellate judge-tells would-be public officials how to get elected. There are lots of books on politics, but most are by political scientists-who never get their hands dirty by actually running for office-or by reporters or participants in big campaigns for the White House or Congress. Anyone who wants to get on the school board or the city council will find this book exceedingly helpful, as Grey speaks from years of experience. Uncommon for a lawyer, he writes clear prose in chapters that follow the course of a campaign: organizing volunteers, advertising, analyzing your district's demographics, etc. Grey supplies customizable worksheets and forms on a CD-ROM, part of what is new for this third edition, which also has updated information on the use of the Internet and emails for seeking, handling, and disseminating information. Grey spells out clearly the legal issues involved in becoming a formal candidate. He stipulates that prospective office seekers check their own state's additional requirements. This is a smart, informed, and practical package. It belongs in every public library, supplemented by official publications on local election requirements.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword	10
	Foreword	11
	Introduction	13
Pt. I	Planning and Organizing the Campaign	19
1	The Office You Want to Run For	21
2	Election Statistics	27
3	Local Election Laws - Getting on the Ballot	33
4	Financial Reporting	41
5	District Geography and Demography	47
6	Talking to an Old Hand	53
7	Campaign Theme and Strategy	59
8	Party, Nonpartisan, and Independent Candidates	65
9	Computers - Using Them in the Campaign	73
Pt. II	Campaigning - The People	87
10	You Have to Have a Plan	89
11	Scheduling and a Calendar	97
12	The Campaign Manager	103
13	Getting a Volunteer Coordinator	111
14	The Candidate	117
15	Money and Fundraising	127
16	Winning It One Precinct at a Time	137
Pt. III	Campaign Procedures and Techniques	143
17	Literature - The Campaign Brochure	145
18	Getting a Good Mailing List	155
19	Doing a Mailing	159
20	Radio and Television	169
21	Newspapers	179
22	Yard Signs and Billboards	189
23	Going Door to Door	197
24	Miscellaneous Things That Ought to Be Mentioned	205
Pt. IV	Appendixes	213
A	Sample Campaign Plan	215
B	Initial Planning Worksheet	221
C	Week-by-Week Campaign Planning Form	223
D	Nominating-Petition Worksheet	229
E	Sample Volunteer Card	231
F	Sample Scheduling Form	233
G	Directory of State Elections Officers	235
	H: Glossary of Terms	241
	Index	247

Go to: Chinese Snacks or Charleston Receipts Repeats

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Author: Alex Abella

The first-ever history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for sixty years.
Born in the wake of World War II as an idea factory to advise the air force on how to wage and win wars, RAND quickly became the creator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”
In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts became McNamara’s Whiz Kids and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied— religion, patriotism, tribalism.
With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America’s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.

The New York Times - Jacob Heilbrunn

…an entertaining and fast-paced account of the RAND Corporation…Abella excels…in his descriptions of the colorful characters who populated RAND at its inception, like the mathematician John Davis Williams, who "personified what would become hallmarks of RANDites—a love of pleasures of the flesh, a dedication to abstract theory, and a sense of absolute self-righteousness married to an amoral approach to politics and policy."

Publishers Weekly

When President Eisenhower famously warned against the military-industrial complex, he largely meant the Department of Defense-funded programs of the RAND Corporation. Abella (coauthor, Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States) presents a sometimes dry but thorough account of this think-tank, which he asserts not only played a key role in the U.S.'s biggest foreign misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq but also, through its development of "rational choice theory," has affected every aspect of our lives, not necessarily for the better. Abella, working with the cooperation of the usually secretive organization, details RAND'S history, from analyst Herman Kahn's energetic support of a virtually unrestrained nuclear arms buildup to the organization's role in sparking America's involvement in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq. But even more, Abella says, RAND theorists' notion that self-interest, rather than collective interests like religion, governs human behavior has influenced every aspect of our society, from health care to tax policy. The RAND Corporation continues today-as brilliant, controversial and, in Abella's view, amoral as ever-with the complicity of all Americans. "If we look in the mirror," Abella concludes, "we will see that RAND is every one of us. The question is, what are we going to do about it?" 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)

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Kirkus Reviews

A crisp history of the world's most influential think tank, which the Soviet publication Pravda once called the "academy of science and death."The Manhattan Project proved to the military during World War II the efficacy of assistance from independent civilian scientists. Seeking to maintain that link and understanding the need to cope with peacetime threats to national security, Air Force hot shots, including the legendary Generals Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold and Curtis LeMay, helped to found RAND (for "research and development"). Throughout the next half-century, RAND's intellectual gunslingers-its researchers and advisors have won 27 Nobel Prizes-expanded their role and helped set large portions of America's military and political agenda. RAND's detractors accuse the corporation of subordinating morality to the achievement of U.S. government policy, of operating wholly without conscience and of practically inventing the Cold War. Los Angeles Times contributor and novelist Abella (Final Acts, 2000, etc.) takes a swipe at the problematic implications for the country of RAND's seeming amorality, but he deals far more successfully with the corporation's history, particularly the early years, and the procession of larger-than-life personalities who passed through RAND's portals and who influenced the nation's thinking far more than any single policy paper the institute produced. RAND's luminaries have included the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, thermonuclear war expert (and model for Dr. Strangelove) Herman Kahn, national-security expert and Cold War strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and even the humorist Leo Rosten. Its theorists havecontributed to our everyday lexicon such words and phrases as "fail-safe," "doomsday machine," "systems analysis," "futurology," "zero-sum game" and "prisoner's dilemma." How many enemy factories can we destroy with the kind of aircraft we possess? After a nuclear exchange, would the living truly envy the dead? Paid to think the unthinkable, RAND's analysts and their mission come off here as simultaneously marvelous and horrible. As good a look as we're likely to get about an organization where, Ellsberg notwithstanding, keeping secrets is second nature. Agent: Joe Regal/Regal Literary