The Do Nothing Strategy: An Expose of National Progressive Politics

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Electing Women

I still refused to believe that The Do Nothing Strategy pervaded the entire progressive community when I founded and directed Fifty plus One, an organization to train pro-choice women in the campaign skills necessary to run for public office. At the end of my tenure, I worked with a U.S. based, international organization to train 60 women to run campaigns for Parliament and Local Council in Botswana, Africa through a grant provided by United States Agency for International Development. Trainings contributed to 100% increase in the number of women in Parliament in a single election cycle—from 9% in 1994 to 18% in 1999. Trainings were also a key factor in dramatically increasing number of women in local councils.

The U.S. Senate is the rough equivalent of Parliament in Botswana. The U.S. Senate in the year 2000 saw the highest number of women in its history, with the election of 13 women. Achieving the 13% mark took over 40 years of actively working to elect women. The question is, how actively have we been working toward electing more women? Not The Do Nothing Strategy again.

Early in my tenure at Fifty plus One I approached the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), to work cooperatively with that well-established organization. Their response was to offer me a schedule of NWPC trainings and tell me we could work cooperatively by having Fifty plus One pay them $5,000 per training. Since I was hoping to start with 6 trainings in our first year of operation, the bill would add up to $30,000.00 plus materials—for a fledging organization struggling to attract funding. And, by the way, it would be up to me to do the most difficult work of recruiting training participants with no assistance from NWPC. With such “cooperation” I thought unfortunately that I had to work independently of NWPC. I would lose the chance to benefit from their years of experience; they would lose the chance to nurture a new group dedicated to the same goal of increasing the number of women in politics.

My hopes, however, were raised again when I received a letter from the President of NWPC. I opened the letter with great enthusiasm, hoping for a plan to achieve real cooperation. Instead, in her letter and a subsequent phone call the President launched a personal attack that questioned my integrity and competence. It was an obvious attempt to deliver a crippling blow to a potential rival for funding and media coverage.

What makes this story so sad for women is that there is so much to do. There are 500,000 electoral offices in America, the overwhelming majority occupied by men. The NWPC has done a respectable job of training women for public office over time, but the job is far too big for one relatively small group. It’s like having one drinking water fountain for all of America. My experience helps me to understand why progress in electing women has been so slow. The real problem is that there aren’t enough people working to bring women into the political pipeline at the entry levels. Progress cannot be judged by input like media coverage, conferences held, and mailings sent. It must be judged by output and by the bottom line: a larger percentage of women in public office at all levels. Fifty plus One worked with over 1000 universities, labor organizations, local women’s organizations and professional associations, but we suffered and finally ceased to exist partly because of resistance that ranged from passive to active from entrenched organizations like NWPC whose mission it was to elect women to office.

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