The Demarco Factor

Pertschuk, Michael

ISBN 10: 0826517021 / ISBN 13: 9780826517029

Published by Vanderbilt University Press Jun 2010, 2010

About this Item

Neuware - Draws out strategic and leadership lessons that engaged citizens and advocates for popular causes stonewalled by powerful lobbies can put to immediate and practical use. Includes a unique strategic template that includes momentum-building stages over a multiyear campaign; using the media to engage public support; building coalitions of faith, community, labour, public health, and business groups; and persuading candidates to support legislation before elections, rather than after they have been elected to office. Seller Inventory # 9780826517029

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Demarco Factor

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press Jun 2010

Publication Date: 2010

Binding: Buch

Condition: Neu

About this title

Synopsis:

Vinny DeMarco might be a latter-day Don Quixote except that he tilts his lance at real obstacles to social justice: lobby-locked state legislatures and Congress, stonewalling the public will. And he makes impossible dreams come true. In twenty years of organizing campaigns in Maryland, he has led successful efforts to pass gun control laws (against National Rifle Association opposition), to hike cigarette taxes to prevent youth smoking, and to extend health care to hundreds of thousands of low-income workers. He has also built a unique alliance of mainstream and conservative faith groups, which helped secure rare bipartisan votes in Congress for the enactment in July 2009 of landmark FDA regulation of tobacco manufacture and marketing.

DeMarco's unique strategic template, developed over two decades of serial campaigning, includes momentum-building stages over a multiyear campaign; unrelenting, skillful access to the media for engaging public support; coalitions of hundreds, even thousands, of faith, community, labor, public health, and business groups; and a hard press on candidates to support legislation before elections, rather than after they are comfortably in office. As an organizer/leader, Demarco also succeeds in his campaigns through force of personality: his unquenchable exuberance and idiosyncrasies delight and madden his opponents--sometimes his allies, too.

Michael Pertschuk, himself a veteran advocate, here chronicles three of DeMarco's campaigns, each facing a different obstacle course. His deep analysis draws out strategic and leadership lessons that engaged citizens and advocates for popular causes stonewalled by powerful lobbies can put to immediate and practical use.

About the Author:

Michael Pertschuk served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 1977 to 1981, and he cofounded the Advocacy Institute. He is the author of Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars and The DeMarco Factor: Transforming Public Will into Political Power (both published by Vanderbilt University Press) and three other books.