The DeMarco Factor: Transforming Public Will Into Political Power - Softcover

Pertschuk, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082651703X ISBN 13: 9780826517036

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010

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 this title

About the Author

Michael Pertschuk has had a long and distinguished career in public health advocacy: as consumer counsel and ultimately chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, from 1965 to 1976; as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, from 1977 to 1984; and as co-founder and co-director of the Advocacy Institute. His previous books include Revolt against Regulation, Giant Killers, and, with Wendy Schaetzel, The People Rising.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 082651703X
• ISBN 13: 9780826517036
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244