A nationwide grassroots political campaign has grown so fast in Syracuse that it needs to be relocated to a larger area.

Syracuse-area supporters of Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean had planned to hold two simultaneous meetings last night to discuss the campaign. A record turnout, however, forced them to consolidate in the larger of the two venues.

The meetings, set up by a Web service called Meetup.com, were set to take place at Happy Endings Coffeehouse in Armory Square, which would have been too small to accommodate all those in attendance, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society on East Genesee Street. Organizers decided to redirect all the Dean supporters to the May Memorial site so that there would be room for the roughly 85 people who had signed up for the events, said Walter Rath of Syracuse, who co-hosted the informal gathering at Happy Endings before directing supporters to May Memorial.

About 80 Dean supporters, including several Syracuse University students, filled half the pews at the consolidated venue. Shawn Galloway, an organizer of a group called Syracuse for Dean, led the discussion and recruited volunteers for the group’s committees.

Galloway stressed Syracuse for Dean’s separation from both Meetup.com and Dean’s national campaign. In fact, Galloway said that his group receives no funding or materials, not even posters or stickers, from Dean’s campaign.

‘It’s grassroots – you’ve got to pull yourself up by the bootstraps,’ Galloway said.

While Galloway urged supporters to wage their own guerrilla campaign by downloading and printing signs from Dean’s Web site or by making their own, he also warned them to be mindful of restrictions in campaign contributions. Because the signs can be made by printing a model from Dean’s official Web site, they are treated as a donation and supporters must deduct that cost of materials from the maximum of $2000 each person can donate to the campaign.

‘We’re going to walk into some serious gray areas here with the new campaign finance laws,’ Galloway said.

In addition to manufacturing materials, Galloway suggested several other ways supporters could be active in the Dean campaign, such as participating in letter-writing campaigns and serving on one of Syracuse for Dean’s several committees. Syracuse for Dean does not have a central committee overseeing the actions of the others, Galloway said. Some people in attendance found this lack of a central organization, as well as the meeting’s loose agenda, troubling.

‘It needs a huge injection of leadership,’ said Steven Fralich, an information technology analyst at SU and employee in the IT department. ‘Nothing was really accomplished.’

Richard Grant, a second-year law student who leads the SU chapter of Students for Dean (known nationally as Generation Dean), credited the lack of organization to the ‘cacophony of democracy’ that is to be expected in the early stages of a campaign.

‘You have all these different voices here, and it’s kind of difficult to get that organized at first,’ Grant said.

Grant said that Students for Dean is still gearing up and has yet to plan any formal events.

Katie Zaffrann, a senior musical theater major who attended the meet-up, believed that building a community of politically active students will be good for the SU community.

‘I don’t think that enough people at SU are involved enough in politics,’ she said.

Published on September 3, 2003 at 12:00 pm