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Turn Your Back on Bush
Planning for the worst
In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, the founders of The Action Mill started discussing a problem that few people were considering: What to do if Kerry lost? Thousands of people were working around the clock to get him elected, but very little contingency planning was being done. An election win would give Bush a justification for continuing his policies, and leave his opposition dispirited. We set out to create an action that would directly challenge Bush's mandate while providing a meaningful way for people to mourn their loss together and move through their grief so that they could continue to push back against Bush's policies.
Hijacking a spectacle
Turn Your Back on Bush was launched just after the election was called by the major networks as a call for a symbolic direct action to hijack Bush's inaugural parade. It was designed to allow participants to filter into the high-security area around the parade before coalescing into a unified group. The simple set of instructions allowed a wide variety of participants, especially people who hadn't done any kind of direct action before, to join the action.
Over the next 78 days, we built a decentralized organization with 41 state chapters and a media plan that pushed training and coverage down to a local level. We organized through the website, email, conference calls, text messaging systems, and postcards, and trained a 15-person all-volunteer staff in DC to coordinate the action.
Changing the news cycle
On inauguration day, 5000 people from 47 different states participated along the parade route, and simultaneous actions were held in Brussels, London and Mexico City. Coverage of the action started months before inauguration day, with articles about local organizers, coverage by the AP and CNN, and a mention on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update.
We embedded reporters on buses coming from around the country, and hundreds of articles about participants appeared in the weeks preceding and following the action. The Onion parodied the action on its front page, and 42 US newspapers covered the action, with dozens more in other countries. A media study showed that the action was covered in 44 of the top 50 television markets, with a total broadcast audience of 16 million viewers. In addition to coverage by networks around the world, the BBC invited Jethro Heiko, Organizing Director, to provide commentary on its inauguration day show.
Total budget for the national Turn Your Back on Bush campaign was $64,000, with $42,000 of that made up of in-kind donations. That's a lot of media for not a lot of money – but that's not the only way to measure Turn Your Back on Bush's impact. After the action participants from Wisconsin stopped at our post-event party on their way out of DC. These were people who, along with 300 others, had boarded buses a day and a half earlier, rode for over 24 hours, waiting in security lines, stood in the freezing cold for six hours, took part in an action that lasted all of a minute, and were about to reboard their buses to ride back to Wisconsin. But first, they wanted to thank our volunteer staff for giving them the opportunity to participate in Turn Your Back on Bush.
In the months following the action, state organizers continued to use this tactic, hijacking Bush's social security town hall meetings and receiving nation-wide coverage.
As reported in the Washington Post: "Carol Shea-Porter and Susan Mayer had tickets and were admitted to the event staged in an airplane hangar. They even were allowed to stay through the entire show, despite the fact that they sat near the TV cameras and removed their sweaters to reveal red T-shirts that said, 'Turn Your Back on Bush.'"
(Carol Shea-Porter was a state coordinator for Turn Your Back on Bush. She is now a Congresswoman from New Hampshire.)
Turn Your Back on Bush started with two people and a website, but the final action would not have been possible without the help of Emilie Surrusco and Ray Abernathy and Associates, who managed our press relations and donated office space, SmartMeme, which helped us with strategic planning, messaging, and organizing, the hundreds of volunteers who took this idea and made it theirs, and especially our volunteer staff in DC.
