Weird self-realization.

I've been doing a post-mortem on my campaign on and off, and I've been realizing that I had a potential coalition and the fairly right issues to run on and I'm not a bad candidate, but it really came down to the $ necessary to scale up, and it's hard to even see how I could get to some dollar amount where I could put together the sustainable, sizable, costly operation that I realize in retrospect that I needed, and that couldn't be replaced by any amount of in-house work (vs. consultants) or innovative outreach (vs. the standard expensive stuff).

I don't have money and I work weird hours. And, people like me but I don't have rich friends (the kind who can donate $1-3K). And, I know people in labor and community organizing, but I'm not a tried-and-true person who an organization would automatically recognize as such and bank on with money or volunteers. And, *maybe* I could have fundraised just enough to hire a staffer who could harness the random folks I know into a sustainable operation, but what would that have even looked like at the time in terms of fundraising and breaking through into sustainability, etc. etc.

And, amidst all of this, I realized that my campaign repristinated my PhD experience: 

No amount of talent and work can substitute for money and the right kind of connections, and without them a person has very little room for error (if the possibility of advancement ever really existed at all).

Crazy, isn't it?

I kind of realized that the other night at the end of shift at my one job when some supportive assisted living co-workers were telling me that maybe I could hit a lot of people like them up for more money next time, or maybe I could save money for a few years for my next campaign, and I had to tell them that it was just a different level of money.

It's like once during my doctoral program when I was trapped financially and others were passing me by, and my mom told me that she and my dad could give me $2,000, so I could finish my dissertation.

Like academia, politics is not really accessible to me, though I can go through the motions to a certain point, and most people don't see the difference at all and I didn't even, not till late in the game or even afterwards.