The 1998-2000 National Committee was to be chosen at the 1998 National Convention, held in Washington, D.C. over the 4th of July weekend. Members and supporters of the Browne campaign worked vigorously to install a sympathetic National Committee. The National Chair candidate was David Bergland, Harry Browne’s 1996 Campaign Chair.
In Bergland, Browne had a highly reliable supporter who was deeply tied to the Browne campaign and who was a credible candidate. In 1996, Bergland had been Browne’s Campaign co-Chair. Bergland had financial ties to the Browne Campaign. His wife, Sharon Ayres, was Browne’s 1996 Campaign Manager. FEC records show that in the post-nomination period, July through late November 1996, Ayres was paid more than $57,000 by the Browne campaign. During the same period, the Browne campaign’s FEC filings report only $6120 under the cognomen ‘advertising’.
At the 1998 National Convention, Bergland vehemently claimed that the very substantial sums his wife had received were not all salary. The payments were claimed to include unspecified sums in lieu of reimbursements, for expenses for which full records were not available. Indeed, the Browne campaign reported its payments to Ayres as lump sums for ‘payroll, travel, & supplies’. As we have seen above, if one believed Bergland’s claim one reaches the interesting conclusion that the 1996 campaign spent far more on printing, mailing, and travel than the larger 2000 campaign did.
While a candidate for National Chair, Bergland promised the membership that he would implement the grandiose membership recruitment scheme “Project Archimedes”. Project Archimedes was the brainchild of Party National Director (soon-to-be Browne campaign chair) Perry Willis. Willis, who had been covertly in the pay of Browne’s 1996 campaign, wrote a near-book-length manuscript, “Operation Everywhere”, describing Archimedes. [Editor: I still have a copy of it.] In Bergland’s realization of the concept, Project Archimedes was a self-funding direct mail project. Long recruiting letters would go to potential Libertarians whose names appeared on rented mailing lists. Mailings would recruit new members. New members would pay dues and donate generously. Money from the new members would fund further mailings to yet more potential Libertarians, in an ever-repeating cycle. Some money would always be locked up, because letters that had just been mailed would not have had time to pay for themselves. However, dues and other donations from the new members would more than pay for the cost of recruiting them. The Party would grow exponentially. The Party eventually learned that Willis derived a direct financial benefit from Project Archimedes whether it worked or not.
Operation Everywhere was most notable for its total focus on membership recruitment. Operation Everywhere specifically and categorically opposed running serious as opposed to illusory campaigns for local office. [Editor: I still have a copy of it.] According to Willis’s plan, serious local campaigns divert the attention of activists away from generating names and addresses of potential recruits. Serious local campaigns divert donors away from supporting the National Party and its membership recruitment campaigns. Even local electoral victories are not wanted; they are “…diverting important resources from more viable projects” and not a path to future national victories.
Serious local campaigns are therefore undesirable. [In contrast, local paper campaigns were viewed as an effective tool for finding potential member-donors. Once located by the paper campaigns, members were to be diverted away from campaigning into recruiting more members.]
Bergland set concrete numerical objectives for Project Archimedes: 50,000 members by the end of 1999. 100,000 members by the 2000 National Convention. These objectives were somewhat below the 200,000 members that Browne had demanded. 100,000 members by July 2000 still required recruiting more than 3000 new members a month, and replacing those who left.
Bergland was not the only member of his faction calling for more members. A 12-page “vision statement” from LP National Chair Steve Dasbach said that membership recruitment meant “recruiting more members and voters…than the Democrats and Republicans have”. [Editor: For the other parties ‘members’ were donors, not voters.] That would amount to a half-million or million members.
