BRINCK SLATTERY: ...We're actually working on picking our phone system right now.  There's a lot of different options out there.  The VOIP ones are pretty cool.  There's a company, Victory VOIP, they make a great product, but they charge a lot of money for it.  It's basically like a database system where it's a live updating database, where when you put it on the phones it actually updates the database as you go so if it's a bad number you press bad number and it takes it off the database.  If they answer a survey question it keeps a voter file for each number so it tell you what answer on each line of the survey is, then you can pull that off the hard drive and use it to creat walk lists.  It's really a neat system.

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: Are there downsides?

BRINCK SLATTERY: It's really, really expensive.  And they also from what I understand—I'm not sure if they're continuing this policy—but from what I understand they typically only contract with one per cycle in each race, so I'm not sure if that's something they're going to do whit the presidentials.  But when I worked on the Jim Bender campaign last summer during the primary for Senate we had that system and it was just awesome..

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: When did you start looking for an office?

BRINCK SLATTERY: A month and a half ago.  We were just starting to think about getting real operations rolling.  As I said last night our focus has been on getting Gov. Johnson in front of as many sort of mainstream Republican regular middle of the road folks as possible to let them know that he's a very straightforward, legitimate, experienced kind of guy.  So we decided that it was time to sort of pick up operations and get the actual [inaud.] of the campaign going as far as getting people out knocking on doors, making phone calls and all that stuff.

And it was actually pretty easy to find this place.  I went and spoke to Justin Gamache—Ben Gamache is a great Manchester Republican; I mean he's a guy that's been very supportive of the party.  They were just extremely helpful.  He showed me I think one or two other properties.  The spot that's across the hall is available as well, but yeah we got a great deal and it was quick and easy. 

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: You were set on Manchester from the beginning?

BRINCK SLATTERY: You can get everywhere in the state from Manchester in two hours...  Ultimately I would like to have an office in say Laconia, Portsmouth and Keene so that we have some satellites so it's easier for folks up in the North Country.  For now we're planning on setting up sort of grassroots depots, you know where [you] find a supporter out in that area, give them a whole bunch of literature and signs and let people just go there if they need stuff like that.  The downside of that of course is that you can't make phone calls from someone's garage unless you have a system set up there.  Now also with the cheap cell phones you can get there's a couple of different options with that too.  On the Ron Paul campaign we got a bunch of Verizon cell phones at a pretty good price and we had I think 20 of them and so we would just have this box of phones and for any time when there were people we were like here's a list.

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: So you looked at one or two other places.  Yeah I looked at—there was another spot down on Elm Street, I forget what the address was.  It just—  to me, I like having parking.  I think that's really important.  I think that people like to not have to pay money to park and like to be able to carry thing in and out of an office and not have to trek a mile and a half, and basically anywhere on Elm Street you're going to run into that and end up having people having to pay the meters and not have enough room. 

This is a little bit...off the strip if you will.   I don't know; it's a hundred yards away from Bridge Street, we're right next to downtown and for me I can't think of a better location...


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