Happy Kate Donaghue Day!

I’ll start by pointing to Sue Kennedy’s excellent April 13 BMG post describing Kate and inviting people to the event (which Sue coordinated). In the comments, you’ll also see a list of guests as well as a good chunk of the elected officials who were present.

Very briefly, Kate is a member of the Democratic State Committee with an unusually deep commitment to recruiting, coordinating, and participating in political volunteer activity. I sometimes suspect that Kate is actually a set of holograms because she seems to be everywhere at once. When I went up to New Hampshire for the final stretch before the 2008 presidential election, I remember being sent from the Obama ’08 office in Concord to a satellite “staging area” in Pembroke, a small town located a distance away. I had never heard of Pembroke before, but the person who greeted me was familiar enough: Kate Donaghue! It turned out that not only was she managing the volunteer effort there, but a few minutes before that, she had been interviewed, right in front of the stacks of canvassing sheets, on the Jeff Santos Show on WWZN AM-1510 in Boston. (Off-topic: if you can, tune into Jeff’s show at 8:15 a.m. tomorrow for some good news about progressive talk in Boston.) Yet despite Kate’s being so busy in physical form in New Hampshire and in virtual form in Massachusetts, she took the time to make sure that I received a volunteer assignment that made me happy. When I told her that I’d like to find a route for the next day that had been less heavily canvassed, even if I had to travel some distance to get there, she obliged me by finding me one of the few remaining towns that fit that description. She somehow manages to make volunteers happy while making sure that all the necessary tasks are covered, which must be a demanding balancing act. If you read her posts on Blue Mass Group, or the comments that others have written about her, you can see her commitment to both goals.

For those, like me, who have mostly seen Kate surrounded by volunteers, it was fun to see her surrounded by elected officials, an environment where she seems equally at home. One of the speakers (bonus question for attendees: which one?) received appreciative chuckles when he talked about the value of an endorsement from Kate.

Since a picture tells a thousand words, and my good friend Nancy Weinberg took about a thousand heartwarming pictures, I figure that you’d be roughly a million times more interested in visiting Nancy’s photo essay of the event on her blog Nancy’s News Network than reading any more words I have to write on the subject.

Please join me in saluting Kate. Happy Kate Donaghue Day, everyone!

Please share widely!

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