[Excerpt] It's said that money is the mother's milk of politics. But cash isn't all there is to it. By 1992, my local had achieved the lofty status as the No. 2 local union in raising dollars for the Active Ballot Club (ABC), the United Food and Commercial Workers' equivalent of the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (COPE). Most of the money we raised for our candidates was spent on television ads and other slick media. Because we had never conducted a grassroots voter registration education get-out-the-vote campaign before, I question whether dollars spent on media actually motivated our members to go to the polls.