I am a Reform Democrat

Bob Brigham worked for Dean Dozen candidate Ginny Schrader in the 2004 election

The Democratic Party needs reform. Without discussing whether we need to move to the right or the left, what can we do to reform the way we do business?

The following is a compilation of some of the best ideas I've read, coupled with my experience as a political hack young enough to have grown up with computers but old enough to have a few cycles of experience in traditional Democratic campaigns (in both red and blue states).

Lead America
If we only follow the polls, we will be reactive to the whims of Americans and unable to win in the long run. We need to lead on issues. This Gonzalez nomination is a great example—instead of having a debate about whether we should oppose him, we should have a debate about whether a torture supporter should lead the Justice Department, and then hit him with everything we have. We need to stand up for what we believe in!

Go Young
People under the age of thirty are the only age group that we won. The young vote was turned out by young people managing organizations with enough resources to succeed. We need more young people in decision-making roles at the DNC, and in positions where they have the resources to maintain and expand on our successes with young Americans.

Offer Alternatives
We cannot offer compromises. Instead, we need to offer coherent alternatives to Republican proposals. These proposals must be crafted with an eye towards framing the next election.

Canvass the Internet
We need visionaries who can see the vast potential that lies in the future of the internet. We need to fight in real-time across the internet, the blogosphere, and on search engines. We need an online war room that never stops and interjects our positions into every conversation online. Every site with a conversation needs our comments and links.

Be Disciplined With Email
Cut back on fundraising emails. Cash-appeals turn people off, and the Kerry campaign burned their list early on. As people stopped opening the emails, the campaign suffered a huge opportunity lost when they needed to organize supporters in the end. Emails should be used to initiate interaction. Once people are vested in our actions, they'll help fund the effort.

Offer E-Training
How many trainings on e-campaigning has the Democratic Party hosted? With a couple of cycles experience in online politics, let me be the first to say it would have been nice to have had somebody teach the tactics instead of having to figure things out as I went. I've been to multiple Party and progressive organization trainings on organizing which taught me a great deal. Other than the one training I have given myself, I have yet to hear of any trainings on how to campaign online.

Make Voting Simple
We need to make voting as easy as possible. That means same-day registration and early voting. We need to make sure every vote counts and provide a paper trail for black box voting. With more voting machines, there will be shorter lines.

West Coast Offense
Yes, I saved the sports analogy for last. We had the largest GOTV ever and we still finished 10 points shy from where we needed to be. The Kerry campaign thought they were going to win and tried to run out the clock in the last two weeks. We can never let this happen again. We need to campaign every single day of every year like we are 10 points down, because we are. We must never again finish an election like we only needed to make it to field goal range, and GOTV will put us over the top.

We need to be winning beyond the margin of error and let our hustle and determination show that we want to win more than the GOP. We need to contest every down, force turnovers, and inside the pile we need to claw and poke and squeeze and do whatever it takes to make sure we have the ball in the end.

Thanks for reading.

—Bob Brigham.

Bob Brigham's Comments

Posted by Matt Stoller at November 18, 2004 03:40 PM

I'm going to reproduce what Bob wrote in our permanent open thread. It's great stuff.

I'm glad to see NDN hosting this conversation. "We" are not in the minority; the Democratic Party is in the minority. This last election was the first post-modern cycle with the internet and independent organizations surpassing the Party in scope and success. I hope our independent organizations continue their good work, but I do not think we should give up on the Party, especially now. If the Party is modernized and overhauled it has the potential to become a strong voice. We need to reform the Democratic Party.

The following is my "if I were in charge" compilation of some of the best ideas I've read coupled with my experiences as a political hack young enough to have grown up with computers but old enough to have a few cycles of experience in traditional Democratic campaigns (in both red and blue states).

Internet
A modern Democratic Party needs leaders who can format a hyperlink. Not only do we need leaders who understand current e-campaigning, but we need visionaries who can see how vast potential that lies in the future of the internet. We need to fight in real-time across the internet, the blogosphere, and on the search engines. We need an online war room that never stops and interjects our side into every conversation online. Every site with a conversation needs our comments and links.

Email

No more fundraising emails. Period. If the Kerry campaign had asked the Dean campaign, they would have learned that constant cash-appeals turn people off. The Kerry campaign burned their list. As people stopped opening the emails the campaign suffered a huge opportunity cost when they needed to organize supporters in the end. Emails should only be used to initiate interaction, once people are vested in our actions they'll help fund the effort.

End Sentences with Prepositions

We need to campaign like we have an seventh grade education and unlearn the linguistic hindrances that hold us back. The people we target with our ads don't talk like the people who make them. Our candidates need sentences with a subject, a verb, an object and then a period. Look how people write emails, forget what you learned in English class and talk to people. Tell a story. Focus on connecting to the audience instead of winning the hearts of the proofreaders. What do you think you're more likely to hear at a small town diner an hour before sunrise, "Its the economy, stupid" or "A Stronger, Safer America"? We can earn street cred with our writing without pandering.

Lead America

If we only follow polls, we will be reactive to the whims of Americans and will not be able to win in the long run. We need to lead on issues, decide issues by value not polling worth and lead the people. This Gonzalez nomination is a great example, instead of having a debate about whether we should oppose him we should have a debate about whether a torture supporter should lead the Justice Department and then hit him with everything we have. No more conversations about whether it is strategic to follow our gut, instead we need to stand up for what we believe in and fight with everything we have.

Blogosphere

The DNC should invest financially in the blogosphere. The DNC should have an ad with the message of the day on every single liberal blog (new every day, even Sundays and holidays). For a million dollars we could have two thousand points of TV in a major media market or subsidize hundreds of bloggers fighting tooth and nail online, 24/7.

Go Young

People under the age of thirty are the only age group that we won. The young vote was turned out by young people managing organizations with enough resources to succeed. We need more young people in decision-making roles at the DNC and in positions where they have the resources to maintain and expand our domination of young people.

Ask The Right Questions

The question wasn't how the war started; it was whether it should have started. The question wasn't how we were waging the war, but whether we were winning. The question wasn't how the economy was managed; it was whether it was good or bad. The question wasn't how we fought the terrorists; it was whether we were winning or losing. Kerry was too focused on the first questions to realize we needed to win the second questions.

Worldview

We need to learn to distill issues. The right will never say an issue is complicated because every possible situation fits into their worldview in a manner where they know what to do. People learn our values by seeing how issues fit into our worldview, not because we say, "God Bless America" at the end of our speeches. When we turn our backs on our values, people lose respect for us.

Bold Action

Only looking at this calendar year, I think it is easy to conclude Gavin Newsom is the only Democrat with any guts in America. Newsom reframed the issue of gay marriage as equality and personalized a narrative for the issue. His strong offense shifted the country the few points we needed so that we didn't get burned on the issue as badly as the right had planned. For the first time in a generation, a Democrat held the national stage and talked about equality and civil liberties. If Kerry had been as bold on any single issue, we would have won. It could have been Iraq, health care, jobs -- it really didn't matter.

Value work

Kick consultants off percentage, pay a good hourly wage and demand results. Have you ever heard a consultant on percentage recommend not spending more money on TV? Even in the battlegrounds with markets so saturated with political ads that people are 100% tuned out? We need to budget according to results which is impossible when consultants have a financial incentive to spend on distribution instead of creation.

Training

How many trainings on e-campaigning has the Democratic Party hosted? With a couple of cycles experience in online politics, let me be the first to say it would have been nice to have had somebody teach the tactics instead of having to figure things out as I went. I've been to multiple Party and progressive organization trainings on organizing which taught me a great deal. Other than the one training I have given myself, I have yet to hear of any trainings on how to campaign online.

Make News

Dean understood this, but Kerry didn't get it until he brought in the Clinton people and by that time everything that happened was news. We can decide what we want the headlines to be with bold action. The further up the ticket the greater the role the media plays in the outcome. Instead of complaining about the coverage, we need to understand the media's perspective and needs, then create campaign storyboards too good for them to pass by.

Non-political Geography

When we look at maps, we look at color-coded representations based off of political boundaries drawn by city-folk. Looking at everything outside of the suburbs as rural America is simplistic view repeated by people who live in urban environments. Instead of focusing on red or blue squares on maps, we need to focus on geography. We win near large bodies of water, near the Great Lakes, the oceans, and the Mississippi. We can win in the mountains easier than on the plains. We do better where it is cold and where it is sandy. When we talk about campaigning outside of the cities we need to focus on the extremes, big water, big mountains, bad weather.

Rapid Response

We got our asses kicked, yet the DNC posted three posts on the official Party blog in the following 12 days. WTF???

Alternatives

We cannot offer compromises, instead we need to offer coherent alternatives to Republican proposals. These proposals must be crafted with an eye towards framing the next election, not influencing the outcome since we will be fighting to prevent any change from occurring.

Opposition

Any changes advanced by the GOP will regress our country. We need to fight every proposal. Choosing battles is a strategy that is inherently flawed. Compromising is likewise flawed. We need to fight to win and plan to lose strategically. As an opposition party, we must evaluate our leaders by their success at opposing. If they are ineffective, we must immediately replace them.

Operate with Transparency

Who is doing what, with results results and what costs? Much of the disgust directed at the party by the grassroots is due to poor communication. The Party needs to do good things and keep the grassroots informed by involving them in the process. We need a modern party that is beholden to the grassroots. We need to work smarter by questioning and quantifying, then calculating how we can do more.

Lighting

The GOP is better at stage lighting. They learned the lesson of Nixon and spent the eighties bringing Hollywood tricks to political events. Clinton understood, but as recently as this year Howard Dean flopped after a snafu that would never had happened if the campaign had used a mixer before the mult-box for the press pool.

Votes

Elections are about votes. We need to make voting for Democrats easier by making voting as easy as possible. We need same day registration and vote by mail. We need to make sure every vote counts and provide a paper trail for black box voting. We need more machines, less lines. More access to democracy and participation.

West Coast Offense

Yes, I saved the sports analogy for last. We had the largest GOTV ever and we still finished 10 points shy from where we needed to be. The Kerry campaign thought they were going to win and tried to run out the clock in the last two weeks. The Democratic Party has been silent since the election. We can never let this happen again. Elections come and go by the battle for America's future never stops. We need to campaign every single day of every year like we are 10 points down, because we are. We need a passing game and a strong blitz, we must never again finish an election like we only needed to make it to field goal range and GOTV will put us over the top. No. We need to be winning beyond the margin of error and let our hustle and determination show that we want to win more than the GOP. We need to contest every down, force turnovers, and inside the pile we need to claw and poke and squeeze and do whatever it takes to make sure we have the ball in the end.

 

I am a Reform Democrat
by blogswarm

Thu Nov 18th, 2004 at 11:18:07 PST

The Democratic Party needs reform. Without discussing whether we need to move to the right or the left, what can we do to reform the way we do business?

The following is my "if I were in charge" compilation of some of the best ideas I've read coupled with my experiences as a political hack young enough to have grown up with computers but old enough to have a few cycles of experience in traditional Democratic campaigns (in both red and blue states).

Internet
A modern Democratic Party needs leaders who can format a hyperlink. Not only do we need leaders who understand current e-campaigning, but we need visionaries who can see how vast potential that lies in the future of the internet. We need to fight in real-time across the internet, the blogosphere, and on the search engines. We need an online war room that never stops and interjects our side into every conversation online. Every site with a conversation needs our comments and links.

Email
No more fundraising emails. Period. If the Kerry campaign had asked the Dean campaign, they would have learned that constant cash-appeals turn people off. The Kerry campaign burned their list. As people stopped opening the emails the campaign suffered a huge opportunity cost when they needed to organize supporters in the end. Emails should only be used to initiate interaction, once people are vested in our actions they'll help fund the effort.

End Sentences with Prepositions
We need to campaign like we have an seventh grade education and unlearn the linguistic hindrances that hold us back. The people we target with our ads don't talk like the people who make them. Our candidates need sentences with a subject, a verb, an object and then a period. Look how people write emails, forget what you learned in English class and talk to people. Tell a story. Focus on connecting to the audience instead of winning the hearts of the proofreaders. What do you think you're more likely to hear at a small town diner an hour before sunrise, "Its the economy, stupid" or "A Stronger, Safer America"? We can earn street cred with our writing without pandering.

Lead America
If we only follow polls, we will be reactive to the whims of Americans and will not be able to win in the long run. We need to lead on issues, decide issues by value not polling worth and lead the people. This Gonzalez nomination is a great example, instead of having a debate about whether we should oppose him we should have a debate about whether a torture supporter should lead the Justice Department and then hit him with everything we have. No more conversations about whether it is strategic to follow our gut, instead we need to stand up for what we believe in and fight with everything we have.

Blogosphere
The DNC should invest financially in the blogosphere. The DNC should have an ad with the message of the day on every single liberal blog (new every day, even Sundays and holidays). For a million dollars we could have two thousand points of TV in a major media market or subsidize hundreds of bloggers fighting tooth and nail online, 24/7.

Go Young
People under the age of thirty are the only age group that we won. The young vote was turned out by young people managing organizations with enough resources to succeed. We need more young people in decision-making roles at the DNC and in positions where they have the resources to maintain and expand our domination of young people.

Ask The Right Questions
The question wasn't how the war started; it was whether it should have started. The question wasn't how we were waging the war, but whether we were winning. The question wasn't how the economy was managed; it was whether it was good or bad. The question wasn't how we fought the terrorists; it was whether we were winning or losing. Kerry was too focused on the first questions to realize we needed to win the second questions.

Worldview
We need to learn to distill issues. The right will never say an issue is complicated because every possible situation fits into their worldview in a manner where they know what to do. People learn our values by seeing how issues fit into our worldview, not because we say, "God Bless America" at the end of our speeches. When we turn our backs on our values, people lose respect for us.

Bold Action
Only looking at this calendar year, I think it is easy to conclude Gavin Newsom is the only Democrat with any guts in America. Newsom reframed the issue of gay marriage as equality and personalized a narrative for the issue. His strong offense shifted the country the few points we needed so that we didn't get burned on the issue as badly as the right had planned. For the first time in a generation, a Democrat held the national stage and talked about equality and civil liberties. If Kerry had been as bold on any single issue, we would have won. It could have been Iraq, health care, jobs -- it really didn't matter.

Value work
Kick consultants off percentage, pay a good hourly wage and demand results. Have you ever heard a consultant on percentage recommend not spending more money on TV? Even in the battlegrounds with markets so saturated with political ads that people are 100% tuned out? We need to budget according to results which is impossible when consultants have a financial incentive to spend on distribution instead of creation.

Training
How many trainings on e-campaigning has the Democratic Party hosted? With a couple of cycles experience in online politics, let me be the first to say it would have been nice to have had somebody teach the tactics instead of having to figure things out as I went. I've been to multiple Party and progressive organization trainings on organizing which taught me a great deal. Other than the one training I have given myself, I have yet to hear of any trainings on how to campaign online.

Make News
Dean understood this, but Kerry didn't get it until he brought in the Clinton people and by that time everything that happened was news. We can decide what we want the headlines to be with bold action. The further up the ticket the greater the role the media plays in the outcome. Instead of complaining about the coverage, we need to understand the media's perspective and needs, then create campaign storyboards too good for them to pass by.

Non-political Geography
When we look at maps, we look at color-coded representations based off of political boundaries drawn by city-folk. Looking at everything outside of the suburbs as rural America is simplistic view repeated by people who live in urban environments. Instead of focusing on red or blue squares on maps, we need to focus on geography. We win near large bodies of water, near the Great Lakes, the oceans, and the Mississippi. We can win in the mountains easier than on the plains. We do better where it is cold and where it is sandy. When we talk about campaigning outside of the cities we need to focus on the extremes, big water, big mountains, bad weather.

Rapid Response
We got our asses kicked, yet the DNC posted three posts on the official Party blog in the following 12 days. WTF???

Alternatives
We cannot offer compromises, instead we need to offer coherent alternatives to Republican proposals. These proposals must be crafted with an eye towards framing the next election, not influencing the outcome since we will be fighting to prevent any change from occurring.

Opposition
Any changes advanced by the GOP will regress our country. We need to fight every proposal. Choosing battles is a strategy that is inherently flawed. Compromising is likewise flawed. We need to fight to win and plan to lose strategically. As an opposition party, we must evaluate our leaders by their success at opposing. If they are ineffective, we must immediately replace them.

Operate with Transparency
Who is doing what, with results results and what costs? Much of the disgust directed at the party by the grassroots is due to poor communication. The Party needs to do good things and keep the grassroots informed by involving them in the process. We need a modern party that is beholden to the grassroots. We need to work smarter by questioning and quantifying, then calculating how we can do more.

Lighting
The GOP is better at stage lighting. They learned the lesson of Nixon and spent the eighties bringing Hollywood tricks to political events. Clinton understood, but as recently as this year Howard Dean flopped after a snafu that would never had happened if the campaign had used a mixer before the mult-box for the press pool.

Votes
Elections are about votes. We need to make voting for Democrats easier by making voting as easy as possible. We need same day registration and vote by mail. We need to make sure every vote counts and provide a paper trail for black box voting. We need more machines, less lines. More access to democracy and participation.

Responsiveness
DaveOinSF pointed out in the comments that the above point didn't really belong here as it was not something Democrats could do unilaterally. So I removed it. What a great illustration of how "responsiveness" should have been included.

West Coast Offense
Yes, I saved the sports analogy for last. We had the largest GOTV ever and we still finished 10 points shy from where we needed to be. The Kerry campaign thought they were going to win and tried to run out the clock in the last two weeks. The Democratic Party has been silent since the election. We can never let this happen again. Elections come and go by the battle for America's future never stops. We need to campaign every single day of every year like we are 10 points down, because we are. We need a passing game and a strong blitz, we must never again finish an election like we only needed to make it to field goal range and GOTV will put us over the top. No. We need to be winning beyond the margin of error and let our hustle and determination show that we want to win more than the GOP. We need to contest every down, force turnovers, and inside the pile we need to claw and poke and squeeze and do whatever it takes to make sure we have the ball in the end.

********

The issue of DNC Reform is a continuing conversation. Please post your ideas here or email me at bob.brigham [at] gmail.com with more suggestions. Thanks for reading, feel free to recommend.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/18/14187/373

I've modified (with apologies) the Cluetrain Manifesto 95 theses to politics:

1. Campaigns are conversations.

2. Campaigns consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8. In both internetworked campaigns and among intranetworked supporters, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

10. As a result, voters are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked campaign changes people fundamentally.

11. Voters in networked campaigns have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from politicians. So much for consultant rhetoric about adding value to political message.

12. There are no secrets. The networked campaign knows more than consultants do about their own candidates. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

13. What's happening to political campaigns is also happening among supporters. A metaphysical construct called "The Candidate" is the only thing standing between the two.

14. Politicians do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, politicians sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of politics-the sound of policy statements and brochures-will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

16. Already, politicians that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

17. Consultants that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

18. Politicians that don't realize their campaigns are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

19. Campaigns can now communicate with their voters directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

20. Politicians need to realize their voters are often laughing. At them.

21. Politicians need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the campaign web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

23. Politicians attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their campaign actually cares about.

24. Bombastic boasts do not constitute a position.

25. Politicians need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Hacks are deeply afraid of the voters.

27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep voters at bay.

28. Most campaign programs are based on the fear that the voters might see what's really going on inside the campaign.

29. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

30. Party loyalty is the political version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable-and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart politicians are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

31. Networked voters can change politicians overnight. Networked knowledge voters can change sides over lunch. Your own "triangulation initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

32. Smart voters will find politicians who speak their own language.

33. Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

34. To speak with a human voice, campaigns must share the concerns of their communities.

35. But first, they must belong to a community.

36. Campaigns must ask themselves where their political cultures end.

37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no campaign.

38. Human communities are based on discourse-on human speech about human concerns.

39. The community of discourse is the campaign.

40. Politicians that do not belong to a community of discourse will lose.

41. Campaigns make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own voters and workforce.

42. As with networked campaigns, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company-and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

43. Such conversations are taking place today on political intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

44. Campaigns typically install intranets top-down to distribute corporate information that supporters are doing their best to ignore.

45. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked political conversation.

46. A healthy intranet organizes supporters in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

47. While this scares politicians witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

48. When political intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked campaign.

49. Org charts worked in an older campaigns where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

52. Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills campaigns.

53. There are two conversations going on. One inside the campaign. One with the voters.

54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked campaigns.

56. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

57. Smart campaigns will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

58. If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few politicians have yet wised up.

59. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive political campaigns as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

60. This is suicidal. Voters want to talk to campaigns.

61. Sadly, the part of the campaign a networked voter wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false-and often is.

62. Voters do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the political firewall.

63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those voters. We want to talk to you.

64. We want access to your political information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

65. We're also the supporters who make your campaigns go. We want to talk to voters directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

66. As voters, as supporters, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless polling and third-hand campaign news to introduce us to each other?

67. As voters, as supporters, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around-in the press, at your conferences-what's that got to do with us?

69. Maybe you're impressing your contributors. Maybe you're impressing K Street. You're not impressing us.

70. If you don't impress us, your contributors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

71. Your tired notions of "the campaign" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections-perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

72. We like this new political marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

76. We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to vote for. Got a minute?

77. You're too busy "doing our business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

78. You want us to vote? We want you to pay attention.

79. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join our party.

80. Don't worry, you can still win races. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

81. Have you noticed that, in itself, politics is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

82. Your campaign lost. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who created it. Your political strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your consultant. What do you mean she's not in?

83. We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

84. We know some people from your campaign. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

86. When we're not busy being your "target voters," many of us are your volunteers. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the voters is candidates job.

87. We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

88. We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our vote. Politics is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

89. We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

90. Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most rallies, more entertaining than any TV talk show, and certainly more true-to-life than the political web sites we've been seeing.

91. Our allegiance is to ourselves-our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Politicians that have no part in this world, also have no future.

92. Politicians spent millions of dollars on self research. Why can't politicians hear this timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

93. We're both inside campaigns and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

94. To traditional politicians, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.


Since you read all the way to the bottom, buy the book.

The following is my "if I were in charge" compilation of some of the best ideas I've read coupled with my experiences as a political hack young enough to have grown up with computers but old enough to have a few cycles of experience in traditional Democratic campaigns (in both red and blue states).

 

Internet

A modern Democratic Party needs leaders who can format a hyperlink. Not only do we need leaders who understand current e-campaigning, but we need visionaries who can see how vast potential that lies in the future of the internet. We need to fight in real-time across the internet, the blogosphere, and on the search engines. We need an online war room that never stops and interjects our side into every conversation online. Every site with a conversation needs our comments and links.

 

Email

No more fundraising emails. Period. If the Kerry campaign had asked the Dean campaign, they would have learned that constant cash-appeals turn people off. The Kerry campaign burned their list. As people stopped opening the emails the campaign suffered a huge opportunity cost when they needed to organize supporters in the end. Emails should only be used to initiate interaction, once people are vested in our actions they'll help fund the effort.

 

End Sentences with Prepositions

We need to campaign like we have an seventh grade education and unlearn the linguistic hindrances that hold us back. The people we target with our ads don't talk like the people who make them. Our candidates need sentences with a subject, a verb, an object and then a period. Look how people write emails, forget what you learned in English class and talk to people. Tell a story. Focus on connecting to the audience instead of winning the hearts of the proofreaders. What do you think you're more likely to hear at a small town diner an hour before sunrise, "Its the economy, stupid" or "A Stronger, Safer America"? We can earn street cred with our writing without pandering.

 

Lead America

If we only follow polls, we will be reactive to the whims of Americans and will not be able to win in the long run. We need to lead on issues, decide issues by value not polling worth and lead the people. This Gonzalez nomination is a great example, instead of having a debate about whether we should oppose him we should have a debate about whether a torture supporter should lead the Justice Department and then hit him with everything we have. No more conversations about whether it is strategic to follow our gut, instead we need to stand up for what we believe in and fight with everything we have.

 

Blogosphere

The DNC should invest financially in the blogosphere. The DNC should have an ad with the message of the day on every single liberal blog (new every day, even Sundays and holidays). For a million dollars we could have two thousand points of TV in a major media market or subsidize hundreds of bloggers fighting tooth and nail online, 24/7.

 

Go Young

People under the age of thirty are the only age group that we won. The young vote was turned out by young people managing organizations with enough resources to succeed. We need more young people in decision-making roles at the DNC and in positions where they have the resources to maintain and expand our domination of young people.

 

Ask The Right Questions

The question wasn't how the war started; it was whether it should have started. The question wasn't how we were waging the war, but whether we were winning. The question wasn't how the economy was managed; it was whether it was good or bad. The question wasn't how we fought the terrorists; it was whether we were winning or losing. Kerry was too focused on the first questions to realize we needed to win the second questions.

 

Worldview

We need to learn to distill issues. The right will never say an issue is complicated because every possible situation fits into their worldview in a manner where they know what to do. People learn our values by seeing how issues fit into our worldview, not because we say, "God Bless America" at the end of our speeches. When we turn our backs on our values, people lose respect for us.

 

Bold Action

Only looking at this calendar year, I think it is easy to conclude Gavin Newsom is the only Democrat with any guts in America. Newsom reframed the issue of gay marriage as equality and personalized a narrative for the issue. His strong offense shifted the country the few points we needed so that we didn't get burned on the issue as badly as the right had planned. For the first time in a generation, a Democrat held the national stage and talked about equality and civil liberties. If Kerry had been as bold on any single issue, we would have won. It could have been Iraq, health care, jobs -- it really didn't matter.

 

Value work

Kick consultants off percentage, pay a good hourly wage and demand results. Have you ever heard a consultant on percentage recommend not spending more money on TV? Even in the battlegrounds with markets so saturated with political ads that people are 100% tuned out? We need to budget according to results which is impossible when consultants have a financial incentive to spend on distribution instead of creation.

 

Training

How many trainings on e-campaigning has the Democratic Party hosted? With a couple of cycles experience in online politics, let me be the first to say it would have been nice to have had somebody teach the tactics instead of having to figure things out as I went. I've been to multiple Party and progressive organization trainings on organizing which taught me a great deal. Other than the one training I have given myself, I have yet to hear of any trainings on how to campaign online.

 

Make News

Dean understood this, but Kerry didn't get it until he brought in the Clinton people and by that time everything that happened was news. We can decide what we want the headlines to be with bold action. The further up the ticket the greater the role the media plays in the outcome. Instead of complaining about the coverage, we need to understand the media's perspective and needs, then create campaign storyboards too good for them to pass by.

 

Non-political Geography

When we look at maps, we look at color-coded representations based off of political boundaries drawn by city-folk. Looking at everything outside of the suburbs as rural America is simplistic view repeated by people who live in urban environments. Instead of focusing on red or blue squares on maps, we need to focus on geography. We win near large bodies of water, near the Great Lakes, the oceans, and the Mississippi. We can win in the mountains easier than on the plains. We do better where it is cold and where it is sandy. When we talk about campaigning outside of the cities we need to focus on the extremes, big water, big mountains, bad weather.

 

Rapid Response

We got our asses kicked, yet the DNC posted three posts on the official Party blog in the following 12 days. WTF???

 

Alternatives

We cannot offer compromises, instead we need to offer coherent alternatives to Republican proposals. These proposals must be crafted with an eye towards framing the next election, not influencing the outcome since we will be fighting to prevent any change from occurring.

 

Opposition

Any changes advanced by the GOP will regress our country. We need to fight every proposal. Choosing battles is a strategy that is inherently flawed. Compromising is likewise flawed. We need to fight to win and plan to lose strategically. As an opposition party, we must evaluate our leaders by their success at opposing. If they are ineffective, we must immediately replace them.

 

Operate with Transparency

Who is doing what, with results results and what costs? Much of the disgust directed at the party by the grassroots is due to poor communication. The Party needs to do good things and keep the grassroots informed by involving them in the process. We need a modern party that is beholden to the grassroots. We need to work smarter by questioning and quantifying, then calculating how we can do more.

 

Lighting

The GOP is better at stage lighting. They learned the lesson of Nixon and spent the eighties bringing Hollywood tricks to political events. Clinton understood, but as recently as this year Howard Dean flopped after a snafu that would never had happened if the campaign had used a mixer before the mult-box for the press pool.

 

Votes

Elections are about votes. We need to make voting for Democrats easier by making voting as easy as possible. We need same day registration and vote by mail. We need to make sure every vote counts and provide a paper trail for black box voting. We need more machines, less lines. More access to democracy and participation.

 

West Coast Offense

Yes, I saved the sports analogy for last. We had the largest GOTV ever and we still finished 10 points shy from where we needed to be. The Kerry campaign thought they were going to win and tried to run out the clock in the last two weeks. The Democratic Party has been silent since the election. We can never let this happen again. Elections come and go by the battle for America's future never stops. We need to campaign every single day of every year like we are 10 points down, because we are. We need a passing game and a strong blitz, we must never again finish an election like we only needed to make it to field goal range and GOTV will put us over the top. No. We need to be winning beyond the margin of error and let our hustle and determination show that we want to win more than the GOP. We need to contest every down, force turnovers, and inside the pile we need to claw and poke and squeeze and do whatever it takes to make sure we have the ball in the end.

 

To Review

Posted by jesselee
Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 9:45 AM

So it would seem, as Josh Marshall suggests, that the GOP truly is preparing to wage war against Texas DA Ronnie Earle when, as they apparently expect, his Grand Jury indicts Tom DeLay. Josh asks:

So DeLay is getting members of the Republican caucus to accuse Earle of being an unethical district attorney and pursuing a prosecution to advance a political agenda.

Now, is there any evidence of that?

First thing to note, of course, is that it was a Grand Jury that indicted DeLay's deputies Ellis, Colyandro, and RoBold, and it would be a Grand Jury that would indict DeLay - Earle is merely presenting the case. But Josh's inbox is likely being filled right now by Republicans frantically emailing this statement from Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas:

I know he prosecutes for political purposes. He did it to me. And I think it is a very dangerous thing to criminalize politics.

This will likely be the top GOP talking point. It is true that Earle lost that case, but obviously that in and of itself does not make it politically motivated, and to my knowledge no Republican has argued that they have evidence that it was. And in the absence of evidence, this key statistic is difficult to overcome:

''The only people I antagonize more than Republicans are Democrats,'' Mr. Earle said later. He said the record showed he had prosecuted 12 Democratic officials and 4 Republican officials, although for much of his time in office, he acknowledged, Republicans were on the outs. ''We prosecute abuses of power,'' he said, ''and you have to have power to abuse it.''

That stat, for the record, has been confirmed by press reports throughout this scandal. But to find out whether this case against TRMPAC has merit or is politically motivated, how about we just look at the evidence?

The starting point for looking at this case is the law itself, 100 years old now, that specifically bans corporate and union fundraising except for purposes of "administrative overhead." That the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), which was founded by DeLay, raised corporate money is not in question - $600,000 to be fairly precise.

The GOP legal defense has been that the exception for "administrative overhead" is vague enough that virtually anything can fall under that category. Michael King of the Austin Chronicle addressed that defense this way:

There's been loud pettifoggery from the usual brace of lawyers - unfortunately echoed by some news outlets - that Texas campaign finance law is "vague." But on this score, it has been plain enough for a century that the brazen defiance by the GOP is essentially unprecedented. Commented Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, which filed the original complaint that eventually led to the TRMPAC indictments, "It's about as plain as the law that says you can't steal another man's horse."

But judge for yourself whether these activities sound like overhead:

State law generally prohibits corporate money from being spent on campaigns except for a political committee's administrative overhead such as rent and utilities. Texans for a Republican Majority spent corporate money on pollsters, phone banks and consultants, arguing that the expenses were part of the committee's overhead.

Still not convinced? Then let's go to the horse's mouth. This was a fundraising appeal TRMPAC sent out early on, which one might argue is the single most damning piece of evidence in the case:

"Unlike other organizations, your corporate contribution to TRMPAC will be put to productive use," the piece said. "Rather than just paying for overhead, your support will fund a series of productive and innovative activities designed to increase our level of engagement in the political arena." [emphasis added]

Ouch. So you see that the entire point of the PAC was to get around this law, but unfortunately that appeal completely dashed their sole defense. Now in the course of the 2002 campaigns for the Texas legislature, TRMPAC made several cutesy moves to try to dance around the law. For example:

A political committee connected to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay sent $190,000 in what internal memos say were corporate donations to the Republican National Committee, which then doled out the same amount to seven candidates in Texas House races. It is illegal in Texas to use corporate money in political races, and some open-government advocates suggest the transaction smells of a money-laundering exercise.

Jim Ellis, a special favorite of Charles Kuffner's for authoring this despicable memo on the redistricting, wrote that check, and it should therefore be no surprise that he, along with John Colyandro, were indicted for money laundering.

All told, 32 indictments have been handed down so far, and obviously with good reason. The only question that remains is whether DeLay was personally involved. Of course as we noted, the entire purpose of the PAC, which again was founded by DeLay (whose specialty is corporate fundraising) was to get around or above these laws. But more importantly, there are at least three particularly potent pieces of evidence demonstrating his involvement.

Westar:

...in May 2002, an executive at Westar Energy discovered his company was about to make a political donation that, on its face, seemed rather odd. Westar Executive Vice President Douglas Lake didn?t understand why his Kansas-based energy company with no operations in Texas and no stake in the state?s elections would give $25,000 to a Texas congressman's PAC that operates solely in Texas campaigns.

"DeLay is from TX. What is our connection?" Lake emailed a colleague. Westar Vice President Douglas Lawrence responded that contributions to DeLay, Texas Republican Joe Barton, Billy Tauzin (R-La), and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) were necessary to get "a strong position at the table" during a House-Senate conference committee hammering out a federal energy bill...

Enron:

In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.

DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

The Tauzin Fundraiser:

A newly obtained memo indicates U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had personal involvement in directing some of the fund-raising activities of a political action committee that is under a grand jury investigation.

[...]

The August 2002 e-mail by one of TRMPAC's paid fund-raisers stated that she was acting on DeLay's behalf in an attempt to set up an event featuring U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La.

The Westar case was, as we know, one of the incidents cited in DeLay's recent string of ethics admonishments.

So there you have it, the case against DeLay. Obviously nobody knows for sure whether DA Earle will see fit to indict DeLay, but it is difficult to see how his top three deputies in the effort deserve indictment and he does not. It is also difficult to see how any of the indictments are not justified. To be clear, if no convictions emerge, the 100-year-old law is dead, and may as well be taken off the books. Obviously, this would be very much to DeLay's liking.

So let us close by bringing this back to the change in party rules passed yesterday. The Chicago Tribune writes:

But it's hard to read much more than arrogance in what the GOP did Wednesday. If DeLay is indicted, he should step down from party leadership immediately, at least until the charges are resolved. Allowing a high-profile leader such as DeLay to continue to serve as a spokesman for his party while he faces criminal charges would be crippling for the Republicans.

Republicans must know this stinks. They did it behind closed doors Wednesday and there was no vote count.

DeLay has responded to all this with his usual bluster. Maybe that works in Texas - though his relatively narrow re-election would argue that even Texans are growing weary of him. DeLay can bluster, but the Republican Party has to show that it understands political leaders have to set a high ethical standard. Their actions on Wednesday suggest they want to protect DeLay at any cost - even the cost of the party's reputation.

We have a petition just to let them know you're watching.

Put your foot down.

Sign the Petition.

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by Chris Bowers
Thu Nov 18th, 2004 at 01:27:20 PST

Perhaps it is presumptuous to place myself in the category of "mainstream" blogger, which I must admit is a term that I find strange and difficult to accept on any level. The entire notion of mainstream blogs sounds like "mainstream Indy media," "mainstream grassroots," or "mainstream alienated" to me. It sounds a lot like the warring factions of the two Green Parties, of the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) and SWP (Socialist Worker Party) during my time in England. I was actually involved in both of those disputes. In fact, being a radical during most of my twenties, and a Democrat only more recently (like, since Dean), this is actually the sort of dispute I am all too familiar with, and which I left the far left in the hopes of avoiding.

I suppose the term mainstream blogs is with us to stay now, whether I like it or not. Further, if there is a mainstream of blogging, I guess there is no way to deny that I am a mainstream blogger. As one of the maybe fifteen people in the country who is blessed with actually being able to make a living out of blogging, and one of the very few bloggers who is blessed with a wide daily audience numbering in the tens of thousands, apart from maybe four other liberal blogs I am about as mainstream as it can get. Then again, maybe I am still fringe--sometimes I am mentioned as a mainstream blogger, sometimes I am not.

So, the prevailing wisdom is that "we" in the mainstream are now failing to adequately cover election fraud. Believe me, I am very familiar with this debate, which became far uglier over at MyDD than it probably did anywhere else in the Democratic blogosphere. The recent culmination of the debacle led to Jerome and I mutually deciding to remove a new guest poster from the front page, largely due to the extreme responses that he stirred up over the election fraud issue. There were lots of nasty diaries, and lots of nasty emails. As someone who is both way out on the left and who has literally worked full time for over a year as a political activist, I do not take kindly to being called a Republican conspirator.

This entire situation is getting ugly folks, and it needs to be talked about. It needs to be talked about not just on the level of what we should and should not be doing about election fraud, but of how we should and should not be relating to each other as members of what is, in reality, pretty small community. The charge of "mainstream" in particular needs to be discussed, because it is only when labeling someone mainstream--institutional--that you can begin to understand them as part of some larger, nefarious plot. So, before I go any further, I would like to spend a little time explaining what my life as a "mainstream" blogger is like, and how it came to take place. I think it might be enlightening for more than a few people.

To be aristocratic for a moment, I would like to start by noting that I am actually one of "you." In fact, unless your name is Josh Marshall or Taegan Goddard, "we" are all like "you." My blogging career began as a commenter on MyDD and Dailykos in early 2003 after a few months of lurking. It was only with the advent of diaries here at Dailykos that I was really able to explore my own ability as an online political writer. I was lucky enough to have quite a few stories promoted to the front page back in the early days of scoop, and to develop a regular diary / column that gained a following. I eventually landed the gig at MyDD and Swing State Project because of my writing in the diaries here at dailykos (in case you are wondering, from what I can gather, my insanity rant from late April, You Don't Know Shit About Iraq is possibly the main reason I am writing at MyDD).

"We," and by we I mean so-called "mainstream" bloggers, pretty much all started like this. Jerome and Kos were both originally commenters over at Taegan Goddard's Political Wire back when it had comments (2001 and earlier). You probably didn't know that, but Political Wire is the ultimate lefty blog grandfather. When Goddard shut off the comments, Jerome transformed MyDD to accept comments, and much of the original community shifted. Eventually, after admiring MyDD, Kos started Dailykos and started a regular link exchange with Jerome. The great Billmon grew out of this community. So did Steve Gillard and Steve Soto. I am sure there are similar stories for Atrios and Kevin Drum that I just do not know.

We were all commenters before we were bloggers. When we became bloggers, I am not sure if anyone, except Jerome, ever expected that things would become, well, so enormous. When I started blogging at MyDD and Swing State Project, combined the two sites were receiving about 1,400 unique visits a day. By late October, the two sites combined to be well over 150,000. On election night, we broke one million unique visits. The weekend before the election, I met Bill Bradley, and he knew who I was before I even met him. As a poorly paid teacher and union organizer who for most of my life had dreamed that I would write a book of poetry that would be read by 5,000 people, I was more than a little unprepared for that level of audience. Considering here we came from, I think we all were.

So, here is how I live. I wake up, usually late (around 10), because late night blog surfing is the best time to really grasp what is going on in the blogosphere (everyone else is asleep, change is much slower, and I tend to not go to bed until after three). I make a five second commute to work from bed to my computer. After checking the newswires, gossip wires, blogwires, around ten select blogs and my "future stories" favorites folder on IE (a series of bookmarks that I decided the day before might be worthy of an article), I try to start thinking about what to write (before the election I always checked the poll wires as well). The way I figure it, every day I need a minimum of four stories and 2,500 words, otherwise there will not be enough new content to keep my readers interested. Ideally, although such days are rare, I write seen or eight posts in one day, totaling around 4,500 words. Hopefully, every day there will be at least one dairy worthy of promotion, and the various co-bloggers (formerly, just Jerome), will chip in between one and four articles as well.

Think about that for a second--the sheer quantity of writing that is necessary to be a mainstream blogger is kind of astounding. With skeleton crews we are providing nearly entire newspaper sections every single day on all of the "mainstream" blogs. I love it--it is without question the best job I have ever had--but it is fucking hard. I wrote eight articles the past two days, and it took me around eighteen hours to do so. Even so, I feel like a slacker. I hate looking at Atrios and seeing how much he has written, even though his posts, on average, are much shorter than mine. I have grown convinced that large quantities of good, original content that you cannot get anywhere else are what makes a blog strong, and I know that is what I must do myself. I know I must do it because, quite simply, if I don't no one else will. In just the last three months, I have written over 400 articles totaling well over 150,000 words. This past Saturday and Sunday were the first two-day I have taken off in three months. Over these three months, I have been paid a little under $6K. While I have become something of a very minor celebrity within activist circles, I will tell you right now that in order for even Jerome to score the level of gossip that he scores it frequently requires getting drunk with staffers that he only tangentially knows.

This is your mainstream--a small group of voluminous writers who are nowhere near as wealthy and nowhere near as well connected as you might think. We operate entirely without constraints except for our own, but also without any guidance except for each other because no one has ever done this before. We are truly independent. We are also utterly consumed by political analysis and commentary. Most importantly, and never forget this, we all came out of exactly the same circumstances that those who are angry with us currently find themselves in. We were frustrated by an environment where we felt an important perspective was not being heard, so we went and set up a forum for that perspective on our own. We are not pros, or old hats, or even natural leaders. Hell, in early August of 2002, I did not even know what a blog was.

Let me put it as simply as I can: we are human, and I mean this in many ways. I mean it in the sense that we are fallible. I mean it in the sense that we have absolutely no institutional support propping us up. I mean it in the sense that we all believe in the power of grassroots organization--of humans--to make a very real difference. I mean it in the sense that we are literally just a bunch of guys writing like crazy on the Internet. We have no master plan, except to help elect Democrats (and we only recently even developed that master plan). Our motives on how we are covering voter fraud can only be understood in absolutely personal and human terms. What does Chris Bowers, the person, think about voter fraud in this election, and how is he able to write about it and do it justice in the course of his life? How is he able to do this without putting the rest of his life on hold? How is Jerome Armstrong able to do this? How is Joshua Micah Marshall able to do this? How is Duncan Black able to do this? How is Kevin Drum able to do this? How is Markos Moulitsas able to do this? What do these few individuals actually think about what happened? Some of these people have businesses, and even children, who they also need to spend time with after literally months of eighty-hour weeks working to defeat Bush (even before I was a full-time blogger, I was doing this for several months). Being a single, lonely guy stuck writing in the small bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment that I share with my best friend / brother, I do not have a family to care for, but I know most of the "mainstream" bloggers do. We are, like I said before, both independent and human. As much as we love you, and as much as we understand your frustration, you do not own us. We are normal people, thrown into extraordinary situations, and we are doing the best we can.

But I guess we have become the "mainstream," with all of the nefarious motives and characteristics that can often be assigned to mainstreams. I am not going to speak for anyone else in the mainstream, but I will tell you my motive about writing about election fraud right now. As someone who is familiar with the Presidential voting patterns of literally every county in the nation for the past several decades, I can tell you without question that Kerry got beat in the popular vote. I never considered Bush the legitimate President because he lost the popular vote, as I would never consider any President legitimate who lost the popular vote. This, in and of itself, significantly dampens my personal desire to investigate voting fraud. In what personally matters to me--and I emphasize that again--as a lone individual who spends the vast majority of my time typing in an empty apartment, according to my view of justice and democracy, righteousness is on Kerry's side when it comes to policy, but not when it comes to being elected President. More Americans wanted Bush than Kerry. Not many more, but more. That matters to me, even as it makes me want to vomit.

I am aware of a number of instances where machines, long lines, intimidation, faulty felon lists, unjustified challenges to registrations and other anti-Democratic measures infringed on people's right to vote. This pisses me off to no end, and the fact that stuff like this occurs on a regular basis in election after election pisses me off even more. I am setting up a special page on MyDD to compile all of this evidence.

When it comes to Kerry winning the Electoral College, the only thing that is buzzing in the back of my head are the exit polls. They are almost never wrong. What happened? We must demand the full release of the methodology and raw data of the Election Day exit polls so that we can better know what happened.

When it comes to writing more about election fraud, I am aware that I am a leader in a wide community (as strange as that may seem to me). For this reason, and because I want to believe it, even though I don't believe it, I intend to write more about it. However, unless something very strange happens, it will never become the main topic of MyDD. Quite frankly, sometimes I think that the only way to satisfy some people would be if this were the only subject we ever wrote about anymore. All fraud, with capital letters, all the time, or else we are just conspirators capitulating to what is obviously a clear but case of a stolen election. That seems to be the opinion of the non-mainstream election frauders out there (yeah, you are mainstream to some as well).

If you feel that what we are doing is inadequate, then your reaction should be obvious. Rather than acting like conservatives and simply complaining about the media, act like the liberal entrepreneurs that you are, and all bloggers are--do something about it. Start your own location where all of this is handled to a level you find satisfactory. As a full-time blogger, I assure you that I am aware of all the election fraud charges, and I would write about them more if I found them both credible and enough to alter the result. However, I am only one person, and the "mainstream" blogs are basically only about ten people. If you were relying on us to show you the truth in the first place, you were already making a terrible mistake, and you have vastly over-inflated views of who we are. We are, in fact, just like you. Without much money, without many connections, with limited time and manpower, more often than not we need to be shown the truth. I can count the number of times when I broke stories or led new lines of attack on one hand (I think it has been four times: partisan index, incumbent rule, poll weighting, and Ginny with anti-conservatism waiting in the wings). Election fraud is a big claim, and if you expected someone else to provide all of the answers for you, then your problem is entirely your own. What do you expect the ten of us to do? Literally thousands of us were unable to prove a connection between Fitzpatrick and the people who hacked Ginny's computers. Start something up, make it good, and show us. We came from you--we are you. We are human. Quite frankly, we need your guidance and your work far more than you need ours simply because there are so few of us and so many of you. If you do not think that what we are doing on the subject is good enough, then fucking show us what we are missing. That is the true nature of the blogosphere--action, not whining.

We are here to help, but don't expect us to do everything. Rather than trying to figure out our motives, act, and through your actions we will respond. Why do you expect anything less from us? When in the past have we done anything less? If blogs were just about talk, then we would all still be saying "Howard Dean who?" Don't complain. Be a blogger. Make it happen.