Enhancing Freedom, Opportunity and
Cooperation in
Through informing and networking Liberals and
Liberal Organizations.
Our vision is hundreds of
thousands of well-informed
April 27, 2007
Calendar
of Events Friday,
April 27 at 6:30 PM at Saturday April 28 at 10
AM at Saturday, April 28 at
1:30 PM at Sunday, April 29 at 2
PM at April 30 – Deadline for applying for free July 1-8 Political
Campaign Boot Camp – More Information. Tuesday, May 1 at 2 PM - John Edwards Town Meeting at . Table
of Contents Liberals and Democrats Support our Democratic
Presidential Candidates How Many Democrats Are In
Washington State? All You Wanted to Know
about MoveOn and More Nation and World Why Our Media Supported
the Iraq War Our
Media Disagree with Public Opinion Watch McCain
sing his ‘Bomb Iran’ song Mandatory
Drug Sentences Should Be Eliminated Socialism for our Rich,
Robinhood in Reverse Lester
Thurow on Globalization State and Local Private
Financing Destroys Respect for Legislators Vigiling to Bring Our Troops Home Alive Quote of the Week What is our oil doing
under Arab and Persian sands?
Our Political Priorities · Fair Elections and Open Government · Fair Taxes and Competent Spending · Personal Security, Equal Rights, Family Support · Quality Health, Education, Jobs, Income, Retirement
· Investment for Productivity · Environmental Protection and Energy · International Cooperation and Leadership Conservatives oppose all of these. Recommendations ·
Darcy Burner for ·
Alec
Fisken for ·
Dana Stober for ·
Keri Andrews for ·
Brian Conlin for Help Darcy Burner obtain
DFA support
Liberals and
Democrats
Support our 2008 Democratic
Presidential Contenders
I
am impressed by all of our Democratic candidates. My personal preferences are now John Edwards,
Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Joe
Biden and Mike Gravel, but many of the contenders are nearly equal in my mind
and my preferences may change as their campaigns reveal more.
Our
newsletter will provide equal access to all our candidates. It will include information which submitted
to us and information we find independently.
I suspect that Thompson will be the Republican nominee if he enters the
race, but he can’t please the Republican base and a majority of American
voters. In any event, virtually any one
of our Democratic candidates can beat any of the Republican candidates.
The
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC)
lists six reasons to elect Democratic Senators: (1) Iraq War, (2) Global
Warming, (3) Surging National Debt, (4) Energy Crisis, (5) The Poor Get Poorer
and the Rich Get Richer, and (6) Crisis in Health and Education. The National Committee for an Effective
Congress (NCEC) points out that Red States
have increasing populations which Republicans will seek to gerrymander after
the 2010 census. We need nationwide
non-partisan redistricting. And we need
to turn all red states blue. Support the
National Democratic Committee’s
50-State Strategy.
How Many Democrats Are In
It depends on the definition
of Democrat. Imagine a series of
concentric circles.
·
The largest
circle contains 2,000,000+ likely Democratic voters if they were all registered
·
The next smaller
circle contains 1,833,800 registered likely Democratic voters
·
The next smaller
circle contains 1,184,700 voters who voted in 2006 for Maria Cantwell
·
The next smaller
circle contains 781,900 Cantwell voters who consider themselves Democrats
·
The next smaller
circle contains 10,000? active Democrats beyond voting (PCO’s, legislative
district members, caucus participants, campaign volunteers, etc.)
·
The sixth circle
contains 400 party insiders - officials who receive occasional Democratic Party
newsletters
These
numbers were derived from voter and voting statistics, generalizations
concerning various ratios and personal communications.
This
yields the following types of actual and potential Democrats:
·
Outer ring –
several hundred thousand likely Democratic voters who aren’t registered
·
Next smaller ring
– 650,000 likely Democratic voters who didn’t vote
·
Next ring –
400,000 likely Democratic voters who don’t consider themselves to be Democrats
·
Next ring –
770,000 self-identified Democratic voters who are inactive beyond voting
·
Next ring –
9,600 active Democrats, but not insiders
·
Smallest circle
– 400 insiders
We
Democrats would like to create a whirlpool in which people within each
ring are drawn into the smaller rings.
We want them to register, turn out to vote, consider themselves
Democrats, become active and become insiders.
How do we do this? We reach out
to as many as possible to recruit and train them to be politically informed and
effective, likely increasing their motivation and activity. This is what our
A Suggestion for
You
have demonstrated your interest and ability to analyze voter and election data
for our 8th congressional district.
I suggest you perform an analysis for our 8th congressional
district similar to the analysis above for our
Initiate a regular (perhaps bi-weekly)
newsletter to your active supporters,
indicating your values, priority policies and political strategies and how they
can become involved. Expand the number
of recipients of your newsletter rapidly to other 8th congressional
Democratic activists who weren’t involved in your campaign. Since your newsletter is private, going only to
your supporters and potential supporters (with perhaps a few overlooked
exceptions), you can carefully provide information which your opponents can’t
easily use to attack you.
It is very inefficient for each
candidate to offer a separate newsletter. Encourage the Democratic Party to
provide a newsletter with each candidate allowed a column to be published
repeatedly until the candidate updates it.
In the absence of a Democratic Party newsletter, submit a column to be
published by this newsletter. While
there is some risk that our opponents will obtain copies of our newsletter
(although I have seen no evidence yet that they know we exist and we vigorously
avoid publicity), a greater risk is that your supporters and potential
supporters don’t receive regular information about your campaign and
possibilities for their involvement. We
welcome columns from all Democratic candidates and will provide a regular free
advertisement to any who send us 100 names, email addresses and residences (at
least city and neighborhood) of liberals to be added to our newsletter
distribution list.
We
will do all we can to support you and our other Democratic and candidates. Even allowing Republicans to be elected dog
catchers, provides them a resume for going on to higher office. In baseball terms, let’s shut down their farm teams.
Organizing Precinct Clusters
Led by Chair Barbara Geller,
a group of 41st Legislative District Democrats has initiated an experimental
demonstration project for identifying and motivating likely Democratic voters
to become more active Democrats and to vote.
During several meetings, they have:
·
delineated 17
precinct clusters
·
made a map
showing these clusters, their precincts and PCO’s
·
initiated a
database of prospective cluster team members
·
chosen 3 for
initial experimentation with 2 others which may be added
·
chosen leaders
for the first three cluster teams
·
decided a rough
timeline for
·
assembling and
training the first teams,
·
canvassing
previously identified likely Democrats to recruit more team members,
·
canvassing
unidentified voters
·
when the first
experiments are succeeding, initiating the other 12 or 14 cluster teams
Instead of lonely PCO’s in
only some precincts, they will have teams (consisting of PCO’s and other active
Democrats, who may become PCO’s after they realize they are doing the same
work) responsible for all the precincts.
Team members can support and motivate each other to get the work
done. If success is apparent within the
next 4 months, other legislative districts may benefit by following the lead of
the 41st district.
A manual for organizing
precinct clusters is available and will be
posted on our website.
Some Apt Quotes
"Whenever the people are well-informed, They can be trusted with their own Government."-Thomas Jefferson, 1789 “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”-Daniel Patrick Moynihan "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"-Voltaire "We can have Democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few..... But we cannot have both."-Louis D. Brandeis "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."-Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906 "We know how to transform this world to reduce our impact on nature by several fold, how to provide meaningful, dignified living-wage jobs for all who seek them, and how to feed, clothe, and house every person on earth. What we don't know is how to remove those in power, those whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference to human suffering. This is a political issue. It is not an ecological problem."-Paul Hawken, from a speech in Oct. 2002 How About Reborn Liberals?
Chris
Hedges, Excerpt from Secrets of Christian
Right's Recruiting Tactics. 4/24/07
“There
is a false, but effective, fiction that one has to be born again to be a
Christian. The Christian right refuses to acknowledge the worth of anyone's
religious experience unless, in the words of its tired and opaque cliché, one
has accepted "Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."
The
emotional meltdown that leads to the conversion experience -- one often induced
in crowds skillfully manipulated and broken down by demagogues -- is one of the
most pernicious tools of the movement. Through conversion one surrenders to a
higher authority. And the higher authority, rather than God, is the preacher
who steps in to take over one's life. Being born again, and the process it
entails, has far more in common with recruitment into a cult than it does with
genuine belief.
I
attended a five-day seminar in
The
seminar, which I attended as part of the work I did on my book "American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on