Ok, so I took Mike's advice and I am starting all over again. He said this topic is far too important to let it go into stupid ranting.
Here's the deal:
Grassroots activism at the national level, whether online or off is an animal of a completely different kind than the activism that happens at the local level. The local is more personal, more mundane. I have incumbents in city government that live in my neighborhood. You are liable to bump into people even in a city as big as New York.
NYC is a big city and we need more people to fight the good fight. The DNC, the DFA and the liberal blogosphere have basically turned their backs on us.
Howard Dean said earlier this year that Democrats needed to win New York back. He came to the city, he came to the state and he pumped everybody up. Then he washed his hands of the primary race.
This has not only been the lowest turn out for an important Democratic primary, but it comes behind the heels of a report from the Voting Research Project that surprised a lot of New Yorkers. The stufy is about the most liberals and most conservative cities in the US based on voting patterns. NYC ranked #14, Buffalo #24. Not only were these the only NY cities to make it to the list, but, they did so only because statistically these places tend to have more Democrats than Republicans.
This should be a cause for concern for Democrats across the nation.
This is what the usually excellent Mole333 had to say about the primaries outcome :
Years ago, before Bill Clinton's presidency, I think, a Pulitzer Prize winning (and recently deceased) journalist, David Shaw of the L.A. Times, wrote a piece he called "The Greying of American Politics." He was not referring to AARP's power. He was referring to a phenomenon whereby in the national arena (specifically Presidential politics) no candidate with any unusual ideas, characteristics or positions would make it through the grueling process of a national election. Since America is so big and diverse in ideas, only the most boring candidates can survive the process. No exciting bright colors...only boring, grey politics as usual. Americans like non-threatening candidates who make them feel like everything is okay...fine...go back to watching TV.
David Shaw was talking about presidential politics, but I am convinced that this phenomenon is starting to apply at all levels of politics, including Brooklyn, NY.
People on the left love to hate Hillary Clinton. Many say "Hillary does not represent me..." or "Hillary is not a true Democrat." Usually I defend her based on her overall voting record, but truth be told, despite my frequent defense of people like Clinton and Biden, they don't represent me either. At least not to my satisfaction. But let us look at the message that voters send them. Look at the Democratic primary in NYC (the most liberal part of NY State)...and look at the mayoral polls.
Yesterday NYC chose a boring, pro-business, do-nothing incumbent Public Advocate over a dynamic, strongly pro-Civil Liberties challenger. The incumbent won handily. The Democrats of the liberal city of NYC spoke loud and clear that they wanted calm, boring, non-threatening politics as usual. So they re-elected Betsy Gotbaum, the Public Advocate that disappeared from public view after her election. They chose the candidate that Mayor Bloomberg supported. They chose the candidate that has never stood up for the public. And they solidly rejected the progressive, interesting candidate, Norm Siegel, who had been head of the NY Civil Liberties Union for 15 years.
The clear message from yesterday is that NYC wants boring politicians who don't stand up for anything.
mole333 wrote a diary about this earlier today and was called a troll. A TROLL. This is a guy that is one of the best writers of NYC politics ever!
To a lot of people DailyKos has become a social oasis where they can hang out with other progressives online. But to some of us it is also a real, get-down-and-dirty and roll-up-your-sleeves political node; a place where we network with other people from across the nation and/or our localities to fight the good fights.
In other words, we actually use this place as a point of activism. So we don't care about beauty or popularity contests. We care about real outcomes.
Ignoring or not helping people actually involved in campaigning and activism in places like New York City will have a repercussion at the national level. There are ways to bring attention to pressing issues like NYC going to Bloomberg again, than just leaving it to a couple of blogs and/or grassroots organizations to sort out.
In NYC, we need people. It's not just hits on our sites. That can always grow. What we need right now are people on the ground doing citizen journalism and research. We need to blogswarm against Bloomberg. We need to get people on the phones and tell others why Ferrer is a good candidate. We need to get the word about how the Republicans will use Bloomberg's victory as a Bush victory and will laugh themselves to the bank and up the polls again. We need to have people writing constantly about how living in NYC under Bloomberg is actually much harder for the middle class and almost impossible for poor people. How there are so many workers with no benefits or health insurance after 9/11. How fees on everything have become a second form of taxation and how the city planners would rather destroy whole neighborhoods and have realtors put in high rises because an increase in population is better than increasing taxes.
We need people writing about this 24/7, sending out to the city and state government incumbents weekly. We need people to make sure their neighbors read this stuff because, as one of my neighbors said, "if it were'nt for you i would have no diea what is going on in the city".
In other words we need your help.
DailyKos constitutes statistically about 1/3 of the liberal blogoshphere all by itself. There are a lot of people on this site, many of them New Yorkers.
In the earlier diary I deleted, one commenter said something to the effect, "well, why didn't you post about your blog". Well, I have and I have the link on my sig. But this not just about my blog, this is about all the netroots being forsaken in NYC.
The DFNYC has basically been left to sort things out by themselves all this time. Shit, if Howard Dean was so intent on getting NY back to the Democratic Party, why the hell didn't he do a couple of GOTV speeches here in NYC?
Why has the DNC just walked away from this city?
And why isn't the Liberal Blogosphere all over this shit?
At culturekitchen I write about national politics. The Daily Gotham is the blog I created back in April to cover NYC politics. We've been doing great and it has had an impact in NYC as far as people paying attention to what we are saying and, let's say ... paraphrasing some of the points we've raised about the campaigns. Like the need to look at the NYC mayoralty from a national POV, and turn this into a campaign about life after 9/11.
Even a couple of our jokes seem to have made it to the mainstream media (w/o attribution, of course); because, yes, we have been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, NY Observer, Gotham Gazette and other media outlets. We're an oddity in a city that has become content with playing it safe.
I call it post 9/11 voting syndrome.
So, if you are really committed to winning back the country one locality at a time, NYC ought to be your #1 priority. I would like you to take a moment of your time and send some love to the DFNYC, who have been working off their asses trying to get the frigging vote out in NYC.
http://www.dfnyc.com
A lot of groups like Downtown For Democracy, Stonewall Democrats, Boot Out Bloomberg and yes, even blogs like The Daily Gotham work with the DFNYC.
Please, go pay them a visit and offer them your support and help. They need it.
As The Daily Gotham, what can I say. We have been providing really a service but we need more people, from all over the county really, helping us keep abreast of what is happening in different areas of the city. And yes, we'd love to hear from people from other parts of the state as well.
http://www.dailygotham.com
There are others like "Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Website?", OnNYTurf, Mole333.
But there is a bit more you can do. You can ask Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Louise Slaughter, Charles Schumer, Charles Rangel and countless others why have they kept away from the city. Why have they at least did not lend a hand of support in the city by getting out the vote. And you can ask them why would they want to give NYC to Michael Bloomberg and George Bush on a silver platter.
That's what you can do if you are not a New Yorker. Put the pressure on these people and do so now.
I am voting for Fernando Ferrer, not question about it. If you check my diaries here and The Daily Gotham, you can see I got pissed at the way he handled the 'Diallo' incident and his campaing. And I got even madder at how little attention was put on educating the grassroots about him.
The assumption is that in NYC only the old people vote in primaries. The problem is that a lot of those people already have died off or gone into nursing homes like my neighbor from across the hall who used to work the polls during voting day. So who is picking up the slack? The younger generations. The 'kids' (sorry to use that word for y'all) that have grown up sort to speak with Howard Dean and Wesley Clark --basically a lot of people I saw were kids who came of political age in 2003.
Yes, the politicians still rely on union workers but, really they can't afford them anymore. The unions are not giving up their people for free and that's what you see all across the city. Not for nothing Bloomberg spent a staggering 1 MILLION dollars in perks for his campaign workers.
So what I am seeing here is a shift, a major shift, in the demographics and the politicians really have not caught up. So you get a lot of younger 'rooters trash talking Ferrer with really no historical point of reference whatsoever. If they are native New Yorkers, they were too young to remember what the Bronx looked like before Ferrer. They have no idea of the significance of Ferrer's work as the president of the Drum Major Institute. They have no memory of recollection of this man being up there continuing the fight for people's of all kinds in the city.
And what is most alarming about all of this is how many have been more than happy to repeat the talking points the other candidates, but especially Bloomberg have spread about Ferrer.
Ignorance and laziness is what's going to get Bloomberg elected once again. Ignorance and laziness is what's going to get Bush gloating about NYC going Republican once again. He will come for his photo op.
There are a lot of good resons why we should vote for Ferrer and a lot of bad reasons why not to vote for Bloomberg. We just need your help to get the word out. And we need your help to tell the leadership of the Democratic party that if they blow New York City, they will most certainly blow their chances in 2006.
So what are you going to do to help Fernando Ferrer and the Democrats win back New York City? How are you going to help?
[ Apologies to Plutonium Page but, not only am I cranky today, I am being a bit stingy about links. I'll ass those later, just want to get the diary out. ]
Update [2005-9-15 17:38:16 by liza]:
I should apologize to the crew shouldn't I. Well, it does not come easy to me ... ahem ... sorry. I apologize for letting my frustrations and crankiness to get the best of me. Am I still pissed? You betcha. But there are more productive ways of venting and I hope this is one of them.
[update] :
kidoakland, who is a kossack I respect a lot asked me why the deletion of the previous post. He thought the diary was important and was awesome enough to copy it. So, for historical purposes, if you want to read the former diary, it is here.