Howard Dean + georgia10!

Well, I shook his hand anyway. But I did give him a hand-written letter, to thank him for taking on this challenge, and I included a printout from georgia10's diary here:
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/4/5/152153/2396/1#1
That's my portion of the thread, but I recommended he read the whole thing in my letter,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/5/152153/2396
and to post something on here, and to follow up on it for 48 hours. (kinda like an online whistle stop)

Now, that was at 8:00 am. If Susie Turnbull's diary
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/13/113857/852 was a quick turnaround already by 8:37 a.m., I gotta say: right on, you people get it!

Talking point #1: Dean is re-branding (with our help) the Republicans as being the party of:

Deficits, Divisiveness, and Deceit
www.democrats.org comes up when you google "Divisiveness"!

More on what the Dr. said in the extended...

As I mentioned, friends with far greater resources than I gave me and my spouse seats at the VIP reception, which is how I got to deliver the letter.

notes from VIP speech:

1. Learning from the last campaign: GOTV efforts have to be 50 states, and 4 years out of every cycle. The plan is to hire people locally. Susie Turnbull can go into the details, but the idea is to get people FROM WITHIN the communities with roots locally to be doing the GOTV.
   
2. Same staffing strategy, but working on messaging: the idea is to get the local issues and concerns from all communities across all 50 states, use the DNC resources to win local elections, and then in national races, to find the common threads and synthesize them into 3 or 4 main messages that will make up the platform. This is a gound-up approach, and relies on a lot of participation from local people.
   
3. Ovbiously Dean doesn't like Bush, and called him the most destructive president in history, but admires his messaging ability: to get 4 points across in 20 seconds on TV 4 times a day. That's a goal.
   
4. Polling Data: Their new pollster (Brilliant Corners) divided the electorate up into 4 parts:
   

Merlot Democrats - highly educated, higher income
Partiotic Pocketbook
Reliable Republicans (country club highest income)
Backlash Republicans.
This last category was especially interesting to him because they have off-the-charts fear factors on both the economy and on "Moral Issues", which to them means scary garbage on TV, and Meth Labs next door. In other words, they are scared witless by losing control of both their financial health, and also terrified of raising a family in the environment we live in today. Does this sound familiar to anybody? Dean wants to get the party thinking about these people, and empathizing with them / us, and to acknowledge this fear level publically and directly. I think a lot of people here recognize this as a missing piece of the Democrats when they say that it feels like it's all about rich people, and I think Dean has learned about this. I hope we can get through, and I hope people who feel that way about democrats will please please help us by telling us what is working and what is not in this regard.
5. Q & A: somebody asked about Lakoff, and Dean said when they are distilling their messages he wants Lakoff to help them come up with the framing for them. Bravo!!! Also, somebody asked about using FDR as the "Patron Saint" of the Democratic party, Dean said that was good, and that the SS battle will be all about that (more on SS in the next bit)

Larger forum Speech

1. Chris Gregiore: said when she went around the country, people were profoundly grateful that Washingtonians got the election settles right. Way to go!
   
2. Dean came on backing up this point asking people to write letters to editors (excellent!) asking that the republicans get over it and stop litigating with outside special interest money.
   
3. Most of the speech was the same as above, but he elaborated a little bit on the social security issue, in that the attempt to destroy it is really an attempt to destroy the whole notion of collective responsibility that makes a country strong. He said that history has shown over and over that when the gap between the rich and poor gets too big, the country is weakened. He tied this into the Nuclear Option, Tom Delay's ethical violations (and sacking the committee that would do anything about it), phony news, black box voting, etc. This speech was almost a rant, and he  ended with "I'll be Damned if I;m going to let 5 years of right wing rule destroy this country".
   

There was also a good bit about how even in Mississippi people are starting to get activated and fight back.

Overall, quite inspiring, as it should be. I know there are skeptics about the DNC here, and I hope you all contribute your opinions, suggestions, and criticisms, because I have a feeling Dean and the DNC are listening to us. Please be as constructive as you can, and remember that what they're after now is local perspective.