Having just gotten back from OH, and caught up with the Diaries going up, I'm seeing a lot of stuff that is just a bad idea, or impossible.
- Picking a 2008 candidate to back. Are you nuts?! There is a midterm to worry about, and even that is 2 years away. This one is silly.
- Election reform. Forget it, along with any other legislative agenda. We LOST seats folks...other than possible State agendas, there will be ZERO chance of any of this happeneing until at least 2006. Forget it.
So what should we do? IMNSHO, there is only one thing we can and should do right now. That is party reform. We need to start reforming and building the infrastructure which will be needed in 2006 and beyond.
My suggestions?
- Bye, bye Terry Mac. He's had a disasterous term as party chair, and needs to get the boot. Personally, I think Dean would an ideal choice for the job, but your mileage may vary.
- Try to absorb the best of the 527 groups into the party itself. We need modern and intelligent GOTV and party building. The folks who run ACT and Move On have demonstrated they get how to do this in the modern era. Instead of working at overlapping purposes, we need to bring these folks in house so we can form up the same unitary machine the GOP has.
(Having someone like Markos be recruited to run online community wouldn't hurt either.)
- Candidate recruitment. The new party org. will hopefully get the clue that we need to run folks across the board, not just play defense. Contest everything, all the way down to dog catcher.
- Play hardball. In OH our base and minority precincts were gummed up by constant voter challanges, which was as much the cause of the long lines as increased turnout. Yet in all the upscale yuppie zones and exurbs, we just sat around. We should have been challenging just as much in those areas in the morning and evening...those folks don't want to wait hours in the rain any more than we do. We didn't do it. Gutless.
The present Party establishment needs a house cleaning. And that we CAN do right now.