[X-posted at MyDD]
From Leighton and Jesse, Director and Webmaster of Driving Votes:
Driving Votes has officially joined Democracy for America. What does that mean? It means that Driving Votes and DFA will be operating under a common leadership to work toward our common goals: rolling back the right-wing takeover of our country and putting socially progressive, fiscally responsible candidates in office at every level of government. With Howard Dean as DNC Chair, it's the grassroots' party now, and it's time for us to start reorganizing ourselves into a unified movement. This partnership is a strong and exemplary first step.
About two weeks after last year's election, Driving Votes endorsed Howard Dean for DNC Chair. We kicked off a campaign to persuade him to run, then drove the effort to get the grassroots invested in the race. (Visitors to this site may have noticed the Driving Votes ads posted here prior to the DNC election, or read the blog posts from Driving Votes volunteer reporters who attended the DNC regional caucuses.)
We got behind Dean's run for party chairman because we are convinced that the only viable future for the Democratic Party is with the grassroots in charge. We saw firsthand the incredible groundswell of progressive grassroots energy during the 2004 election, and we watched how the Kerry campaign managed to squander that advantage over the Republicans by running another timid, lackluster campaign pointed directly at swing voters and directly away from the progressive, activist base of the party. We were intent to help make that the last time the party leadership would be so disconnected from the rank-and-file.
We were proud to work alongside DFA to help secure Dean's victory. Dean's selection as DNC Chair is nothing short of a sea change in the way that Democratic politics will be run in the future.
With Dean at the helm of the party, grassroots organizations can consider themselves seated at the table. Now it's time to live up to the responsibility that comes with that honor. Dean's DNC will preside over a restructuring of the party, to make it less fractured, more unified, and more accountable to broad Democratic goals rather than narrow particularistic interests. But Dean can't restructure us, the grassroots organizations that operate outside of the party. We need to take care of that task ourselves.
The diversity of groups working on voter registration last year served an important purpose in attracting a broad range of volunteers and providing different approaches to the voter registration work we all had in common. In the post-election landscape, however, that fragmentation is now more of a liability than an asset. Groups working in isolation from one another are prone to reinvent the wheel, or, more accurately, to simultaneously invent the same wheel. There are always benefits in diversity and competition, but we must balance that with the competing benefits of coordination and efficiency. As we size up our Republican adversaries, coordination and efficiency stand out as two things we need to work on.
Driving Votes and Democracy for America are taking a step in that direction, bringing volunteers from existing Driving Votes chapters into DFA's network of local meetup groups. We believe that these city-level and neighborhood-level groups are the best position for future action, and that the larger DFA structure will be able to facilitate coordination between groups to bring efficiency to the entire organization when working on common campaigns.
Until now, Driving Votes and DFA were two separate organizations, but we were always one movement. Our unification under one leadership will make the grassroots stronger.