The problem is not the calendar

On a couple mailing lists I’m on, people are talking about different ways to address problems in our electoral system. There are, of course, the issues of voting integrity, but there is also an interesting discussion about changes to the primary calendar. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this and have a different view from many of the folks on the list.

Let me suggest that we are looking at the issue the wrong way. Perhaps the issue isn't that because a few small states like Iowa and New Hampshire vote early, they get more say in whom our next president will be. The idea of spreading out the primary season across several months so that we can have more retail politics, more chances for people to shake hands with the candidates is, IMHO, a great ideal. Perhaps the problem isn't the schedule, but the way it is being manipulated by corporations and large money donors.

People look back at 2004 and complain that the race was over before most of us even got a chance to vote. They cite examples of the way the media played the Dean Scream. Well, the problem with the Dean Scream wasn't a problem with Gov. Dean or the people of Iowa. It was a problem of the large corporate controlled media. Until we address that problem, it doesn't matter whether we have all our primaries on one day or spread out over several months. The media will control the message. Focusing on Media Reform is likely to have a bigger effect on making the primary process much more open and inclusive then any juggling of the calendar will. I do agree with some of the people on the lists that juggling the calendar without addressing this issue could make the problem even worse.

The other major complaint is the role of money in the campaign process. If you don't do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, your money dries up and your campaign can't keep going. Again, is this a problem with the folks in Iowa or New Hampshire, or is it a problem with the role of money in the political process? The Dean campaign did some amazing things getting everyday people to contribute small amounts to his campaign. In the end, that didn't do the trick, but it raises a couple interesting points.

First, if we want to address the problem with primaries not being democratic enough, we need to do something about the role of money in campaigns. We need to fix the campaign finance system. This takes me back to big media. What is the biggest expense for campaigns? TV Ads! Yup, that's right, it goes back to funding those large corporate media institutions that are thwarting our democracy. If we want reform, we need to move campaigns away from the 30-second spot to something that encourages democratic participation. An interim step might be to free the airwaves and allow campaigns free airtime to get their message out. The big media corporations will fight tooth and nail against this. After all, they get billions of dollars from political advertising. So, if they won't do this, perhaps we need to pull and end run around them. That is why posting video online is so important. All of the Democratic candidates are ramping up their online video capabilities. This may have more of an effect than any changes to the schedule will have.

Then, there is the issue of people saying that they don't need to vote because it has already been pretty much decided in Iowa and New Hampshire. Yup, it's those old cynics fouling up the works again. Well, personally, I believe that my vote matters, even though I vote much later in the cycle in Connecticut. I got out and voted for Howard Dean last time. What we need to do here, again is less about catering to cynics, then it is about trying to promote civic engagement. Let's teach civics! Let's get people involved. Spreading out the primary calendar so that there can be more one on one engagement between candidates and voters probably does a better job of it than compressing everything into one day.

For me, I believe that I can be more involved, living in a state a couple hundred miles away from an early primary state with the current calendar than I could be if we had one national primary day. I can go to New Hampshire and freeze my butt off, meet some candidates and have some real conversations. If they change the schedule I can perhaps volunteer to serve appetizers at a fund raiser for people contributing $2000 each in New York City, but I'm not likely to get into any real discussions about where we need to be going as a country.

Yes, we need to change things to make sure that everyone gets to participate in the presidential primaries. I believe that Media Reform, Campaign Finance Reform and better civics education are much better tools to make this happen than moving to a national primary day.

Iran Lures US Into Invading Iraq and Attacking Iran "Pre-Emptively"--Nuclear Riposte Anticipated

I wonder if this is could be "the plan" that has Rove so confident? Let us all hope not.

Here is a scenario that spells disaster. It is also a bit too possible for any comfort.

2006-11-01 Iran Lures US Into Invading Iraq and Attacking Iran "Pre-Emptively"--Nuclear Riposte Anticipated

It is our best judgement, drawing exclusively on open sources of information, an understanding of history, an understanding of the intent of the Bush-Cheney Administration, and an understanding of the reluctance of the US military flag officers to "stand down" and refuse to obey illegal and stupid orders, that the U.S. is about to launch a "pre-emptive" strike into Iran, and that this will result in a Sunburn missile with a Pakistani nuclear warhead taking out whatever is in the Red Sea (six times Hiroshima), or the nearest carrier battle group, whichever is closer.

Read the full post and supporting material on the source site.

60 Seconds to Steal an Election

This is a cross posting of a Marty Kaplan note posted originally on The Huffington Post.

09.14.2006
How to Hack a Diebold (Ivy League Edition)

Watch this video

Princeton computer scientists have figured out how to hack into a Diebold AccuVote [sic] TouchScreen voting machine. The subversion of democracy takes a coupla minutes, a screwdriver or paperclip, plus a floppy with the malware they've written.

This is no comedy video; it's a bone-chilling, blood-pressure-raising, citizen-outraging rebuttal to all the calming unctuous bromides you've heard about the safety of our voting technology.

The authors of this paper may be geeks, but they don't wear tinfoil hats. The P doesn't stand for Paranoia; it stands for Princeton.

I'd upload the Princeton video so you could watch it right here, but the Creative Commons non-commercial license it's copyrighted under precludes wrapping it in an ad. As long as you attribute it and don't profit from it, you can post the video on any site you'd like. If the hotlink to the video doesn't work for you, here's the URL:

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/videos.html

The complete paper can be found here.

Had enough?

RFK Jr. on the 2004 Election

Speaking of the "the corruption of democracy, itself", as Tom Atlee does below, consider tnis:

Friend Bob Weber forwarded this note to me. It is very much worth reading. How will we counter election fraud, apparently a fundamental and essential tactic of the Bush administration, in 2006 and 2008? Election fraud is both necessary and sufficient for Bush to assure "victory".

If you read one thing this year, let it be the compelling article by RFK Jr. on the theft of the 2004 election.

And look at the accompanying 3 charts:

This one is going to be hard to ignore.

The Citizens Party

“Had Enough? Vote Democratic!” Is NOT ENOUGH,
We Need a New Dual Membership Party

Robert David Steele Vivas

A few days ago I was discussing strategy with Jock Gill. Both of us tried to help Dean, Edwards, and then Kerry, in that order, with a concept for winning over non-Democrats like me (a moderate Republican). None of the staffs had sufficient gravitas to realize that we were absolutely right when we said, over and over, that the Democrats cannot beat the Republicans on base, issues, or leadership alone.

Last week, I conceptualized the concept of a “dual membership” party, the Citizens Party. This new party would not ask its members to leave their original party, but would, instead, serve as a second home, a unifying party, committed to one issue and one issue only: achieving electoral reform by electing a coalition government committed to the American Independence Act of 2007. Thereafter, the Party could serve as a second home for individuals, like myself, who are proud of what the Republican Party once stood for, but do not wish to consort with impeachable leaders or the extremists who have hijacked the party.

Today, I read with admiration a really superb Op-Ed by Tim Roemer in the New York Times (Saturday, 29 April 2006) entitled ‘Enough Already,’ that suggested that all the Democrats need to win in 2006 and 2008 is the simple slogan, “Had Enough? Vote Democratic!.” This worthy gentleman is half-right.

The Democrats, in my view, cannot beat the Republicans base-on-base or on the issues. Even a character debate will be a toss-up. There is, however, a major opportunity for a lasting revitalization of democracy if the Democrats will match up their most promising unity candidate with a new party, the American Independence Party, and a commitment to a Coalition Cabinet and Coalition Legislature committed to electoral reform.

This new party would be unique in history in that it would specifically foster the concept of “dual citizenship” and respect the original political allegiances of the moderate Republicans, the conservative Democrats, the Independents, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and the newly mobilized from both the Latin and Asian immigration pool as well as the survivors of the Dean revolution.

This new party would have ‘wings’ and leaders from all American political parties, and they would commit to support Democratic *and* Republican legislative incumbents or challengers who agree to dual citizenship in the American Independence Party, and its single reform focus: restoring the vote to *all* Americans.

Electoral reforms, including instant run-offs, the end of gerrymandering and even physical districts, restoration of multi-party debates, and voting on week-ends so the working poor have a shot at voting without losing work, all need to be part of an American Independence Act of 2007 that will have it greatest effect in 2008. In addition, we need to end “party line” voting that forbids our elected representatives from voting for their district instead of their party, and of course end campaign financing while introducing publicly funded campaigns and higher salaries for representatives, teachers, cops, firemen, and preventive health care professionals and other public servants.

Only one issue can unite all sensible Americans: ‘does your vote count?‘ The answer for most is a resounding ‘NO.’ If we were to establish a new party and an interim Coalition Cabinet now, even before a final candidate for President is chosen, and commit publicly to this single lasting “fix” on the system, everything else will fall into place -- including wiser foreign and domestic policy, an end to the double deficit, and a restoration of the moral legitimacy of the Republic. We must restore informed, engaged, democracy (collective intelligence), honest public policy, moral capitalism, and America the Good -- instead of America the Idiot Bully.

In 2006 we must demand that incumbents and challengers commit to this unification reform idea. In 2007 we pass the American Independence Act that implements sustainable electoral reform. In 2008 we elect a President and a Coalition Cabinet and Coalition Legislature that restores America the Good, an American Republic that is Of, By, and For We the People.

I have secured the domain name Citizens-Party.org. Shortly, we will open the web page, once we are as secure as possible. So I have a question for all of you: anyone interested in helping set this party up, register it in every state, and be ready to announce it on the 4th of July?

Warm regards to all,
Robert

No Paper Trail Left Behind:

Cross posted from Project Censored:

The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election

By Dennis Loo, Ph.D.
Cal Poly Pomona
ddloo@csupomona.edu

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Through the Looking Glass)

In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)

The post then goes on to list 18 items that are in fact completely unbelievable. And then continues with:

The Emperor (and the Electoral Process) Have No Clothes

The preceding list recounts only some of the irregularities in the 2004 election since it ignores the scores of instances of voter disenfranchisement that assumed many different forms (e.g., banning black voters in Florida who had either been convicted of a felony previously or who were “inadvertently” placed on the felons list by mistake, while not banning convicted Latino felons(14); providing extraordinarily few voting machines in predominately Democratic precincts in Ohio; disallowing Ohio voters, for the first time, from voting in any precinct when they were unable to find their assigned precincts to vote in; and so on). A plethora of reasons clearly exists to conclude that widespread and historic levels of fraud were committed in this election.

Indeed, any one of the above highly improbables and utterly impossibles should have led to a thorough investigation into the results. Taken as a whole, this list points overwhelmingly to fraud. The jarring strangeness of the results and the ubiquity of complaints from voters (e.g., those who voted for Kerry and then saw to their shock the machine record their votes as being for Bush), require some kind of explanation, or the legitimacy of elections and of the presidency would be imperiled.

The explanations from public officials and major media came in three forms. First, exit polls, not the official tallies, were labeled spectacularly wrong. Second, the so-called “moral values” voters expressed in the now ubiquitous “red state/blue state” formula, were offered as the underlying reason for Bush’s triumph. And third, people who brought forth any of the evidence of fraud were dismissed as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists” while mainstream media censored the vast majority of the evidence of fraud so that most Americans to this day have never heard a fraction of what was amiss. I will discuss each of these three responses, followed by a discussion of the role of electronic voting machines in the 2002 elections that presaged the 2004 election irregularities, and then wrap up with a discussion of these events’ significance taken as a whole.

Read the whole of this excellent essay at: http://tinyurl.com/7nbct

A Strategy for a Greater Democracy of the People

By William Wood, Ph.D. & Jock Gill

The May 26 edition of the Boston Globe printed an AP story with some fascinating data on the 2004 election in the United States:

Turnout of blacks, whites said higher in '04 presidential vote
Rates seen unchanged for Hispanics, Asians

By Associated Press
May 26, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Whites and blacks voted in the 2004 presidential elections at higher rates than they did four years earlier, the Census Bureau reported yesterday.

That was not the case with Hispanics, one of the most heavily courted groups of voters by the political parties. The voting rates did not change for Hispanics or Asian-Americans.

For too long the Democratic party has fallen into the zero sum trap of gender and identity politics. For too long one group has feared that anything given to another group must come at their expense. The GOP has been very effective splitting us along our identity lines in using this against us. It is time for us to take steps to adopt an all inclusive, win-win, strategy based upon justice and civil liberties for all. This is a strategy of high values for escaping from the identity conflicts that have plagued us for years.

The data in the AP story above, as illustrated by the Boston Globe, reveals the close tracking, going back to the election of 1964, of white voter turn out with black voter turn out. This calls into question the validity of the old Democratic political strategy of banking on the Black vote to gain the winning majority. The 40 years of data show that this may be a strategy with no benefit in terms of total vote count advantage. Increasing the participation of all demographics is, without a doubt, essential and the morally correct thing to do. But, by focusing especially on a narrow range of demographics, have we been missing a significant source of votes we are not getting precisely from a lack of attention and general neglect? Do we need a new strategy?

Even more interesting than the tracking of voter behaviors is the data on why folks do NOT vote:

#1 reason for not voting: 19.9% report they are too busy = too many Walmart jobs in our Globalized economy? Is this agricultural slavery simply shifted to wage slavery?

#2 reason: 15.4% report illness or disability

Thus 35% of the not currently voting population is too busy, too sick or disabled to fully participate in our democracy. What, as Democrats, have we done for these people? How have we made their lives better? These are the votes of the people, not the money. These are the votes we must go after as the party of full civil rights and justice for all. These 35% of non voters are an important group of disenfranchised Americans we can recognize, support and help to organize to help us all in our cooperative drive to regain our logical majority status.

Two obvious strategies to attract the 35% who are too busy, sick or disabled to vote:

1] Make election days full national holidays -- make business, the money party, give back to society and the greater common good by giving back one day of paid wages to democracy and self government.

2] Make it our policy to insist on full civil rights and justice for all Americans of all demographics. We must demand, for example, full ADA access to every single voting place. We should refuse to enter non ADA complaint structures just as we refuse to cross picket lines. We have to walk the talk if we want to our professed values to be believed and trusted.

Here is a hint: read Victor Hugo an Herman Melville from the point of view of the disabled. Now, is the White Whale the majority society that drives the handicapped, amongst others, to madness? What is the message in making a hunchback the hero? Question: where are the disablility literature courses in our schools and universities? If none, why?

On a more delicate issue, for 1000s of years we have called "the other", and especially the handicapped, "dirty" and banned them from our various houses of worship. Is your church, for example, fully ADA compliant? We have 1,000s of years of antipathy towards "the other" and the disabled that we, as the party that stands for full civil rights and justice for all, need to overcome. If we do not, how can we regain our leadership position in our great national debate about values?

Watching our Main Stream Media Squirm

It is fascinating to watch America's Main Stream Media's inability to admit their complicity in Bush's rush to war in Iraq. Now that we know he cooked the books - to get re-elected? - how else do we explain our MSM's failure to report on the official, state secret, smoking gun recently revealed in England? If it is not their fear of having to admit their complicity, what explains their silence? Their cognitive dissonance must be excruciating.

Published on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 by TomPaine.com
Proof Bush Fixed The Facts
by Ray McGovern

"Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity.

----- snip

This new devlopment also raises the very serious question of how should we look at all our elected representatives who voted for the war? Dupes? Do we want a dupe as president? From either party?

Here is the actual memo as published in the Sunday Times.

BuzzFlash has posted this report by Greg Palast:
Impeachment Time: "Facts Were Fixed."

A BUZZFLASH GUEST NEWS ANALYSIS
by Greg Palast

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.

A Need for Bridge Building

By: Michael Cudahy

For those of you who are familiar with my writing for Greater Democracy, Alternet, Truthout and a variety of other websites and publications, you are aware that I have always been an advocate of bridge building as a means of progressive political organizing.

A few days ago I engaged in an interesting and somewhat emotive discussion with another member of this web site who felt that my attitudes were old-fashioned and no longer relevant.

She may well be accurate. I am inclined, however, to make the case for my position yet again as I believe it to be an extremely effective method for rebuilding a powerful and respected progressive voice in American politics.

Like many people, I was appalled by the results of the November presidential election. The tone and strategy of the Republican campaign reduced what should have been a meaningful issues debate into a circus sideshow. In my mind the means did not justify end. And, as a result, we have a president who has been almost totally discredited in the minds of millions of Americans by his willingness to pursue whatever tactic he felt was necessary to win him reelection.

One of the understandable results of the November election was to foster a powerful emotional backlash against everything this president has done in his second term. The litany of affronts this administration and its allies have inflicted upon the American people has been truly staggering.

Be it the wildly unethical behavior of House majority leader Tom DeLay, the efforts of Senate majority leader Bill Frist to abolish the minority’s right to filibuster, outrageous cabinet and judicial appointments, irresponsible economic and environmental policy, or the recent efforts of the Congress to interfere with a state’s constitutionally protected judicial rights in the Terri Schiavo case. The Bush administration has demonstrated an unbridles willingness to threaten many of the principles that have supported and directed our democracy for over two centuries.

The problem is that many of the issues that incense political activists are inside baseball -- legitimate concerns to the intensely informed, but outside the scope of millions of Americans daily lives.

It has been suggested that all that is necessary to shift the political direction of this country is to educate and motivate the “masses.” The theory is that the resulting reaction will be of such immense outrage that these people will rise up and throw the bastards out of office.

Respectfully, I find such an attitude naive at best, and ineffective at worst.

Over the last 25 years, I have had the privilege to work on dozens of campaigns, from county commissioner and school board to being a senior staff member of congressional, U.S. Senate and presidential campaigns.

If I was able to take nothing else from those experiences, it was an abiding respect for the common sense and wisdom of the American people. It is too easy to suggest that the current plight of our country is their fault. It is too simplistic an answer.

Over 51 million people opposed this president, in what was of the closest elections of the last 9 decades. That indicates to me that a great many people were paying very close attention and just missed their desired objective of throwing this president out of office by a few thousand votes in a handful of key congressional districts.

Those 51 million people did so in spite of the almost crushing challenges of daily American life.

In its efforts to destroy the Social Security system and wage a dangerous war in Iraq, the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to far more pressing problems.

- The fact that over 55 million Americans are unable to access appropriate health insurance;

- That in the last three decades the average annual salary in this country has risen by approximately 10 percent, while the annual compensation of this country’s top 100 CEOs has increased from $1.3 million to $37.5 million. This represents an increase from 39 times that of the average worker in the 1970s to over 1,000 percent at the turn of this century;

- Many American families have at least one family member working 2 or 3 jobs to simply make ends meet -- while the recently passed “reforms” in this country’s bankruptcy laws have stripped them of critical financial protections;

- The current president has gutted the Clean Air Act championed by his father, and replaced it with the “Clear Skies” initiative -- a pale reflection of the former legislation. A move which eviscerates many of its long term goals;

- The “No Child Left Behind” initiative -- legislation which has been grossly underfunded and which has left the education of millions of poor American children in serious jeopardy;

- The Patriot Act enacted in the midst of the post 9/11 frenzy that threatens the privacy and constitutional rights of American citizens guaranteed under the 1st, 5th and 14th amendments.

- President Bush’s recent nomination of John Bolton to be the United State ambassador to the United Nations is a disgrace and a affront to the international diplomatic community.

These are the everyday troubles that engage and consume millions of Americans. Issues that threaten the health and well-being of members of the middle class not only in blue states, but in red states as well.

These are not questions of ideology or party registration. They do, instead, represennt a nonpartisan threat to what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “bedrock of American society” -- this country’s middle class.

While I am certain that millions of Americans would share the outrage of progressive activists over the more artfully executed offenses inflicted on this country by the Bush administration, I would suggest that addressing the issues that menace the foundations of American society will be a more effective and lasting organizing tool.

The anger and frustration that has been generated in many progressive circles by the results of the last election has created an atmosphere of reaction -- not proaction.

Indignation and bitterness are not effective political organizing tools. Not only do they scare people, they also make it extremely difficult to generate meaningful conversations -- dialogues where all parties involved listen and discuss their mutual concerns and dreams.

Howard Dean demonstrated an ability to initiate such a process when he was governor of Vermont, as a presidential candidate, and as an organizer who was able to elect local candidates all across the country in the November election.

Lasting political reform will not come as the result of efforts to educate and enrage America’s “masses” into some sort of Bastille like revolt -- that disrespects their common sense, and ignores their dreams. Any momentary advance achieved from such a strategy would be short-lived and would diminish the integrity of those who employed it.

While I agree with Thomas Jefferson that, “a little revolution is a healthy thing from time to time,” I don’t believe it was his intent that such an action be some sort of reinterpretation of the basic truths of American democracy. Instead I believe it was his thought that Americans periodically revisit the remarkable political liturgy drafted by the founders of this country -- to guarantee its vitality and security. It is not necessary to extensively read the writings of all of America’s founding fathers. A simple review of the preamble to the Constitution of the United States lays out their basic road map.

It says that the American government is supposed to:

- Provide for the common defense;
- Promote the general welfare;
- Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity;
- Establish justice;
- Ensure domestic tranquility;
- Form a more perfect union.

These are the obligations that the president swore to, “Preserve, protect and defend” when he took the oath of office in January. These are sentiments that resonate with the American people and have either been forgotten or, more likely, been consciously ignored by President Bush and his allies.

Instead of trying to educate and scare the masses, I would suggest that it would be better to engage them in an active dialogue about their ambitions and the dreams they hold for their children. They know what works and what doesn’t. And, they are becoming abundantly familiar with the abuses of power rained down upon them by this self-righteous and insensitive administration.

There is a growing hunger for boldness and innovation. -- for honesty and an understanding of the problems that threaten this nation. Americans can be motivated by the power of eloquently articulated ideas. It is a formula that has worked for decades. It is an equation that can win today.

Put simply, an effort grounded in such a strategy can shift a few thousand votes in key electoral states, and with it the balance of power.

Celebrate!

Today is Election Day, the day Americans vote for our representatives. Not for our leaders, but for our representatives--for in a democracy, we the people are the leaders, and our government officials serve at our pleasure and for the common good. This is the greatest gift and value of our democratic system: the people choose and our leaders serve us. When they cease to serve us and begin to serve themselves, they cease to represent us and we can choose others to do so.

Howard Dean's mantra was "You have the power!" and that is the democratic mantra. But to listen to the news these days--so full of fear and trembling about the legal outcome of today's election--you'd think that the power resides in the voting machines or the courts or the lawyers or the dirty tricksters of the political parties. It seems we are once again focusing on our victimhood, not on our power. And we are once again focusing on the negative, which is so very easy to do.

Democracy is messy and hard and imperfect. It is a work in progress and was always meant to be so. Our Founders recognized the imperfections and fragility of our system of government, but they also recognized its potential and were willing to do the hard work to help realize that potential. Potential always contains more than reality, and is always a process that moves forward and points toward a horizon that is just beyond our grasp.

I think these words from the movie, The American President are worth remembering today:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours." You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

... We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, and you wave an old photo of the President's girlfriend and you scream about patriotism -- you tell them she's to blame for their lot in life.

Let's celebrate today. Let's celebrate how hard our system of government is and how much of our energy we need to invest in it and how much we receive in return from that investment. Let's not take the easy way out and look around for someone or something to blame for our failures and imperfections.

We have so much to celebrate, so much to be thankful for, and so much to give. Let's celebrate our own potential and the potential of our Election Day to incorporate the way we want to express that potential. Let's make the best informed choices we can, and let no one--not the lawyers, not the courts, not the pundits, not the media--tell us how to think or who to choose.

The future of our democracy depends on our willingness to do the hard work and to use our power. Let's not undermine our own power by criticizing, documenting, and litigating our imperfections and failures until we abdicate our responsibility to the institutions we ourselves have the power to control. Today let's celebrate being Americans. Let's celebrate democracy and the power of potential.

Red, White, and Blue Flu

Following is a press release that is being disseminated to media outlets. It's from my husband, the Rev. Dr. Randolph W. B. Becker. He is calling for a rally on Thursday and nationwide strike on Friday if we don't have the election results by midnight on Thursday.

I agree with him that who gets elected is secondary to how the election goes. Otherwise, it's all over. We need to make them realize this is not a game. Democracy was never meant to be, will never be, and needn't be perfect. If we demand perfection, we do it at our own peril because we put our choice in the hands of the lawyers. The selection fiasco of 2000 should have taught us at least that.

Please spread the word.

October 31, 2004

PARK FOREST (Illinois) MINISTER CALLS FOR THURSDAY RALLY OF VOTER WITNESS -
NATIONAL STRIKE IF NECESSARY

The Rev. Dr. Randolph W.B. Becker, minister to the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Park Forest (Illinois), called for Thursday, November 4, to be a day of Voter Witness. "By noon Thursday, our nation deserves a fair, complete accounting of the election," Becker said, "and we voters should come together in witness to this. We need to be assured that this election will be decided in the voting booth not in the courts, nor the legislatures, nor political committees."

The Rev. Becker has called for a noon rally in downtown Park Forest on Thursday, November 4, to "either celebrate that a fair, open election has occurred and been decided, or to serve notice to the system that they have tried our collective patience." Similar actions by voters nationally "could spread the word that people are fed up with manipulation and inefficiency of our electoral process."

"If I have to go to bed Thursday night not knowing the outcome of my vote," Becker added, "I think I will wake up Friday morning sick: sick and tired of a system which, in the world's most technologically advanced country, cannot deliver fair, open, timely election results. And when I am sick, I call in sick! I encourage others who may also feel sick about all of this to follow my lead." He called for Friday, November 5, to be a day of "Red, White, and Blue Flu" if the election remained undecided by midnight on Thursday.

"Nationally, we need to say that the everyday work of our nation must to stop until the extraordinary business of this election is finished. On Friday, if we do not know the path we have democratically chosen for the future, we should be in the streets demanding results, not in the work place as if nothing has happened."

One of the strategies of electoral manipulation, Becker noted, is to stretch the decision-making process out across time, until ordinary people, in their exhaustion over the process, no longer notice the details. "Without pressure from the electorate to reach a timely conclusion, the process can be stretched to serve the desires of covert political agendas beyond the notice of most people."

"The greatest threat to the American experiment is not the choice of this candidate or that candidate," Becker said, "but the perception that an individual's vote is not important in the overall systems. In a nation where billions of monetary transactions can be recorded and accounted accurately and quickly everyday, it would be more than tragic if the most valuable asset of our democracy, our votes, were not treated with the same efficiency. The future of our democracy is balanced on that essential valuing of our votes . . . and we must demand that attention to their value."

The Rev. Becker's comments came in his sermon to the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Park Forest, Illinois on Sunday, October 31.

Contact Information:
the Rev. Dr. Randolph W.B. Becker
31 Cunningham Lane
Park Forest, IL 60466
1-708-748-4250
minister@uuccpf.org

Unitarian Universalist Community Church
70 Sycamore Drive
Park Forest, IL 60466
1-708-481-5339
info@uuccpf.org

The Power of GOP Moderates to Defeat George W. Bush

by Michael Cudahy. Originally published at Common Dreams. Reprinted with the author's permission.

If President George W. Bush is reelected, the direction of the Republican Party is likely to undergo a massive and fundamental shift. Long-held principles of liberty, integrity and respect for human rights -- established by Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower -- could be relegated to the pages of history books.

Should the president win reelection we could see national identity cards, a continuation of irresponsible fiscal policies, and a foreign policy that rejects a decades long respect for multilateralism. These are positions that have defined the party for the better part of the 20th century and are deserving of this president's consideration.

Ironically, the decision rests in the hands of the centrist or "moderate" wing of the Republican Party -- the very people whose values will be devalued if this administration is permitted another four years in office. Representing only 18-20% of registered Republicans nationwide, they are in a position to supply Democrat John Kerry with the 3-5% points he needs to win an extremely close presidential election.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush mesmerized many of his party's centrist members with talk of "compassionate conservatism," and a desire for bipartisanship cooperation.

"President Bush's rhetoric during the 2000 campaign held the promise for a significant change of direction," said Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI). "There was a strong bipartisan desire for mutual respect and cooperation -- for the good of the country. We were exhausted by the bitter partisan infighting, but this administration's behavior has only made the problem worse."

"We are seeing policy initiatives that are diametrically opposed to the promises we heard four years ago," Chafee says. "The president is advancing an extreme agenda that rejects everything from worldwide environmental cooperation to the banning of access to abortions for service members overseas."

"Moderates were in a position to provide significant assistance to this president," says Chafee. "Sadly, he chose a different direction."

The question that needs to be addressed is the commitment and courage of rank and file Republican centrists. Are they prepared to overthrow the neo-conservative Republicans that betrayed President George H.W. Bush in 1992, or has their will been broken by the strong-arm tactics of the last 12 years?

"The problem with moderates," says Ann Stone Chairman of Republicans for Choice, "is that they are so moderate, so civil, and generally so silent. Nonetheless," Stone says, "only 38% of her membership will be supporting President Bush."

In talking with Republican activists who have consistently supported moderate positions for decades, I discovered that none were willing to speak on the record. To a person they are intimidated by the extremely personal and well organized attacks by members of the Bush administration's political operation.

"When I talk anecdotally to moderate Republicans, it's very hard to find one who is going to vote for Bush," said John Zogby, president and CEO of the polling firm Zogby International, in an interview with Salon.com. "On the other hand, it's not showing up in our polling." In fact, Zogby's latest polls show 87 percent of Republicans backing Bush. "I'm just watching and waiting and saying to myself maybe there's something going on here, because I'm hearing it."

Consequently, it is hard to understand why respected and visible moderate Republican leaders like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator John McCain, and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani went to such lengths at the Republican Convention in New York to provide President Bush with important political cover. It is particularly difficult to understand when this administration has done virtually nothing to support their concerns.

While some political analysts suggest it is a strategy to reestablish influence for the centrist Republican agenda, other observers question whether the benefits will be worth the price.

"A second Bush term would be a disaster for American women," said, Evelyn Becker Deputy Communications Director at NARAL. "We would see an effort to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with ultraconservative justices in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade, as well as continued and aggressive legislative moves to limit women's access to birth control, proper family planning and health care services," she said.

The November election will also decide other major legislative battles critical to party moderates. We are certain to see the Bush administration set new standards in partisan politics. This extreme behavior could precipitate a serious economic crisis, as a result of irresponsible tax policies and out of control government spending, while threatening the American tradition of free speech with measures such as the USA Patriot Act.

We will find out in a few short weeks whether Republican moderates can be bought off by the occasional bone and a seat at the children's table, or whether they will regain their voice and become major players in setting the party's political agenda for future generations.

Michael Cudahy is a political writer and analyst from Massachusetts. He was a former national campaign staff member for President George H.W. Bush, Executive Director for Elliot Richardson's Committee for Responsible Government, and National Communications Director for the Republican Coalition for Choice.

Sinclair Broadcast Group and the Fog

Remember Sinclair Broadcast Group? They wouldn't let their ABC affiliates stations run NightLine when the program showed names and photos of troops killed in Iraq. Now they're requiring 62 of their television stations to broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," which they say is news and not campaign propaganda. What is the film about? The Guardian UK:

Carlton Sherwood, a Vietnam veteran and former journalist who made the film, said Monday that he felt the media had not explored the period of Kerry's life after his return from Vietnam, including when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee alleging atrocities in Vietnam.

"For 33 years, we've been saying that how Kerry portrayed us was utterly false. It was purgatory of the worst kind. It was slander," Sherwood said. "But no one wanted to talk about it. Everybody ran for cover."

If soldiers in Vietnam were not involved in atrocities, I can imagine how they might think none were committed, or at least might prefer to think so. However there clearly were atrocities and incidents of abuse, as documented by war historians such as Richard Moser. The most clearly visible and well-documented case of atrocities in Vietnam was the My Lai massacre, but Moser suggests there were many other cases. A documentary that suggests Kerry was lying when he said he had heard of atrocities committed would be pretty baseless, but if you'd rather deny or forget, it would be troubling. And today we have a group of conservatives who for whatever reason want to glorify war, and in so doing refuse to acknowledge that ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances of conflict are capable not only of remarkable acts of heroism, but also remarkable acts of violence. That was supposed to be one of the lessons of Vietnam as we confronted our "heart of darkness," but that lesson seems all but lost today. Kerry himself seems to distance himself from the remarks he made then, instead trying to convince voters that he has the same commitment to war as Bush. We're in a bit of a fog here – complex conflicts, more than any of us can quite comprehend. Where will we find clear thinking? Meanwhile, however, if you think Sinclair Broadcast Group is breaking the public trust that accompanies a license to the airwaves, you can let people know what you're thinking.

Is Bush Wired?

When we talk about electronic democracy, this isn't quite what we had in mind: it appears that George W. Bush wears a gadget when he speaks/debates that allows his handlers to whisper sweet nothings in his ear remotely. Somebody's started a blog to explore the evidence. (Perhaps the candidates should be frisked before the next debate?)

Major Policy Address?

Fred Kaplan in Slate analyzes George Bush's "major policy speech," which was actually a campaign speech intended to make up for his poor showing in last week's debate.

In short, the cable networks were lured into airing an hourlong free campaign ad for George W. Bush. (CNN's spokeswoman did not return my calls inquiring if the producers felt used. The secretary to MSNBC President Rick Kaplan—no relation—connected me to a "viewer relations" line, where I could leave a message if I wished. I called again to clarify that I had a press question, not a consumer complaint. She connected me to the same line again. When I tried a third, fourth, and fifth time, she didn't even pick up the phone; no doubt seeing my number pop up on the Caller ID screen, she routed my call to the prerecorded announcement.)

It's hard to blame either network for taking the White House's bait. Most presidents would want to deliver, right about now, a major address on the war against terror and the war in Iraq. In the last few days, one blow after another has struck the very foundations of Bush's policies. The fact that, under the circumstances, Bush didn't deliver a major policy address after all, despite his advance word, should embarrass not only CNN and MSNBC but, still more, President Bush.

Kerry's mistake

Kerry ought to admit that he made a mistake in voting for the Iraq War. Get it over with. "Yes, I made a mistake, and I can admit it. The mistake was, Mr. President, believing you."

Now, the truth is that Kerry voted for the war out of a craven desire to take the issue off the table back when the war was popular, seemed like it might be short, and could have turned up WMD's. So, it was a CYA vote. And simultaneously Kerry tried to cover his ass for his CYA vote by saying he was voting for it only to give Bush the big dick, um, stick, he needed to intimidate Saddam. So, this is a low point in Kerry's political career. But, still not as low as the Commander in Chief's lying to trick us into starting war.

As some columnist said a long time ago, the reason Bush's opposition looks like a bunch of damn flippity-floppers is that they made the mistake of believing Bush...on the war, on No Child's Behind Left Unspanked, even on compassionate conservativism. So: "I made the mistake of believing you, Mr. President. But, unlike your administration, the American people learns from its mistakes."

Bush Campaign Sues FEC

The Bush Campaign is suing the FEC, trying to force the agency to derail 527s like Moveon.org and America Coming Together. If you think this is because the Bush campaign is eager to support campaign reform, I can offer another interpretation: they didn't get started early enough with their own 527s, and they're having trouble getting them up and running and funded in time to affect the election. The next best thing is to try to shut the progressive 527s down. [Link]

Ben Barnes on Kerry and Bush

Ben Barnes, former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, talks about patriotism, John Kerry, and George Bush. He mentions very frankly how he got George W. Bush and other children of wealthy Texans into the National Guard as an alternative to Vietnam, and how he regrets it now. [Link]

Two Kerrys

by Dana Blankenhorn

I supported Howard Dean, and opposed John Kerry, because there is one Dean and two Kerrys.

Howard Dean opposed the War in Iraq before it began. One John Kerry supported that war, while a second now calls it poorly executed and offers no realistic plan to do better.

The Swift Boat ad that occupies media attention today claimed to attack the first Kerry, a lieutenant who fought in Vietnam in 1969. After letting them have their way for some time, Kerry’s campaign has now blown them out of the water, and made the counter-argument that President Bush put them up to it.

But when those same Swift Boat veterans are pressed on why they attacked their comrade, they talk about a second Kerry. This is the John Kerry who fought the War Against The War, who helped found the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who threw combat ribbons away in an anti-war demonstration, and who testified (eloquently) to the war’s evil before Congress.

I would have been proud to follow that John Kerry:

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

The anti-Kerry vets believe to this day that in 1971 John Kerry attacked them, while he maintains he was attacking the men who sent them.

The problem I have with today’s John Kerry is that, while he eloquently defends the 1969 Kerry he has yet to defend the 1971 Kerry, yet it is that later man I would like to see in the White House. The earlier man had courage. The later man had wisdom.

Because in some places Kerry’s 1971 testimony is literally ripped from today’s headlines:

The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.

In Iraq today, as in Vietnam during my own childhood, men have been sent to take territory and, upon leaving it, seen it retaken. In Iraq today, as in the Vietnam of my adolescence, we have committed atrocities that turned friends into enemies and made a mockery of our highest ideals. John Kerry fought against that in 1971, but in 2002 he voted to authorize the Iraq war, and to this day he gives us nonsense about how he would get out of it.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy.

The Iraq War has been like Vietnam in fast-motion. The campaign before it began was as intense as anything seen against Vietnam before 1968. And today it is obvious that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, no reasonable exit strategy, and no hope of victory.

Instead of fighting for democracy and against tyranny, American soldiers now defend a former Saddam Hussein henchman, a government created entirely in Washington, and a systematic corruption that makes Vietnam look noble by comparison.

It is that which Senator John Kerry must address. In addressing it, he must risk political death, because it’s very possible that most Americans still believe Vietnam was lost by the hippies and the reporters, by Jane Fonda and John Kerry. If they do, history will condemn America as it condemned all previous empires, and all regimes that sought to impose their will by force on faraway lands whose will they had no way to know.

If you believe in democracy, you offer people that clear choice, and accept the verdict of history on the result.

What will happen to Iraq if America admits its mistake? Nothing good. Maybe, in admitting that mistake, America can win back its allies and broker some resolution that doesn’t bring evil men to power there. Maybe not.

But until we admit that we can be wrong, the Vietnam War is not over. And unless John Kerry tells Americans that fact, he will become yet another casualty of it.

As will our children.

GOP Must Stop Bush

Carl Bernstein calls on Republicans to stop Bush. He compares Bush's situation today to that of Nixon thirty years ago. The Bush administration has been aware of the systematic torture of detainees in Iraq:

Since January, Bush and Rumsfeld have been aware of credible complaints of systematic torture. In March, Taguba's report reached Rumsfeld. Yet neither Bush nor his Defense secretary expressed concern publicly or leveled with Congress until photographic evidence of an American Gulag, possessed for months by the administration, was broadcast to the world.

Honorable Republicans will find their party tainted for years to come by this worst case of the Bush Administration's errors and incompetence, which also includes alienation of the world community, environmental arrogance and blithe incomprehension of the consequences of global climate change, and an ongoing attempt to gut the New Deal safety net and distribute more income to the rich at the expense of the poor. While calling himself "the education president," he's cut funding for education. He's called himself a "war president" though he clearly know nothing of the consequences of war - while responsible for the deaths of hundreds of soldiers in an ill-concieved Iraqi war, Bush has seen fit to joke about his Administration's inability to produce the "weapons of mass destruction" that were its supposed purpose (and he alluded to them again tonight, in his address to the nation). Bush's legacy will be stain on the reputation of the Republican Party; less so only if Republicans acknowledge the problem and help vote him out of office. [Link to Bernstein in USA Today]

Why I Would Vote for Bush If the Vote Were Today

Robert David STEELE Vivas

Why I Would Vote for Bush If the Vote Were Today

Robert David STEELE Vivas

I wanted Dean, but Dean’s staff isolated him from all of us calling for strategy, policy, balanced budget mathematics, and big tent electoral reform. So, I, and the other 15-20% of the moderate Republicans fed up with the impeachable offenses of the Bush-Cheney regime, had to settle for Edwards, good conservative Southern Democrat that he is. But his staff had the same problems, and he was not able to expand the message or the tent fast enough. Now we have Senator John Kerry. Boffo haircut, French accent, Jewish sidelines, questionable Viet-Nam record, and the same crummy staff and narrow perspective with a rotten disjointed incoherent largely off-center irritatingly down in the weeds collection of mis-fit sound bites. You get the idea.

Senator John, I have news for you: you are toast as things now stand. Not only are you toast, but even if Senator John McCain agrees to help you—he would be an idiot to do so as you are now untrained, unequipped, and unorganized to be a real President—I don’t think you can win because you and your last-gasp staff are missing the core realities. I will be blunt: four more years of Bush-Cheney radicalizing America and the world are likely to be better for America, in the long run, than four years of you and McCain as Bush Lite with a half-baked message.

I have simple guidance for you, if you want to win, win big, and win good.

First, understand that the center of gravity in this election is not left versus right, but corrupt elitists against working class new progressives. Norman Cousins had it right in The Pathology of Power (Norton, 1987) when he said:

Government is not built to perceive great truths; only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths. And the particular truth in which they need instruction today is that new means for meeting the largest problems on earth have to be created.

Senator John, if you are not helping us devise those new means, you are part of the problem. If you are not helping to level the playing field for all Americans, and helping set the stage for a massive redirection of American power toward solving the great problems of the world, for harnessing the distributed intelligence of every American, not just the ones that contribute to your campaign, then you are nothing more than a yip-yapping small dog chasing after the big dog.

Make no mistake about it, Bush is a big dog
with big money, and it you want to beat his ass,
you need to be a dog-catcher, not another dog.

So here is my guidance, and it is quite simple.

1) A commitment to electoral reform is the only dog-catcher issue on the table. You will definitely not beat Bush with a Democratic base against Republican base strategy, and you will probably not beat Bush with a McCain face lift strategy absent substantive policy and improved budget math. You have to mobilize the third of America that is either engaged but disenfranchised (Independents, Greens, Reforms, Libertarians) or completely dropped out (Joe and Jane Six-Pack, Couch Potatoes, Working Poor of all races and ethnicity). You do this in three ways:

a) You take Ralph Nader’s recommendations for electoral reform and go him one better. Here they are, as I have improved them. You made this the centerpiece of your campaign and you swear on all that hold dear that your primary purpose in life is not to displace Bush-Cheney, not to restore America’s alliances, not to reduce the deficit, but rather to restore power to the people. This is the dog-catcher issue. Power to all of the people.

Change law to do voting on week-ends (Sundays for Orthodox Jews);

Restore League of Women Voters as the presidential debate manager, and open the debates to third, fourth, and fifth parties.

Announce non-partisan Cabinet in advance of election and in time to enable the League of Women voters to change the voter evaluation paradigm by interspersing Cabinet candidate debates with Presidential and Vice Presidential debates.

Implement the “instant run-off” concept, where the first choice counts toward future Federal funding for minority or losing parties, but the second choice, if first choice does not win, counts toward the election of a winner elected by a majority.

End physical gerrymandering, and move instead toward virtual representation in which citizens can self-identify as belonging to a specific party, and then vote for Governors, Congress, and other key positions as a member of that virtual community within each state—this will achieve true representation; and

End corporate and association contributions to political candidates—simply make them illegal, while doubling salaries of elected officials over ten years, coincident with a push for major increases in salaries for those engaged in homeland nation-building—teachers, cops, firemen, and public health professionals.

b) You promise America that you will strive to make these reforms effective in time for the 2006 elections, with a view to making every Republican now in Congress subject to honest challenge and where appropriate, to recall.

c) You demonstrate your commitment to this Holy Communion with America by holding a national referendum, immediately, in time to announce on the 4th of July the provisional members of your Coalition Cabinet. You work harder than you have ever worked in your life—you break sweat and get down on your damn knees and dig in the dirt—and you come up with a Coalition Cabinet that includes great Democrats like Sam Nunn on defense, and systematically brings in the great Independent, the great moderate Republican, the great Green, etcetera. You not only do this in time for the 4th of July and then the Presidential debates, but you challenge the incumbent to send his Cabinet incumbents to debate your Cabinet selections on the 4th.

2) A balanced budget in support of an Innovation Agenda is the real-world foundation for the above commitment. It will prove to America, and the world, that you are not only innovative in ideas, but capable of implementing those ideas responsibly. So far, your math sucks. You not only don’t have a balanced budget, you do not have any budget at all. A responsible budget for a challenger would at a minimum carefully identify the $500 billion in added revenue available for domestic programs through restoring the corporate tax contribution to federal revenue, ending unwarranted subsidies, and going after the $50 billion or more in import-export pricing fraud and tax avoidance. A balanced budget would allow you to reconcile, in an intelligent and progressive manner, the competing interests of the working poor, the middle class, the labor unions, the progressive pension funds, and the small businesses of America, all of which are vastly more important to the future of this country than are Wall Street and the crooked corporate cronies of Dick Cheney who give George Bush the occasional hand-out.

3) You get Howard Dean, the Deaniacs, and MeetUp back in the game. Sponsor a MeetUp topic on the national budget (www.budget.meetup.com) and make the budget, not politics, the catalyst for engaging every American in a monthly MeetUp. We have the software to allow every MeetUp team, as well as individual Americans, to enter their policy preferences across the thirty-one discretionary budget lines, sorted by zip code and current party affiliation. You will know you have won when you have two things: an equal number of non-Democrats participating, and a balanced budget (inclusive of the new revenue) that a majority of those engaged in the online exercise can support. While you’re at it, tell MoveOn to stop pissing away their political capital on little issues, and join you in focusing on this one big issue.

Senator John, you can be the dog-catcher, or you can be the little dog that couldn’t. Think big. Think co-intelligence, Think power to the people. Get over the Washington bullshit and stop paying attention to the media. You have one shot and if you don’t make a decision along these lines by 1 June, and announce your commitment and your provisional Cabinet by 4 July, I think George Bush is the better man for four more years—not because he will do good, but because he will set the stage for someone who is a better man than you, four years from today.

There is a God. He is testing us with George Bush, and so far we are failing that test. I am a citizen in search of a leader. Right now, you are not winning my vote. St.

Stories & Technologies

Stories are shaped by the technologies used to tell them. New technologies enable new stories.

John Kerry needs to take advantage of the best of the new technologies to tell an exciting new story.

Bush is clearly left telling the ancient apocalypse end of time story. Most of us want to believe in a future that takes at least the next 7 generations into account. We will reject the end of the world fantasies of the extreme Apocalypse End Times party led by Bush. He is no Republican!

So what is the New Story from John Kerry we can embrace?

Looney Lady #3

CNN Poll: Is Iraq good or bad for America? Should the power transfer be soon or later?

Looney Lady: Say what? Is that our only choice? How about adding up all the things we could be doing with that $400B: like cutting world hunger in half; putting 20 water desalination plants in place, starting with the Middle East; funding a Digital Marshall Plan; etcetera. Are you telling me that the only vote I have is between an idiot and a dufus, between going short or long on Iraq? That's not a choice, that's idiot journalism.

Unity

In the wake of the termination of Howard Dean's presidential campaign, members of the Dean grassroots are organizing a national unity effort emphasizing three main points:

1. We are UNIFIED in working to send as many delegates pledged to Dean as possible to the Democratic Convention.
2. We are UNIFIED in the need to create a movement to advocate for the principles articulated by Howard Dean.
3. We are UNIFIED to work together in coalition with a broad range of groups to oust George Bush in 2004.

They're collecting the names and contact info of leaders of regional and
national Dean grassroots organizations who might be interested in endorsing
the final press release. Once we've completed writing the release, we'll
forward it to you for your approval. If you agree with the statement, we'll
include your organization's name as part of the release.

If you'd like to be a signatory to the press release (after you've approved
its contents), send the following information now to Rob Dickinson :

• Name of the grassroots group:
• Description of what constituency this group serves:
• Contact(s) Name:
• Phone number(s):
• E-mail address:
• Approx. number of people represented in this group:

Additionally we have set up a mailing list so we can stay in touch.
Subscribe at:

http://www.smc4dean.org/mailman/listinfo/grassroots-unity

and or send an e-mail to:

grassroots-unity-subscribe@smc4dean.org

Please direct questions to Dan Robinson at dan@drob.org.

(For more re. post-Dean activity, see http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000412.html.)

– Jon Lebkowsky

Blogging is not enough

A common theme in many of the articles about Dean campaign has been about the failure to turn the incredible energy of the bloggers into votes. From this, many pundits go on to suggest that the Internet is incapable of having a significant effect on electoral politics.

While I believe that getting people off the Internet and out to vote is important, I believe that the assumption that the Internet is incapable of having a significant effect is an unfounded leap. It is based on an oversimplification of the political process.

When you try to get a voter to support a specific candidate, it isn’t simple switch. A committed Bush supporter is unlikely to simply switch to being a committed Dean supporter. Instead, you may get the committed Bush supporter to become a Bush supporter who is now entertaining doubts. You may get a Bush leaner to become undecided, an undecided voter to lean towards Dean, or a Dean leaner to become a committed Dean supporter.

Yet for committed Dean supporters, there is also a continuum. The first step is to get people who have never voted before to register to vote and get out to the polls. For those who have been regular voters, the goal is to get them involved, contributing their time and money to the campaign. Beyond that, supporters need to be encouraged to take leadership roles in their local political parties and run for office.

In a recent report by the Institute for Politics and Democracy and the Internet, “Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign”, http://www.ipdi.org/Influentials/Report.pdf, they observed that Online Political Citizens are nearly seven times more likely than average citizens to serve as opinion leaders. About 44% of online Political Citizens have not been involved in the past in typical ways. 46% have donated to a candidate or political party in the past two to three months, compared with 10% of the general public.

However, it is worth noting that only 7% of the population are considered Online Political Citizens by IPDI. I am struck by the 7% number. My local public radio station often talks about how typically only 7% of their listeners are donors. Perhaps what the Dean campaign has done is simply found an effective way of identifying the most likely donors.

One of the early foci of the Dean campaign was to register new voters. From what I’ve seen, the campaign has been very successful in this. Particularly through Meetups and the blog, the campaign has also been very successful in getting people to donate money and time. Now, we are beginning to see supporters gather together to run for local office. The Yahoo Group, Democratic Wings and the DeanSpace based site, Local Politicians for Dean ( http://localpols.fordean.net

Through sites like Local Pols, one of the goals of Greater Democracy, to use technology to lower the cost of campaigning, so that any citizen can afford to run for office, is starting to be achieved. With this, folks from DeanSpace, and other groups are starting to look at how they can provide a ‘Campaign in a Box’.

The question remains, will the Dean campaign be able to expand not only the number of voters, but the number of Online Political Citizens and the number of people running for office. Will the Dean campaign, and for that matter the other campaigns that have tapped into online activism, manage to take use this to bring about real change.

Deanism

by Dana Blankenhorn

Howard Dean's failure will be complete unless we can transform this movement into a meaningful third force in American politics.

This is not to demean the Doctor. Dean has done an awful lot in a short time. He gave the Democratic Party back its backbone and themes. He gave a generation of detached, cynical voters a cause, and a way to connect. He has defined this race.

But he has been unable to translate his fierce support into mass appeal. His attempt to move to the right of John Kerry - which is where he is - has gone nowhere. His core supporters didn't give-off centrist vibes. Some scared people. Democratic primary voters have chosen, on the whole, to trust their institutions, not their instincts.

Despite Dean's opposition to the Iraq War and his defining speech about representing "the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party," Deanism is actually descended from a long line of centrist American political movements which have tried, unsuccessfully, to move both parties off knee-jerk ideological bases for 40 years.

Deanism is frugal (Perot and Anderson), socially tolerant (Bradley), internationalist without being imperialist (Bush I). Deanists want transparency, both in politics (McCain) and business (Hart), we want balance in our treatment of hot-button issues (Ventura), and we want government to work - it's just that simple (as Perot would say). The only two Democrats elected President in the last 40 years -- Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- were Deanists.

Deanism is far more appealing as a general election platform than it is in a primary because Deanists (or Deanites, if you prefer, even Deanistas) lack the institutional structure that would make us a true political force. Instead the movement is all about the leader. Whether, in the past, that leader was John Anderson, Gary Hart, Perot, John McCain, or Bill Bradley doesn't matter. Howard Dean was the only Democratic candidate in this field with real appeal to Republicans and Independents.

Given an institutional base - think tanks, grassroots organizations, media - Deanists could dominate American politics for the next generation. We could, if properly organized, endorse either side in specific races. We could withhold our endorsement, or we could run our own candidates, where there is running room between two extremists. (That's what Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger did.)

The challenge, then, is to build an organization, in every state, and gain institutional rigor on every issue. This will take money, a lot of it. For the last generation the money has been on the political right, which learned lessons with every defeat. They learned and grew savvy on pushing their social agenda after 1988 (with Pat Robertson), their foreign policy agenda after 1992 (with the Project for a New American Century, and their economic agenda after 1996 (with the supply-siders. These movements have since poured themselves into the Bush Administration and domimate policy.

Moderation has failed, it has even come to be mislabeled left-wing extremism, because we clearly see neither our potential power nor our powerlessness. As a result, we are easily pulled apart toward one set of interest groups or the other, because their institutions create the base voters who can dominate party primaries.

The choice in 2004 will also seem to be a choice between two sets of ideological extremes. We can provide the winning margin in many races, but only if we organize, and withhold our support until we get the best policy price.

Beyond that, Deanism must become much more than Howard Dean. It must become think tanks, it must generate cash flow, it must get itself together again, and go beyond the mere visage of Dean, in every village and town. That's the challenge. What began as a fight for one man must become a fight for all of our causes. It's not as much fun as a Presidential campaign, but in the end it's far more worthwhile.

The Far Right did all this, and now they're reaping the benefits. They may be driving our great nation into the ditch, but they've got the wheel, not us. The lesson of this campaign is we won't get the benefits without the hard work. There are no short cuts in politics. Without a real movement behind him, the best man is still just a man.

Television, Community and the Internet

In 1960, John Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon. Many people attributed this win to the emergence of a new medium in the political process; the television. Over the following years, television continued to change many aspects of daily life. Vietnam came into our living rooms via television. People started spending more time watching television, and less time going to groups like the Elks, Lion’s Club, Rotary, etc. Marshall McLuhan wrote about television being a cool medium, and people’s political and social activity have cooled off as they watched more and more television.

News moved from being a responsibility of the medium to being a moneymaker. News became a successful entertainment industry. Gulf War I played so well that the newly emerging news networks wanted a sequel, which they finally got. However, television is changing. The use of remote controls, as well as improved recording devices have given the view more control over what is watched.

In addition, new competition arrived on the television scene: ‘Reality TV’. Nine men and women go through a battery of strange competitions to win some weird prize. Slowly, one after another would drop out of the competition. The television news media started treating the Democratic Presidential primaries as just another reality TV show.

Yet concurrent with this, a new medium starts having more of an effect on the political process. The Internet comes into its own. People who were spending less time interacting socially and more time watching television, start watching less television and spending more time online. Their online activity is more interactive and hence more social. The Dean campaign taps into this and takes online activism to a new level and makes it mainstream. Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day telethon becomes ‘The Bat’, an amazingly effective tool for online fundraising, which soon gets copied by many other campaigns.

The Dean campaign gets irrationally lauded as having radically changed politics as Dean surges in national polls. Dean becomes expected to win in 2004 based on the Internet in a manner similar to Kennedy’s victory in 1960. Later, when the campaign doesn’t live up to expectations in early competitions, the punditry attacks the Dean campaign for its myopic reliance on the Internet.

Perhaps the most interesting is the criticism that people motivated by messages about Dean on the Internet haven’t done enough to take the message off the Internet. While the Internet is a warmer medium than television, the expectations of people taking the message offline are perhaps as overblown as the expectations that the Dean campaign has radically changed politics.

Communities take time to develop. It has taken many years for Elks, Lion’s Club, etc to grow and then to wane. It has been over forty years since television started eroding communities. It may be many years before new communities mature spurred on by the Internet.

This does not mean we should abandon the goals of using the Internet to build communities. Instead, we need to be realistic about how such communities can evolve. We need to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it burnt in a day.

So, where does that leave us? Hopefully we are a little more clear eyed as we look at what has gone on, and at what we need to do now to help new communities, enabled by computer mediated communications, evolve.

Original Paul O'Neill Papers available

Exact images, including handwritten notes (e.g., "bureaucratic chicken----"), of original papers behind the fired SecTreas Paul O'Neill book, _The Price of Loyalty_ have been published by author Ron Suskind. They make interesting reading and give a glimpse into the real politics of the Bush White House.

Marketing the Presidency

by Aldon Hynes

I don’t know a lot about politics or marketing other than as an end user, so perhaps my comments won’t be quite as valuable as you get from some of the talking heads you see on TV. Nonetheless, I will add my comments to the vast collection of port-mortems on the first couple contests of selecting Democratic nominee for President.

One of the key aspects of marketing seems to be ‘transaction cost’. Marketers want to spend as little money as possible getting as many sales as possible. This applies quite well to political campaigns. Campaigns have limited resources to reach a very large population.

The goal is, of course to get a sale, or in the case of a campaign, a vote. To do this, you want to reach as many potential clients as possible, as cost effectively as possible, and convince them to buy your product.

Broadcast media is particularly effective in reaching a large audience. However, the more advertisements in broadcast media, the less effective it becomes.

In marketing, the marketers often look for ‘decision makers’. In politics, campaigns try to reach the ‘prime voters’. This is where you get the most bang for the buck. Unfortunately, this is all about getting a larger market share, and not about increasing the size of the market.

Another part of marketing is the coverage you get in the public media. Companies and campaigns issue their press releases and try to spin their products in a manner to get the best possible coverage in the public media.

Then, you always have your sales force. In politics, this is your ‘organization’, the people you have on the ground, whether they are part of traditional campaign organizations, town chairs, local elected officials, labor unions, or new grassroots volunteers.

One final aspect of marketing that needs to be considered is viral marketing. Multi-level marketing is one good example of this. The MLM marketer tries to get the clients to market as well. Word of mouth marketing, particularly as it takes place on the internet is another good example.

An effective marketing strategy will take advantage of as many of these techniques as possible.

With this as a framework, let’s look at what has happened in the first couple contests. On the broadcast level, Dean’s advertisements weren’t very good. At least the ones I saw in New Hampshire were disappointing. The ads which criticized the positions of his opponents are what you use to build market share, but not build up the market as a whole. However, Dean’s message has been about getting more voters involved and these ads didn’t fit with his product.

It is hard to tell how effective Dean was in building the size of the market. It is clear that the market was much greater than in previous elections. However, this could be simply because of the level of dissatisfaction with the sitting president and the number of people competing for the right to challenge Bush. It is also unclear how effective the building the size of the market was in terms of getting votes for Dean, and how cost effective such efforts were.

In terms of the press coverage, independent organizations have documented how the press had been much more critical of Dean than of the other candidates in Iowa. While some people may view this as part of a vast media conspiracy, it could also be viewed as a failure of the marketing team to control the message in the public media.

In terms of the sales force, everyone was expecting Gephardt and Dean to do well in Iowa. They were perceived to have large sales forces. However, it appears as if the Gephardt sales force was not as highly motivated and the Dean sales force was not as highly trained. Kerry’s sales force appears to have been smaller, but much more effective.

When it comes to the viral marketing there seems to have been a hope that it would be more effective. This seems to be a hope that most viral marketers have.

Even if you have good marketing in several of the different areas, if you don’t have the right mix, it can also be a failure.

I’ve always been told that a good essay should have a clear conclusion. Perhaps this essay won’t be all that good because I don’t believe there is a clear conclusion. What appears clear to me is that there are many factors in marketing a product. Each factor, and the relationship between the different aspects of marketing needs to be carefully considered. Those that try to simplify the complex factors into a conspiracy of the corporate media or an implosion of a post broadcast dot com bubble, for example, miss important nuances and run the risk of not truly learning from the experience.

It is also worth noting that all of this marketing may have no correlation to the underlying of value of the product being marketed.

I Still Support Howard Dean

Here's why you should, too.

by Jon Lebkowsky

A conservative republican I met recently lectured me for mistakenly referring to democracy as though it was our preferred form of governance here in the USA. We don't have a democracy, but a republic. I thought hard about that; it reminded me of my ongoing semantic concern over the fuzziness of the word "democracy," but it really does have a clear definition, whatever connotations we might attach. It means government by the people, or government by those who are governed.

When, in the Declaration of Independence, we read

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

we read that government is by consent of the governed, but not necessarily by those governed. From the small-r republican view, consent of the governed means that we elect those who govern, empower them through election to govern, and delegate the responsibilities of governance to them. This seems to make sense, because the average citizen has neither the time nor the background to decide governance issues. Direct democracy is chaotic, potentially dangerous. It doesn't scale. It can lead to tyranny of the mob. These are the arguments that seem to favor the republican form of government.

The Republican and Democratic political parties are alike in that they both acknowledge, accept, and favor the republican form of government. They're generally less concerned about using the word democracy than my republican acquaintance, however. He's right, though. It's misleading.

I've been thinking about this as I think about the meaning of Howard Dean's campaign and why I continue to support him, and why I and so many others will be in a quandary as to what we should be doing, politically if Dean isn't nominated.

We like Howard Dean because we're democrats, with a small d. We believe in democracy. We feel that we should be evolving beyond the republican form of government, which made sense when we lacked the educational and information systems that could bring us all to a level of awareness and competence such that something closer to direct democracy feels possible, even imminent.

We support Howard Dean because he gets it. He trusts democracy because he sees how it can work, and his open campaign and commitment to Internet technology are reflections of his understanding, and tell us what kind of presient he will be, if nominated and elected.

Bush and his neoconservative krewe are anti-democratic, not just because they don't trust the rest of us, but because they want to obscure the extent to which they're reaching into our pockets. Bush's administration would strangle our educational system and emphasize privilege over competence. They would ensure that everyone can be defined a proprietary and monetized, and constrain the Internet so that it is slower, more centralized, more controlled, and less useful for any but those few who can use it as a channel for marketing and manipulation.

It's important for someone other than Bush to win the next election, while consent of the governed is still a meaningful phrase. Howard Dean is the best choice, though he may not be as wily and sophisticated as some of the others, because he has the right vision for the future.

If Howard Dean is not the nominee of the Democratic party, we should ensure a victory for Kerry or whoever else gets the nomination. However we should continue on the path that Dean set for us, hopefully with his ongoing involvement, and continue to organize support for a government of the people. It's time.

Post Broadcast Screams

by Aldon Hynes

To what extent can the issues around the media coverage of the ‘I have a scream’ speech of Howard Dean be seen as an archetypal conflict between broadcast politics and post-broadcast politics? If you look at CNBC or CNN coverage, it was a sound byte of Governor Dean broadcasting out nationally in a way that demonstrated he was out of control. Yet reading the blogs and the mailing lists, and now more and more of the media, we are getting a very different perspective.

People who were at the rally talk about it as a very energetic and dynamic rally. The video tapes from people in the crowd, in which you can barely hear Governor Dean over the roar of the crowd, in which there is an incredible back and forth between the crowds and the Governor give a much different view of the experience than how the broadcast media portrayed things. This is the post-broadcast view; a view in which people interact. This interaction is slowly making its way out on the net as one person tells another, and they in turn spread the word about what happened and how they personally related to the campaign.

Many people have compared the current race to the 1960 race. Will social networks enabled by the internet give Governor Dean a similar sort of victory that John Kennedy achieved, or aren’t social networks that powerful yet.

I also have to wonder if the “I have a scream” speech will end up being the ‘I paid for this microphone’ moment of this election.

What can we learn from Iowa and the scream in terms of post broadcast politics?

Online and On the Ground

I keep saying that effective activism is neither virtual nor physical, but a robust combination of the two, and here's a great example: "Blog for America: BloggerStorm!" aggregates posts by various bloggers who have gone to Iowa to work for Howard Dean's campaign.

The photo above is a Dean Perfect Storm team, blogged by Robert Baren.

Can we really be open?

Recently, there was an article in Wired magazine, “Clark Campaign Going Open Source”, http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61723,00.html which caught my attention. I have been very active with DeanSpace, and I feel strongly that Open Source campaigns are crucial to revitalizing democracy in the United States.

I sent an email to the various DeanSpace people, other technologists involved in the Dean Campaign asking for their comments about working together with Clark’s TechCorp. I posted a comment about in my DailyKos Diary, http://aldon.dailykos.com/story/2003/12/29/13159/817. I also sent a copy to the email address listed in the Wired article for the Clark TechCorp people.

I must say, I have been disappointed by the majority of the responses I have received. Perhaps the most disappointing has been the attacks on General Clark that several people sent me. General Clark is a fine candidate, and I will gladly support him if he wins the nomination. I do not think we should be attacking candidates like General Clark, or his supporters.

A second concern that was brought up, was that we don’t have time right now to focus on this. I think this is a very valid and important concern. I am spending as much time as I can working on developing new tools for the campaign, helping set up websites, attending steering committee meetings, and even finding a moment to write a blog entry every now and then. However, by thinking about what we are doing and where we are going, we can make development decisions that will be more likely to interoperate with, and be usable by people developing tools for other campaigns.

Another concern was that we need to be careful not to embarrass the campaign. After all, what would the media do if they found that people from competing campaigns were working together to make each other’s campaign more effective? The only examples of people from different campaigns working together recently have been what appears to be coordinated attacks on Dean by some of his competitors. It could be highly embarrassing if people worked together to improve this country even if they are on different sides of a campaign.

Some people suggested that we shouldn’t be worrying about what people will use after the primary. Their suggestions were that the DNC will have its own software. Perhaps. But we should be developing our tools in such away that even the DNC will be able to benefit from what we are developing. We need not only to have Dean software and Clark software interoperate, but also DNC software and who knows what other software.

One person suggested that we shouldn’t worry about it because Dean will end up having most of the delegates and it will be up to his supporters to select the software to use. They will obviously choose DeanSpace.

I must admit, that this sounds like a likely scenario, but there is a certain arrogance about this that I find uncomfortable. I am also not sure that selecting the software based on whose candidate wins a race is the best way of developing the best software. Granted, this isn’t really that different from what often happens in corporate America. However, we should be seeking to get the best software through cooperation and interoperability, not the force of who wins the nomination.

However, I am not the only person who has been interested in this news about Clark’s TechCorp. David Winer wrote a fairly cranky post about Dean and Clark’s software development, http://archive.scripting.com/2003/12/24#editorial.

To a certain extent, Winer has an important point to make. It isn’t good if campaigns take unfair advantage of volunteers to get the software the campaign needs. To the extent that people are writing software for a specific candidate, this is a campaign contribution. I gladly make that contribution. I don’t feel bad about that contribution, nor do I believe that my contributions end up hurting the software industry.

As a matter of fact, to the extent that we generate good software that gets campaigns using the internet more, and gets more people involved in social networking and politics, it actually helps the software industry. I won’t expand on this. I believe that Jon Lebkowsky has already addressed this more satisfactorily than I would in his blog, http://www.weblogsky.com/archives/000024.html

So, the challenge remains, can Dean supporters, Clark supporters, perhaps even supporters from other campaigns collaborate in Open Source politics? I hope so, and I continue to look for others to join in.

This man can survive shark attacks

by Sidney Blumenthal, originally appearing in The Guardian/London, reprinted with the author's permission.

The presidential party of the party that doesn't hold the White House is like a ghost party that miraculously springs to life in the January of election year. It exists apart from the congressional party and often against it, and it does not proceed through the tortuous path of legislation but a swift and unforgiving campaign. Though the curtain is just rising on 2004, the action is near the end of the first act. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, arrives at his position as frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination by outpacing three successive alternative frontrunners. Paradoxically, the fire concentrated on him has only bolstered him.

Dean's frankness has been accompanied by apparent gaffes - for example, his remark that the country is not safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein, a stunning event that reversed President Bush's poll slide. In a double whiplash effect, the other candidates, who had been trying to persuade Democratic voters that, while they had initially supported the Iraq war, they were against it all along, repositioned. "Dean will melt in a minute once Republicans start going after him," charged Senator Joseph Lieberman. Dean "makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact that he is not well-equipped to challenge Bush," said Congressman Dick Gephardt. "I don't think (Dean) can win either," added Senator John Kerry. Every time Dean makes an artless comment, his opponents see blood in the water. There may be blood, they may be sharks, but he emerges unscathed.

Since 1968, when Eugene McCarthy shocked President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the establishment candidate has been vulnerable to an insurgent. The case for strategic voting has without exception never worked. In 1992, Bill Clinton, under attack for evading the draft during the Vietnam war, was excoriated by his rival, Senator Bob Kerrey: "I'm not questioning (Clinton's) patriotism, but I guarantee Bush will in November," Kerrey warned. "The Republicans will exploit every weakness" and Clinton "will get opened like a soft peanut."

By calling attention to Dean's boldness (or rashness) without any effectual action of their own, Dean's rivals are underscoring his fusion of acceptable political credentials as the only governor in the race who is also the insurgent. They appeal to a mythical establishment to stop him, setting themselves up as the establishment. But the unions are split, with some of the most powerful backing Dean; African Americans have no obvious candidate, with many leaders backing Dean; elected officials are widely diffused, with many behind Dean; Al Gore has endorsed Dean; Jimmy Carter is quietly helpful; and the Democratic national committee is peripheral.

Yet Dean's opponents continue to promote him as the anti-establishment candidate, an image fitting Democratic voters' notion of the primaries: a referendum on their view of political reality. Why trust Bush and the Republicans, the conservative establishment ruling a one-party state?

The intensity among Democrats may appear to result from the debate over Iraq, but its roots go back to impeachment and Florida. Then, after 9/11, Bush betrayed the bipartisan consensus that had supported the Afghanistan war by smearing the congressional Democrats as unpatriotic. With that, in the 2002 midterm elections, he took back the Senate, rendering them impotent. The Democrats' illusion of good faith had disarmed them. They had behaved as though they were dealing with the elder Bush. Iraq, even for most rank and file Democrats who favoured the war to depose Saddam, is understood as an extension of the anti-constitutional strategy of the Republicans' ruthless exercise of power.

The sin of the "Washington Democrats" in the eyes of Democrats isn't simply their fecklessness; it's that they have appeared as appeasers. Whether Dean or another Democrat can win the war is another war. But the first requirement for becoming the wartime leader is to understand that there is a war.

Lieberman has declared that Dean is not in the mould of Clinton in 1992, as though attempting to repeat the past makes a New Democrat born again. But Dean's pragmatic strategy may be another version of that which Clinton adopted after he suffered the loss of the Democratic Congress in 1994. By defining his position apart from the rightwing Republicans and the "Washington Democrats", as he calls them, Dean has reinvented triangulation.

Ballot Initiatives in a post broadcast world

In some recent emails, particularly with Jock Gill, we have been discussing the role of ballot initiatives and plebiscites in politics today. Many people seem to think of ballot initiatives as a great example true democracy where everyone has their say in making a law.

However, I think that ballot initiatives are perhaps one of the last gasps of the broadcast era politics. Issues, like candidates get reduced to sound bytes that get a yes or no vote. The electorate isn't truly involved, whether it be in finding the best solution to an issue, or making an informed choice about an issue. From a psychological perspective it promotes black and white thinking, the view that there are two possible solutions to a problem, and nothing in between. In terms of community, it does nothing to promote people working together for the good of the community.

Hopefully, 2000 was the last gasp of broadcast era politics and we are moving into a new age of post-broadcast politics, where people are fully involved again in new communities.

At the Association of Internet Researchers 2003 conference in Toronto, there were several themes that in my mind interweaved quite nicely to illustrate where the problems are and some of the things that could be done to help get these problems addressed.

One of the first themes was that of the role of blogs in the media today. One speaker commented about agent theory, if I recall properly. The salient comment to me, which seemed to be the center of his paper, was that the media can’t tell us what to think; they can only tell us what to think about. The question that arose was, where do blogs fit into this equation? By keeping stories alive in the blogs, by stories gaining legs in blogs, do blogs change this equation? Do blogs start telling the media what should be thought about? Do issues return to being emergent from the grassroots instead of driven by large media conglomerates?

Another theme was eCampaigns. I presented on the use of the Internet by the Howard Dean campaign. There was another panel concerning archiving of online campaign materials. I spoke with the two of the panel speakers about my paper. In particular, I mentioned Joe Trippi’s Perfect Storm blog entry from last May.

every political campaign I have ever been in is built on a top-down military structure -- there is a general at the top of the campaign -- and all orders flow down -- with almost no interaction. This is a disaster. This kind of structure will suffocate the storm not fuel it. Campaigns abhor chaos -- and to most campaigns built on the old top-down model -- that is what the net represents -- chaos. And the more the campaign tries to control the "chaos" the more it stiffles its growth

This particular quote resonated strongly with the presenters at this panel. In my mind, it fits well with the shift taking place in the media, as blogs, as well as other changes in the media, are leading to a larger distribution of power, at the same time as media outlets try to consolidate power.

This leads to the third theme; the failure of eGovernance efforts so far. With a few exceptions, they have been failures. As I reflected on this at the time, I wondered the relationship between eCampaigns and eGovernance. Perhaps we cannot have eGovernance until we have leaders that have been elected through eCampaigns. As I think more about this, it makes sense in terms of what has been discussed above. What needs to happen for eGovernance to success is for people to find and become comfortable with tools that restore their voice in politics; that move from the world of broadcast politics where a central command sends out information that does not engage to the public to a world of emergent democracy where individual voices join together one at a time until they make up a strong loud chorus that cannot be ignored.

This brings me back to my discussions with Jock. What are the tools that will help people find their voice again? Jock suggested a few. Meetup.com is a very important starting point. It is about taking conversations that are occurring online and moving them to the diners and bars across our country and across the world. Social software, like Deanlink, and even sites that lead to its creation, like Friendster or The Tribe are crucial in helping people find others with shared interests. Other tools to improve communication, like Skype are also important. I must admit, I haven’t played with Skype yet, but I do use Vonage to get Voice over IP in an easy to use manner that connects with the PSTN. Additional synchronous tools, perhaps even including video, will help in getting people better connected.

Jock also spoke about visualization and modeling tools. It seems as if these have great potential to assist people as they discuss ideas either on blogs, at Meetups, or over synchronous tools.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with ballot initiatives per se. Perhaps the problem is that right now they are being created in the old broadcast top down manner. Perhaps what is necessary is to use tools like Meetup, Friendster, Skye, and modeling and visualization tools to make ballot initiatives a truly engaging process where an optimal solution can emerge through many people working together in community.

Open Source Peer to Peer Democracy

Recently, on a mailing list of technologists who are active in the Howard Dean campaign, the issue of whether the technology should be Open Source and Peer to Peer came up.

The person raising the issue said: "To be Open Source, it means that our opponent, the Republican Party, will also have access to the same resource that we have. Do we really want to make our hard work available to them?"

I responded that my concern is much more than just getting Dean into the White House.

My opponent is not the Republican Party. My opponent is anti-democratic forces where ever they might be. I know many great Republicans. (Quite a few of them support Dean.) I believe it was Jefferson who said something to the effect of, for democracy to work, we must have an informed populace. The current regime in Washington attempts to keep the populace misinformed. It attempts to discourage people from finding out what is going on and acting upon it.

Some people have objected that whether we are talking about the Republican Party or the current regime in Washington, either way, we don’t want them to get our tools. Others pointed out that the Bush campaign has $200 million dollars and can get any tools they want.

I believe that by making election tools available to anyone, even Republicans, we move closer to getting the best candidates elected, not only to the White House, but to congressional seats, and in local elections. I believe that by making elections tools available to anyone, we can affect the course of democracy overseas. (I've already been talking with people in London, Austria and Hungry about using open source election tools). To the extent that these tools can be made available internationally to developing democracies, we enable the democratic process so that there are greater chances of political change happening non-violently.

One of the key aspects of the Dean campaign is that it has empowered individuals who have become disenchanted with politics to get back involved. Open Source software and Open Source politics is an important part of that empowerment.

Another person brought up the issue of intellectual property. A lot of effort has been put into Open Source licensing, and even with that there are still large battles as to who can use what software when and where. Further restrictions on the intellectual property makes these issues even more difficult and are likely to discourage programmers from around the country or around the world for volunteering their skills.

The person raising the issue went on to say: “Peer to Peer facilitates communications between individuals, but then again, how can we control or monitor each individual actions to make sure that they are beneficial or disrupting?”

Again, the less we attempt to control and monitor each individual's actions, and the easier we make it for people to connect with one another and talk about what is going on and the issues that matter to them, the more possibility for the truth to be discovered.

This brings us to an important point. Technological organization usually mirrors the organization using the technology. To bring about the social and political change that is increasingly necessary, we must move beyond organizations that broadcast information to passive voters to organizations that engage voters in the process. We must move beyond organizations based on secrecy and control to organizations based on openness and transparency.

One person wrote, “Put all of the open source material developed by Dean and send it as a gift to Rove. He simply can not use it.”

Part of the power of blogs and of many of the open source tools for elections is that they can be used to open up channels of communication and move us to a world of greater Open Source and Peer-to-Peer democracy.

Notice to Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is asking for your opinion. Go to this URL if you want to give it to him. http://www.naderexplore04.org/survey/survey_start.php

Below is what I told them (also posted to Blog for America).

See my long post at www.greaterdemocracy.org. Nadar has many good ideas for reform but he does not play well with others and he does not have a hope in hell of winning--all he can do is be a spoiler. The same is true of Al Sharpton, whom The Black Commentator believes will attract many black votes (if Dean does not make peace with Al). Now, what's the deal? Very straight forward. For 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties to be viable in America, they need a level playing field that includes an *end* to gerrymandering (all voters for any party across the state vote for representation), an end to organizational campaign contributions, voting moved to week-ends, and restoration of the League of Women voters as the debate managers, with any party having more than 5% included automatically; and the instant run-off concept at all levels. This is only ONE way to get there, and that is if the Greens, Reforms, Libertarians, Independents, and moderate Republicans (and all the new people Dean is attacting, previously "drop outs") come together to both elect Dean and elect a non-Republican majority in both Houses of Congress.

I would urge Nader to focus on electing Greens to Congress, but conceding to Democrats at the last minute if there is the slightest chance of letting a Republican get elected.

One other thing: America is uneducated. Half of the 50% that supports Bush on Iraq and the economy will never know any better, they are zealots. The other half can be won over but we need to educate them on the real issues--the hundreds of violent conflicts all over the world, the 66 countries with millions of refugees coming our way, the 59 countries with plagues, the 33 countries with massive famine, the 18 active genocide campaigns going on right now--most of you working for Nader probably have no idea either. This is the kind of stuff we have to get to every conscious American, because the Republicans are going to play the Hitler game--big lies, repeated often.

Nader can be a king-maker, and in being a king-maker, he can not only set the stage for his becoming Attorney General and getting us back on track, he can set the stage for *demanding* from Dean the advance announcement of the Dean Cabinet, including Nader for Attorney General, prior to Election Day.

We can win. We need Nader, but we need Nader in support, not as a spoiler. God Bless Ralph Nader for his very long and good fight (see my Amazon review of his book)--now he needs to get over being a crusader, and think strategically. We cannot take the Senate without Ralph Nader coming on strong, but cooperative.

Best wishes, Robert David Steele, a moderate Republican for Dean.

Creating a Coalition for Victory

Why Dean Can't Win On His Own.....

I support Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun, and Dennis Kucinich because each in their own way represent the future....a future in which truth trumps money and Americans are smart enough to understand that the big divide is between wage-earners ("us") and carpetbagging corporate cronies ("them"). Everything else--race, gender, education--everything else--pales in comparison to the stark reality that the bulk of the wealth is concentrated in a few hands, and the national security budget as well as the various subsidies in the other parts of the budget are largely a means of transferring wealth from the income-tax-paying individual, to the offshore non-income-tax paying corporations of America.

This is what The Black Commentator had to say today about Al Sharpton's role, with some implicit concerns that Dean and his senior staff just don't get it (I told them months ago they needed to respect Al Sharpton as the new voice of black America):

Howard Dean’s December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. ... Howard Dean has taken history in his hands by hitching his ascendant campaign to a straightforward, anti-corporate message that does not pander to white racism. ... Where does this leave Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich? Exactly as they are, preaching the same social democratic, anti-racist, pro-peace message as before, for as long as their energies can sustain them. Dean’s political leap would not have been possible in the absence of Sharpton’s energetic Black candidacy and Kucinich’s principled, progressive white voice from the Left. ... Sharpton’s singular mission remains the same as when he first declared for the presidency: to present himself as the Black candidate.

Carol Moseley Braun is in my view more the voice of reasonable women than she is the voice of black America. This is an elegant lady, a very talented elegant lady, and I can think of no one else I would rather see represent the mature concerns of women across America, not only now, but in a future Cabinet.

Dennis Kucinich, in my view, is the ultimate honest man. Dean can learn from him. The way Kucinich man-handled and slapped down Ted Koppel did my heart good. These media people are corrupt at the financial level (turning down fully-funded anti-war advertisements and programs) and mediocre poorly educated entertainers at the moderator level (PBS excepted).

The other Democratic candidates, less Wes Clark, all have something to offer. Clark won't fly because he ordered the British to fire on the Russians, an incredibly stupid thing to do, and folks just do not yet realize just how blunt all of America's retired generals are going to get if Clark actually starts attracting serious attention. There is only one general in America qualified to be Dean's running mate or senior advisor on national security, and his name is Tony Zinni. General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command.

Edwards is young and shows promise. He'll have his day. For now he needs to be won over so the rules of the game can be reformed and he can be assured of a future run that is honest. Graham is much older, and mature enough to see the value of getting the intelligence czar position as a final major contribution to America's security and prosperity. Lieberman will make a fine majority leader in the Senate, and Gephard of the House. Kerry is, unfortunately, odd man out. He is a sound man with good instincts who is too easily made fun of. He should become an eminence gris, joining Al Gore and perhaps Sam Nunn is the background. However, if Howard Dean continues to screw up policy and outreach so badly, then a Kerry-Sharpton ticket, as much baggage as Al has, would be my favored pairing.

Now, as I see it, there are three things that need to happen if Dean is to win both the Democratic nomination and the general election.

#1. He has got to get his policy act together in a manner that integrates the legitimate concerns of each of the other candidates, but especially Sharpton, Moseley Braun, and Kucinich. At the same time, he must build a policy architecture that will migrate smoothly into the general election, where moderate Republicans and Independents will join with Greens, Reforms, Libertarians, and None of the Aboves (all the wonderful young Deaniacs new to the process, energized by Dean).

#2. He has got to get his outreach act together, and by this I mean the ardious discreet process of starting to cut deals now that will neutralize the Nader effect (and the Sharpton effect) of too many people voting for third and fourth party candidates even if this means Dean as a democratic candidate will lose to a Republican candidate that is not only going to buy as many votes as possible, but also steal as many votes as possible. The electronic voting machines controlled by a friend of the incumbent are a national nightmare waiting to happen. Dean has to get a grip on the larger population such that there are riots in the streets the day after Election Day, if we are robbed again.

#3. This is more subtle. As part of both policy and outreach, Dean needs to get the left leaning side of the Democratic Party--the feminists, the tree huggers, the labor radicals--to agree to go into low profile mode immediately after the Democratic nomination. The Republican Party (now hijacked by extremists) has already started to fund "the big lie" about Howard Dean--that he is a leftist. Nothing could be further from the truth, but if Dean does not get a grip on the left side of the big tent, and get their full cooperation in not scaring off the moderate right at crunch time, the extremist Republicans may succeed in lying their way into the White House for a second term.

All three of the above require that non-Democratic voters be persuaded that this once they have to vote as a block, for Dean, for reform. We have one shot at taking back the power, and it is at risk to a combination of Republican extremist lies about Dean, and selfish short-sighted "vote my conscience" acts such as destroyed Gore by way of Nader.

Below is the essence of a paper I wrote long ago, on the reforms that are needed if we are to have a promising future in America. Now here is the key part: unless Dean can win over and run with the support of not two, not three, not four, but FIVE political groups or more, we will not get the Democratic majorities on the Hill, and Dean will not be able to deliver what I view as the ultimate promise to America: to restore the rules of the road for honest elections that are open to fourth and fifth parties, and that permit every American's vote to count, and every American to be represented in Congress and within the Cabinet by devising a new balance of power that gives proporational representations to the Independents, Greens, Reforms, and Libertarians, and that perhaps splits the Republicans into two parties: Fiscal Conservatives, and Neo-Nazi Nuts & Crooks.

I'm going to vote for Dean, in both the Virginia primary and--if he makes it--in the general election. Right now, I am not feeling comfortable with where Dean or his staff are on the substance of governance, of policy, and of reform where it matters: reform of how America manages all aspects of representation.

Citizen in Search of a Leader: What I Want

Robert David Steele
Bear@oss.net

Summary of Qualifications

America needs a leader that is balanced, thoughtful, integrative, supportive of dissent and debate, and above all, educated enough to craft a national strategy for security and prosperity that will stand the test of time. I want a leader who is at least as committed to the future of my children as to the passing security and prosperity of the moment. Individuals obsessing on being elected or re-elected need not apply.

In my view as a citizen, there are four areas where the right individual, as a team builder rather than a personal icon, could help America restore its balance. These four areas are: 1) electoral reform, 2) intelligence reform, 3) global issues & national security reform, and 4) governance reform inclusive of corporate ethics and accountability. I would sum up the objective of all four reform initiatives with the phrase: “Creating a Smart Nation, Of, By, and For the People.”

I take it as a given that no election that limits itself to Republican and Democratic candidates, and their die-hard voters, will achieve the outcome I seek. We must engage the vast majority of Americans who are Independent, Green, Reform, Libertarian, or dropped out, and we must help the people take back the power while creating a new form of participatory democracy that cannot be hijacked by elitist power brokers who manipulate government to serve their own ends.

Common Sense Guide to Big Issues

Electoral Reform—Restoring the People as Owners of Democracy

We own this country; the hired hands will run it into the ground if we don’t stay on top of them.

Electoral reform has not been articulated in a broad enough manner. Ralph Nader has correctly identified many of its elements, but is not willing to build the non-partisan coalition to make it happen. This is what I want as soon as possible, beginning with a candidate and team committed to these objectives:

1) Change law to do voting on week-ends (with Sundays for Orthodox Jews);

2) Restore League of Women Voters as the presidential debate manager, and open the debates to third, fourth, and fifth parties.

3) Announce non-partisan Cabinet in advance of election and in time to enable the League of Women voters to change the voter evaluation paradigm by interspersing Cabinet candidate debates with Presidential and Vice Presidential debates.

4) Implement the “instant run-off” concept, where the first choice counts toward future Federal funding for minority or losing parties, but the second choice, if first choice does not win, counts toward the election of a winner elected by a majority.

5) End physical gerrymandering, and move instead toward virtual representation in which citizens can self-identify as belonging to a specific party, and then vote for Governors, Congress, and other key positions as a member of that virtual community within each state—this will achieve true representation; and

6) End corporate and association contributions to political candidates—simply make them illegal, while doubling salaries of elected officials over ten years, coincident with a push for major increases in salaries for those engaged in homeland nation-building—teachers, cops, firemen, and public health professionals.

Intelligence Reform—Global Understanding, State & Local Security

“Nothing in the existing or planned Federal budget makes America any safer!

When both the incumbent President and the incumbent Director of Central Intelligence persist in telling America that 9-11 was not an intelligence failure, they demonstrate nothing more than their ignorance and their lack of respect for the common sense of the people. Below are specific intelligence reforms I want to see championed by a candidate and team of substance, because how America understands the rest of the world and its dangers really matters to the future security and prosperity for many generations:

1) National Security Act of 2005. Will provide for the revitalization of national intelligence and counterintelligence in the context of a “Smart Nation” in which every element of government—non-secret as well as secret—is wired together so we can collect the dots, connect the dots, and never again drop the ball. Within this Act should be the following specific reforms:

a) Restructuring of the Presidential staff to create four Director-Generals for Policy, Strategy, Intelligence, and Research. America has no serious strategy for its future, intelligence is not impacting on policy or strategy, and government research (as well as taxation policies) are retarding rather than advancing the private sector’s ability to be innovative.

b) Creation of a consolidated National Foreign Intelligence Program that gives the Director-General for Intelligence control over the three technical intelligence agencies now within the defense department, while earmarking 50% of the program in peace, 85% in war, for defense needs.

c) Elevation of the National Intelligence Council to the Office of the President, where it can do a better job of harnessing the distributed intelligence of the entire Nation, while also working more closely with the Cabinet departments.

d) Establishment of the Global Knowledge Foundation, a $1.5 billion a year “.org” dedicated to helping all elements of the government as well as the private sector gain better access to open sources of information in all languages of the world—80% of what we need for 5% of the cost of secrets. Includes creation of a “virtual national intelligence community” of leading experts on everything who do not want top secret clearances, and Digital Marshall Plan for Third World.

e) National Analysis Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the Central Intelligence Agency toward strategic analysis, while restoring the responsibilities and capabilities of the individual Cabinet departments to do coherent strategic and tactical intelligence analysis.

f) National Processing Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the National Security Agency to leverage its extraordinary capabilities in processing, such that it can “make sense” of all non-secret as well as secret information needed to keep America safe while improving government decision-support over-all (e.g. visualization of complex non-secret databases).

g) National Collection Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the National Reconnaissance Office to become an “all-source” technical collection agency able to both create multiple forms of technical collection platforms, while avoiding competition among different “pipes.”

h) Clandestine Service Agency. Coincident with a gradual decommissioning of the existing clandestine service that is not clandestine at all, create a completely new but very narrowly-focused capability for in extremis requirements that is characterized by very deep non-official cover, multi-national career personnel, and the ability to manage both unilateral and multi-lateral clandestine penetrations of both state and non-state actors threatening the Nation.

i) Homeland Security Intelligence Program. Redirect 20% of the existing $38 billion per year from wasteful earmarked expenditures on emergency responder and “hard-wired” counter-terrorism capabilities that are not agile, toward the establishment of state & local Community Intelligence Centers and networks—we must teach our localities to fish for sharks, don’t try to fish for them.

Global Issues & National Security Reform—Revitalizing Soft Power

“The world is on fire, but we can put this fire out!

America leans toward isolationist and what I call “false neutral” positions. In a world at war with itself there are no neutral positions—only victims, if not today, then tomorrow. We need a candidate and team that can help America to properly interpret 9-11 as the early warning of global chaos, and terrorism as the least of our problems. There are 23 conflicts between countries killing 1000 or more a year; 79 conflicts between states killing less than 1000 a year; and 175 violent internal political conflicts within states. The world is at war and no one at home realizes the threat this implies for America’s future. At the same time there are 32 complex emergencies—failed states—today; there are 66 countries with millions of displaced persons and refugees; 33 countries suffering famine and starvation; 59 countries and rising with plagues and epidemics. There are 18 genocide campaigns going on, today; child soldiers are killing and being killed in 41 countries; corruption is common in 80 countries, and censorship in 62 countries.

This is the real world and it is a world that the two mainstream parties and their corporate paymasters are ignoring because they travel first class and can make their money from the safety of their gated communities. America spends over $500B a year on a “heavy metal” military that is useless 90% of the time, at the same time that we underfund special operations and low intensity conflict forces, underfund diplomacy, overt intelligence, and economic assistance, underfund education at home and abroad, ignore public health, and ignore public safety around the world, allowing warlords and crime kingpins a free run. This has to stop but it will not stop unless America finds a leader of gravitas who is truly representative of both our values, and the power of our budget if spend wisely. This new national security strategy could be called “1+iii” and could, within the $500 billion a year now being spent (greater than what the next 20 nations, including Russia and China, spend together), redirect funds as follows:

1) Big War. Fence at $250 billion a year, fully 50% of the national security budget. Designed to be able to take on the Russians and the Chinese simultaneously, inclusive of strategic nuclear forces, a 12 division-wing-carrier battle group team, and reserve-reinforcement bridges to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Protected from small war or other distractions, focuses on being ready for catastrophic confrontation at all times.

2) Small War. Increase from $20 billion to $75 billion a year, 15% of the national security budget. Continues the elevation of the U.S. Special Operations Command as a global operational force, but introduces constabulary-gendarme forces that can impose order within failed states while providing police, medical, and other critical public services needed in the transition back to local control and security. Creates a new “ground truth” force that provides each regional theater with a battalion of foreign area officers skilled in foreign languages and cultural understanding. Creates a new national foreign area and foreign language reserve of both citizens and immigrants who provide peacetime translation services for intelligence, and wartime translation through 24/7 video cell-phone connections to units in the field.

3) Peace Force. Increase from $20 billion to $100 billion a year, 20% of the national security budget. Dramatically restores the competency and global presence of the Department of State; reinstates the independence of the U.S. Information Agency, doubling the latter. Increases the Peace Corps and the Agency for International Development, with a special emphasis on water and food security as well as public health. Creates a new fund for economic assistance to individual entrepreneurs (micro-lending) and a new fund for environmental sustainability, as well as an international peace reserve (part of a national security education initiative) of language-qualified citizens ready to engage in short and mid-term sustainability and stability projects at entry-level, mid-career, and in retirement.

4) Home Force. Increase from $38 billion (was $16 billion) to $75 billion a year, 15% of the national security budget. This investment recognizes that in the age of networked non-state actors—what Thomas Friedman from The New York Times calls “super-empowered angry men,” it is not possible to federalize security at the state & local level. Apart from the investment in a Homeland Security Intelligence Program discussed above, major investments are needed in securing our borders and ports while providing massive restoration of public health capabilities (preventive medicine and early warning of emerging infectious threats) together with new initiatives in electronic and physical infrastructure hardening and protection. In combination with the intelligence reform initiatives, this investment will also “wire” state & local governments into the global grid and help create a “Smart Nation.”

Governance Reform—Coalition Approach, State Power, More Ethics

“America can’t be governed by one man and his buddies—it takes a coalition team.

The world, and America, have gotten too complex to rely on a single President being elected, and then leaving the rest of the team up to his preferences. America needs to see a candidate for President that has both the courage and the “big tent” philosophy of non-partisan teamwork to pre-select and offer for inspection as part of their two-year campaign, a complete Cabinet. The process of devising a Coalition Cabinet should start now. A leader of a multi-party team, with a landslide popular and electoral vote behind them, should be able to carry out this comprehensive reform agenda that puts the power back in the people, and common sense back into a down-sized government.

Emphasizing the need to use federal funding to empower state & local governments with respect to intelligence & counterintelligence could also set the stage for proposing new national initiatives for elementary and secondary education as well as public health across America. Thomas Jefferson said “A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.” The people of this Nation are its seed corn, and we must tend these fields. Every American should receive the same high-quality education, regardless of the prevailing real estate values that now fund vastly disparate levels of education. At the same time, some form of universal health insurance is needed, not only to cover the uninsured, but also to liberate America’s workers from their dependence on corporate health plans that constrain job mobility and innovation. Finally, we must dramatically re-invigorate our preventive medicine and public health programs to lower the costs to the taxpayer and our families of disease—including animal-borne epidemics—that could have been prevented in the first place.

At the same time, we need a candidate who is very strong on ethics—America suffers when their leadership is perceived by both the people and the international public as being “in the pockets of” big oil or big pharmaceutical companies, or other special interests. The right candidate, with a proven mind of their own, can make the economic case for ethics. A Nobel Prize was awarded for a demonstration that trust lowers the cost of doing business. Ethics is pro-business and pro-consumer at the same time.

Finally, we need a candidate and a team that can change the paradigm of the Presidency—our new President should plan to spend more time on “Seventh Generation” challenges that bear directly on the future of the entire world as well as the future security and prosperity of America seven generations out, and less time on top-level day to day Executive matters. The new Vice President should spend two thirds of their time actually managing the government, and one third training to be President in the future.

All this puts power back in the hands of the people, while tackling the tough issues head on.

Policy and the Dean Campaign

Last week, Robert David Steele wrote a Citizen's Open Letter to Dr. Howard Dean. There has been a fairly well thought out and lively discussion about this in the comment section. In addition, several people have commented to me about it via email. I have sent them my responses. Some have suggested that a more widely distributed and more formal version of my response would be appropriate.

Mr. Steele has written a letter that criticizes the campaign in a way that many people disagree with. I, too, disagree with the general tone of the letter, and with specific points. However, I feel that there are some important points concerning the policy making process that need to be addressed in his letter and I feel that we can learn more about how we can all help the campaign by reflecting on the letter and the discussion surrounding it.

Mr. Steele, and I believe many of the people very involved with Greater Democracy, are coming from a different part of the political spectrum than I, or many of the people that are getting enthused and involved in politics because of the Howard Dean campaign are coming from.

Many would portray this as the classic battle between the traditionally organized Washington insiders, and the grassroots organized common people outside of Washington. I'm not sure if Mr. Steele would completely agree with this characterization, however, and I don't completely buy it myself.

Mr. Steele writes, "A number of us, ranging from moderate Republicans to Progressives of all types, and including authors of seminal works across all policy areas from health and education to national security and intelligence, have been seeking to “connect” to your staff, both on the outreach side and on the policy side. We have failed."

I believe that some of his failure to connect with staff in Burlington is the reason that so many of his comments don't match the experiences of so many of us who are highly involved.

His first point about reinforcing staff with adult volunteers is very poorly worded. It overlooks many people, like myself and many of my friends, who have been reinforcing staff for many months. I think the addition of the word 'adult' comes across as an insult to the great college kids and young professionals who are doing so much to help the campaign.

His third point about the campaign failing to embrace non-democrats for Open Primaries is in marked contrast to my experiences in Connecticut. We have done a great job in reaching out to non-democrats, and we don't even have an Open Primary. December 2 was the last day that Republicans, Greens, and members of other parties could change party affiliations in time to vote in the Connecticut Primary. We sent a mass mailing to all Connecticut supporters urging them and their friends to change party affiliations. We had great letters published in the local papers.

The most powerful letter, in my opinion, was Joan Hull Turner's letter to the Greenwich Newspapers. Her great-grandfather, General John Charles Fremont, ran as the first presidential of the Republican Party. At the urging of Dean volunteers in Connecticut, she wrote an incredible letter talking about how the party has deserted her and how she changed her party registration.

The Meetups that I run are full of Republicans, Greens and unaffiliated voters that have joined the Dean campaign.

His conclusion, starting off with a phrase like "You and your staff have wasted 4-6 months " rings untrue in the ears of many involved with the campaign. It is unfortunate that he wrote his message that way, since it will cause his message to be taken less seriously than it should be. Anyone who has watched what has gone on over the past six months would call it anything but a waste.

Nonetheless, over the past 4-6 months, not enough has been done to empower and engage people interested in policy discussions. I think anyone with interests in policy is likely to agree with that reformulation.

I also disagree with his assessment at the bottom concerning how the campaign deals with ‘bad news’. My experience with the campaign is that its attitude towards 'bad news' is
d. Encourages debate about the news (33.8%)

Mr. Steele’s letter, the comments on Greater Democracy, the many emails I have received and responded to and this response are all part of this debate.

As to the campaign response to a potential for structured change in the industry? From my experience, the campaign is at
f. Company is very proactive (4.7%).

The campaign is driving structural change in the industry. It is telling people, go out and do it. It is allowing individuals to take up the baton and make the changes without needing permission, guidance or even interaction from upper management.

If Mr. Steele wants to get a bunch of volunteers together to discuss security policy, he should do it. If he does something good, it will get noticed. That, I believe has been the premise behind Dean Issues Forum, and perhaps Mr. Steele should join Dean Issues Forum and get all of his friends to do so. If he and his friends put together some well thought out policy positions that the Dean Campaign needs to consider, I believe the campaign will pay close attention.

I say this, because I believe that people highly involved with the campaign understand the importance of policy, even if we look at it from different perspectives. When I run a Meetup, or pass out flyers at a State Fair, people want to find out Dr. Dean’s positions. As an active volunteer, I want to know these positions well so I can discuss them intelligently with people who have questions.

There are others, great thinkers who can contribute a lot to the policy discussion. Some are authors of seminal works as Mr. Steele writes about. Others are people who have been very involved in where the policy meets the road as we work in business, industry, health care, the military and so on.

Independent of how Mr. Steele has raised the issue, his points are important. When I was up in Burlington for the signing of the declaration of independence from special interests, several of us grassroots leaders brought up the concern of lack of connection with people working in policy.

Mr. Steele’s point about getting volunteers to reinforce policy staff, while perhaps not worded in a way to make it most likely to be heard, is also important. I would have liked to hear him ask the campaign to empower individuals with great policy knowledge to help in this area of the campaign.

So, with regards to how policy is handled, there are important criticisms. Mr. Steel may not have presented them as effectively as possible, and to many they may come across as a battle between bitter insiders who have been left out and outsiders who are changing politics. They may come across as part of the battle between those who feel the power to go out and just do it, and those who need (in my opinion) excessive organizational structure.

This leads me to thinking about what can learn from this discussion in the context of recent events.

Yesterday, Vice President Al Gore endorsed Governor Howard Dean. The pundits are talking about this being an interesting joining of the outsiders and the insiders. Governor Dean has repeatedly spoken about this being a campaign to unite people, and not divide them.

“I am tired of being divided by race, sexual orientation, …” he is quoted as saying. I am also tired of divisions between Washington insiders and grassroots outsiders. I am tired of divisions between organizers and policy-oriented people.

This campaign is big enough for all of us. It is big enough for people like Patty, Lori, Suresh, myself and thousands of others on the ground discussing issues with other individuals at Meetups, at State fairs and in dining rooms. It is big enough for people like Jock, Michael and Robert to bring their expertise. It is big enough for people like Bob and Jon to provide new forums for such discussions and interactions.

We have the power! We can do better than this!

Review of Dean's Book Revised

You have all beat me into submission. Here is the revised review of Dean's book as it now shows at Amazon.com:

I was one of the first "substance experts" to believe that Dean could and should be President, and I remain convinced that he is the only Democrat that can beat George Bush.

This is a great book for the masses who want the stump speech in a very easy to read doubled-spaced form. Unfortunately, it reflects zero understanding of the real world (see my 400+ reviews of non-fiction national security books at Amazon) and it reflects zero understanding of the core issues that need to be dealt with in the US economy (see my review posted today of Robert Rubin's "In An Uncertain World").

I still believe in Dean, but if he does not get his policy and outreach acts together at the substantive level, then Kerry-Graham will be the more attractive slate to me. Dean and his campaign manager are giving policy substance short-shrift, and this is important *not* because of the details, but because it must be the foundation for creating a coalition government that integrates Independents, moderate Republicans, Greens, Reforms, Libertarians, and "Drop-Outs" (where Dean is doing magnificently) into a united electorate that will a) work together in the open and modified primaries to overcome the Democratic Leadership Council bias in favor of beltway "suits" and b) work together in the general election to defeat the well-fended and often illegal endeavors of the Republican extremists, who are *not* playing by the rules and who believe they have a God-given right to steal the 2004 election just as they stole the 2000 election.

Dean can win, but he is going into the backstretch weakened by campaign over-confidence and disdain for policy and structured outreach to non-Democrats.

This is a fine book for those who want a quick "read" on Dean as a man and potential leader. It does *not* fill the bill for a serious book about integrated policy issues and an executable sustainable budget that addresses the needs of the vast majority of Americans who are not represented by the incumbent President, nor for that matter by the incumbent Democratic and Republican Senators and Representatives that have chosen to give the incumbent President a blank check for over-turning 50 years progress in multilateral global security, environmental and labor protection, public health and education, and civil rights.

Dean has his heart in the right place, and this book documents that. Now we need to read about where his head is at, and that will take another book entirely.

Review of Dean's Book

This is a copy of a review just posted to Amazon.com, of Howard Dean's "Winning Back America" (Simon & Schuster, 2003), 179 pp.

I was one of the first "substance experts" to believe that Dean could and should be President, and I remain convinced that he is the only Democrat that can beat George Bush. However, this light little book misrepresents Dean as being possibly as shallow as the incumbent, and will be appealing only to those who a) are not interested in substance and b) are for Dean regardless of his substantive positions.

It took me less than ten minutes to "read" this book, ...

which is double-spaced and has chapters that lean toward five pages each (double-spaced). It is a lovely life story, it is inspiring in the sense of being a replay of his stump speech that captures some of his core principles (inclusiveness, take back the power, etcetera).

Unfortunately, it reflects zero understanding of the real world (see my 400+ reviews of non-fiction national security books at Amazon) and it reflects zero understanding of the core issues that need to be dealt with in the US economy (see my review posted today of Robert Rubin's "In An Uncertain World").

I still believe in Dean, but if he does not get his policy and outreach acts together at the substantive level, then Kerry-Graham will be the more attractive slate to me. Dean and his campaign manager are giving policy substance short-shrift, and this is important *not* because of the details, but because it must be the foundation for creating a coalition government that integrates Independents, moderate Republicans, Greens, Reforms, Libertarians, and "Drop-Outs" (where Dean is doing magnificently) into a united electorate that will a) work together in the open and modified primaries to overcome the Democratic Leadership Council bias in favor of beltway "suits" and b) work together in the general election to defeat the well-fended and often illegal endeavors of the Republican extremists, who are *not* playing by the rules and who believe they have a God-given right to steal the 2004 election just as they stole the 2000 election.

Dean can win, but he is going into the backstretch weakened by campaign over-confidence and disdain for policy and structured outreach to non-Democrats. If this book is any indicator, Dean is a 50-50 shot instead of the 70-30 shot he should be.

Citizen's Open Letter to Dr. Howard Dean

3 December 2003

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CHALLENGER, DR. HOWARD DEAN

Dear Dr. Dean,

It is with grave concern that I watch your staff begin to turn a come-from-behind grassroots endeavor into a potentially catastrophic losing campaign. If your latest “lecture” to the President on national security is the best you can come up with, and you continue to fail to present a vision and a strategy that is coherent across all policy areas, then you are destined to fulfill the expectations of the Democratic Leadership and Bill Clinton—you will crash and burn.

A number of us, ranging from moderate Republicans to Progressives of all types, and including authors of seminal works across all policy areas from health and education to national security and intelligence, have been seeking to “connect” to your staff, both on the outreach side and on the policy side. We have failed. As best I can tell, I am the only one remaining loyal to you. The others have connected to Clark, to Kerry, and to Edwards, all for the simple reason that your staff has shut the doors, is over-whelmed, and appears unable to grow into its responsibilities for the home stretch. Your people are believing their own press, and failing to detect and advise you on all of the clearly visible early warning signs that your campaign is running on style, not substance. You are not ready for the back-stretch run to the nomination, even less so for the final win. The only thing you have going for you at this point is that the other Democratic candidates are lesser men with lesser staffs. You’re not up to beating Bush and his staff as things now stand.

I have the following specific suggestions for your campaign, all devised with inputs from others, but now coming from me alone—the others who wanted to help you have given up.

a. Reinforce Staff with Volunteer Adults. The staff is nowhere near being at a White House 24/7 level of attention and rapid response. An influx of either “Marines for Dean” or a small number of volunteer adults (not interns) would help stabilize and extend staff reach. Your staff is literally pissing off and turning away substantive contributors of ideas and votes because they either think they don’t need them, or don’t have time to deal with them.

b. Focus on Redefining the Progressive Middle. I introduced to the senior staff Dr. Paul Ray, co-author of the seminal book on The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (and gave them, with his permission, a copy of his brilliant 21-page paper on “The New Political Compass: The New Progressives are in Front, Deep Green, Against Big Business and Globalization, and Beyond Left vs. Right”), and we also carried out a short integrative analysis of Michael Weiss’s facts and figures as published in The Clustering of America. Both of these show that you should not over-do your appeal to the liberal minority, but should stay strictly in the middle and if anything lean toward conservative values including family values and fiscal conservatism. You should of course ignore the fools who consider you too liberal to win the general election. As best I can tell, your senior staff, both outreach and policy, have refused to consider these ideas or make even the most cursory call to these two brilliant authors and mappers of the American political-economic landscape.

c. Embrace Non-Democrats for Open Primaries. Your senior staff is deliberately avoiding engagement with non-Democrats until after winning the Democratic nomination. I believe this is a major strategic error, both because of the number of open and modified open primaries where non-Democrats can make a difference, and because ultimately the winning message must be national rather than partisan. As part of this several of us have recommended that they begin to discuss with Independents, moderate Republicans, Greens, Reforms, and Libertarians, what a future coalition cabinet and coalition government might look like. My four-page listing of reforms that you could be addressing in your speeches, electoral reforms, intelligence reforms, national security reforms, and governance reforms, has been ignored. So also the capstone idea of beginning now to define a Coalition Cabinet that would assure you of an overwhelming majority in the general election, which could begin to garner general election votes from non-Democratic voters now, both for your own election and for a Democratic majority in Congress.

d. Focus on Recruiting/Neutralizing Other Candidates. Early on I recommended a deliberate focus on identifying what the other candidates might want in return for supporting Dean (e.g. Senator Bob Graham would appreciate being the intelligence czar and mentoring a National Security Act to reform intelligence and counterintelligence), and on hiring those of their staff that came on the market (e.g. Graham’s staff, and those fired by Kerry and Clark). I identified very specific people recently departed from those campaigns that could have been recruited into a small action arm, and was ignored, so you now have a very marginal appreciation for both the current mistakes and planned mistakes of your opponents.

e. Dramatically Expand Outreach through Big Idea Authors. I am the #1 reviewer of national security books at Amazon (#55 over-all), and have for over fifteen years sponsored a Global Information Forum that puts world-class authors before intelligence professionals from over 40 governments. The campaign has been very slow and ineffective in acting on my introductions to Jonathan Schell (Unconquerable World), Matthew Miller (2% Solution), and many others. Even with William Greider (Soul of Capitalism), your staff limited itself to getting him to write a silly letter on why he endorses you, rather than to help you by writing letters to every labor and environmental group Greider interacted with in the course of writing the book. Your staff is confusing a surge of Internet sign-ups (the vast majority of whom do not contribute funds to your campaign) with substance. They are not yet organized to do what I have pioneered over the past ten years, which is to “harness the distributed intelligence of the Nation.” At this point you need ideas distilled into policy appreciations more than you need votes. Your staff is blowing this one big time, in part, I believe, because you personally, and your most senior staff, are not paying attention to the urgency of integrating long-term general election policy and outreach strategy.

f. Post One-Page Policy Papers as Living Documents for Interaction. The policy staff appears to have just two full-time people and one part-time person. They are focused on sound-bites “at the 50,000 foot level” rather than concise one-page policy papers that have substance that can be debated and refined as part of engaging America in the substance of your campaign. They have been very slow to use the Internet to harness ideas and inputs. I had hopes for them, until this last speech of yours where you threw out some school-kid garbage on national security. Simply not serious. My Thanksgiving Message has as much substance as you need right now to get a serious policy round-table going, but neither you nor your staff seem willing to invest in policy at this point. I would point you to the Clinton example, where he took a full day off to meet with heavy-weights, at an early stage in his campaign, to get the details right. You need to do that in four areas: domestic social policy; domestic economic policy; foreign relations; and national security. You are going to be increasingly embarrassed and made to look like the neophyte that you are if you don’t get your policy and outreach acts together, simultaneously, right now and before 1 January 2004. Note: yesterday the Washington Post quoted Joe Trippi as being highly derogatory about policy issues and staff in general. While he is correct to be skeptical of the beltway crowd, he is seriously remiss in not giving you a coherent policy architecture that can begin the process of uniting all Americans less the extremist Republicans. There are, for example, 1400 professors of Middle Eastern policy across this land, and nothing you are doing is getting them engaged.

g. Promulgate a Nation-Wide National Security or Policy Briefing. Your staff appears paralyzed when it comes to contemplating 500 “Johnny Appleseeds”, 10 per state, each taking a strong national security message across the land. We have such a briefing in draft form for national security, and it could be easily augmented with a companion briefing on domestic policy. I am just now reading Rubin’s book, and the message from that book that I will highlight in my Amazon review is this: you cannot do good policy without first educating the American people. Senator David Boren and Mr. David Broder understand this, your staff does not.

Conclusion. You and your staff have wasted 4-6 months during which all of these could have been moving forward. You’ve clearly had priorities where you have been focused and been successful, e.g. Internet fund-raising and selective labor endorsements, but on balance I (and those who have abandoned you for others) believe that you will waste December as well unless you personally call for a “safety day” and bring a few of us iconoclasts up to Burlington to discuss these seven specific contributors to a “margin for victory”. I respect Gephardt and Kerry, but only you can win without the burden of corporate political contributions, only you can win with an open mind, an open agenda, and a popular mandate for change. Right now, your staff has a closed mind and a closed door, is handicapped by the physics of the 24 hour day, and it’s shortcomings could just cost you both the primaries and the general election.

Let me know if I can be heard by you. A number of us can help you and your staff get to the next level, but only if you are willing to listen, to reinforce your staff, and to think coherently about policy in an integrated fashion that draws on the full knowledge of the Nation, not just a few pals of pals. I specifically and respectfully caution you against allowing Clinton national security failures (the most senior ones, Joe Nye excepted) from being part of your advisory group—they represent the opposite extreme to what we have now in Bush. You need to define your own middle ground in national security, while also drawing on the best of the Clinton team for economic successes—e.g. Rubin. Bush is vulnerable beyond belief on the deficit, and you are doing nothing of substance here. I am committed to your success, but I and many others of substance cannot help as your staffing situation now stands.

Sincerely yours,
Robert David Steele
Citizen

FYI, the following are typical management failures listed in the best book on business intelligence Early Warning by Ben Gilad of Israel, perhaps the best practitioner in this field:

Management’s typical attitude toward “bad news”?
a. Does not want to know and will potentially punish the messenger (2.2%)
b. Denies it as poorly thought-out or presented (13.2%)
c. Says it knows it already and does nothing (27.2%)
d. Encourages debate about the news (33.8%)
e. Encourages fast delivery and distribution of the news (23.5%)

Your staff is between b and c.

Management’s typical response to a potential for structured change in the industry?
a. Will discuss it with outside consultants only (8.1%)
b. Embodiment of “paralysis by analysis”—everyone takes part in the debate (19.6%)
c. Issues will disappear into a “black hole”—no discussion, no action until crisis (16.2%)
d. Management will react but slowly and almost always late (38.5%)
e. Management has method of “forcing quick action” in the company (12.8%)
f. Company is very proactive (4.7%).

Your staff is solidly at c.

Citizen's Thanksgiving Message

A Message of Thanksgiving

Most of the Presidential challengers are alone with their families this Thanksgiving, giving thanks for our many blessings. Most are not scheduling public appearances. Still, Thanksgiving is a good time for a little reflection about where we all stand—and what the future might hold for our children and the next seven generations of Americans. I write this as a citizen, now, because I have not yet heard any single challenger put it all together. Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun, Dennis Kucinich are the only three remotely close to this vision, but even Dean, the most electable, is failing to reach out to the other candidates and to the non-Democrats who might well swing the primaries, and hence in his hubris may fall short. This message, and the attached reform agenda, are in my view, as close as anyone has come to defining what the winning challenger must stand for if we are to take back the power for the people, not only in governance, but in our commerce.

Let’s start with the myth of Thanksgiving, move to the myth of democracy, and end with a firm commitment to take back the power and restore true family values, true democracy, true morality, to the American Republic and that for which it stands.

The Thanksgiving “story” is not a true story, it is a myth. Most of the early Americans were outcasts and fugitives, the native American Indians they met were not friendly, and the genocidal war between the newcomers and the indigenous natives ultimately established the institution of slavery in America—first of Indians sold to the French and British, then of Africans kidnapped to keep this profitable trade alive after we killed off most of the Indians. We have much to atone for.

At the same time, we have much for which to give thanks, and it is this latter reason, evolving over time, which makes Thanksgiving the most important family celebration of the year. America is a rowdy, libertarian, sprawling land where every kind of person can find a niche, where there have been in the past great opportunities for everyone, regardless of their origin, their education, their race, or their religion. And yet, there is myth about democracy as well. Over a hundred years after the Civil War, over a quarter century after the enactment of civil rights legislation, the majority of our people of color remain impoverished, with many of the fathers in jail or broken from their families. Our middle class is collapsing, jobs are being exported, and the new jobs, such as they are, pay less and demand more time away from our families.

We are, today, victims of a democracy that has been hijacked by elitist politicians, Democratic as well as Republican, all in the service of those who can pay them off with campaign contributions that keep them in power, on average, longer than any Soviet Union Politburo member could hope for—a point made by Ronald Reagan when he addressed a joint session of Congress. We, the people, have lost our power through a combination of inattention and misdirection—our “consent” has been manipulated, as was the case when the incumbent and his neo-conservative cronies took us to war against Iraq on a platform of lies—over 62 documented lies, according to one web catalog. We have lost our history because our history has been constructed from lies and propaganda. Otto Reich, who today serves the incumbent President, was found guilty by the General Accounting Office, during the Reagan Administration, of master-minding “black” covert action propaganda operations against the American people. This is illegal. It continues today in many forms.

What can we do about this? I see this very clearly. John McCain was deprived of the Republican nomination by a combination of misdirected influence from the Bush family and the Republican National Committee, and misdirected wealth from those corporations and ultra-wealthy elites that understood President McCain—we should be so fortunate--would enact campaign finance reform and end the unwarranted privileges enjoyed by Enron in the past and by Haliburton and other major corporations today. The corruption and war profiteering that is going on in relation to the failed reconstruction of Iraq is funded by the individual American tax-payer, and we will continue to have our pockets picked until we make it illegal for any politician to accept any support other than their salary and designated funds from the public treasury. Challengers to the incumbent must forego public funds this time around, not because they do not believe in campaign finance reform, but because they do not believe in fighting a bully with rich friends while having both hands tied behind their back.

We the people can win. We the people will win. And on that note, I want to take just a moment to lay out some of the basic principles that I believe must guide America into the future, and which I have yet to hear any challenger articulate in a coherent and comprehensive manner. “It’s all connected.” As of today, no challenger meets this standard.

First among these are family values, inclusive democracy, the primacy of the individual, and civil rights. The challenger must be pro-life, and must respect the rights of consenting adults to find their own forms of family based on their genetic and emotional dispositions. The challenger must believe that equal opportunity means universal public health care such as is common in many of the great nations of Europe; that it means education of equal quality everywhere, not just in those neighborhoods with high property values; and that it means civil rights that cannot be overturned by incumbent regimes who have the temerity to deprive US citizens of their rights by declaring them an “enemy combatant” and locking them up secretly and without access to the due process of the law. The challenger must promise us that the most fundamental focus of their Administration, a coalition administration, will be on optimizing the security and prosperity of every American, with a special emphasis on nurturing our children and on restoring neighborhoods across America.

Second among these are national cohesion and security. There is nothing in the incumbent Administration’s budget that makes America any safer. Indeed, as four top Israeli intelligence officials recently concluded, all that Israel is doing today against the Palestinians—and by extension, all that is being done “in our name” against the Iraqis—is making us less secure. We have devalued citizenship since Viet-Nam, we have devalued morality, we have devalued civil discourse and the common courtesy that must characterize a mature democracy. We have devalued collective security in the form of voluntary labor associations able to represent the concerns and needs of the American worker against corporate managers that have, in the past twenty years, risen to new heights of corruption and insensitivity to the human dimension of capitalism. We must restore our national cohesion by restoring the participation of every citizen in the life of their nation, from the neighborhood association to the labor union to the professional associations to political activism at the county, state, and national levels. America must no longer be managed by an elite that tries to tell us what is good for us, for we have learned that this elite cannot be trusted. America must be managed by its own citizens, with representative democracy once again being held accountable by an informed and attentive population that will brook no slight of hand, no thievery, no betrayal of the public trust. We get the government we deserve, and we deserve better.

National security is vastly more complicated and nuanced than the incumbent and his neo-conservatives, most of whom have never served in uniform, can ever understand. National security in a globalized world requires a great deal more than a “heavy metal” military that can smash countries back into the Stone Age, but is incapable of nation-building—of delivering electricity, clean water, health care, or even subsistence food for the children, many of them in poor health from prior US embargoes against medicine imports.

I see national security as a four-part challenge, and am looking for a challenger that shares these specific views:

Part one is here at home. We live in a glass house and the incumbent has been busy throwing stones. He has gotten us into a hundred-year war on six fronts—in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in Colombia, in North Korea, in Africa, and in South Asia, where Indonesia and the Philippines continue to grow suicidal terrorists. We will inevitably see another 3,000 dead here in America unless we take homeland security seriously. A winning challenger will promise to invest an additional $50 billion dollars a year in homeland security, with an emphasis on creating intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities at the state & local levels, with federal funding but under the sovereignty of the individual Governors and their Mayors. This money will also go toward food and water security, toward a hardening of critical infrastructure and the end of deregulation of vital national utilities, and toward the creation of an educated citizenry that knows what to look for, who to tell, and how to “swarm” any potential attacker daring to hijack a public vehicle or seeking to destroy a public school or building.

Part two lies overseas, where instability, disease, crime, and mass migrations of millions of people have caused over 20 so-called sovereign states to fail. The incumbent Administration, and before them, the Clinton Administration, thought nothing of supporting Saudi and other dictatorships in return for cheap oil and other favors that did nothing for the people of those states, nor—in the long term—for sustainable American security and prosperity. We must focus on the stabilization of the world, or we will be faced with a massive illegal immigration problem that will make today’s illegals look like a single jaywalker. A winning challenger will promise to invest an additional $100 billion a year in diplomatic, economic, educational, and cultural outreach and assistance, in close coordination with other Western nations and with international relief organizations. Among their highest priorities must be the elimination of plagues and epidemics in the fifty plus countries where they exist today, all an airplane flight away from our homeland; the elimination of poverty and famine, and the elimination of ethnically-based crime that hits us hardest here at home. A winning challenger must also focus on water scarcity, not only in the critical Palestinian homeland and in Israel, but in our own mid-Western region as well as in China and elsewhere, where water scarcity serves as a destabilizing factor.

Part three lies in cyberspace and in the American mind. A winning challenger must agree with Senator David Boren, and with Mr. David Broder, both of whom have called for the internationalization of American education. We have, as a nation of individuals pre-occupied with our own local affairs, lost touch with reality, with the stark realities of the rest of the world. A winning challenger must promise to invest an additional $50 billion a year in two initiatives. Here at home the focus must be on revitalizing foreign language, foreign affairs, and foreign cultural studies, to include funding centers of excellence in every state that will emulate the superb capabilities that the Mormons have established in their internationally-oriented missionary studies program based primarily in the State of Utah. America has a great deal to teach the rest of the world, and a great deal to learn from the rest of the world, but only if we speak their languages, walk in their shoes, and meet them halfway. A second initiative must be a Digital Marshall Plan. A winning challenger will create an international consortium of both US and non-US cyberspace service providers, and we the American people will subsidize the extension of the Internet into every corner of the world, beginning with Africa and moving quickly to Central Asia, South Asia, and Latin America. A winning challenger will understand that the Internet, and the freedom of expression that the Internet makes possible, is the single greatest force for peace and understanding that exists today, and will want to lead America in exporting Internet services and Internet-based opportunities, while importing jobs based on our being the hub for the global network.

Part four lies in traditional military capabilities, now funded at close to $500 billion a year, counting supplementals. We cannot cut the national security budget, but we can redirect it. There is so much waste and war-profiteering and inefficiency in the US military machine that we have no alternative but to legislatively mandate national security reform. A winning challenger will agree with those who say we must be ready to fight both a major regional war and several minor conflicts simultaneously, but the challenger will also believe that the military we have today is too heavy and too inflexible to succeed, or be sustained, in the future. The Navy has too few ships that are too big. The Air Force has too few complex airplanes that need 24 hours notice to change their mission load. The Army has too few divisions too poorly trained, and incapable of capturing Bin Laden in Afghanistan, or of fighting an insurgency in Iraq. The Marine Corps and the Coast Guard are two bright lights in this constellation, and need expansion. A winning challenger will invite the distinguished Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and then Congress in general, to sit down with their team and agree on a new National Security Act that revitalizes U.S. foreign intelligence, that restructures our “big war” forces while dramatically expanding our “small war” and peacekeeping forces, and that converts our military from a big “dumb” traditional force, to a diverse “smart” unconventional force that is able to win and win fast in any clime and place. This force will be our “big stick” as the winning challenger focuses on defeating the real axis of evil, dictators, with a view to bringing legitimacy, liberty, and prosperity to the 47 countries that not free at all, and the 56 countries that are only partly free, but on their own terms, by invitation of the people, and with soft power—diplomacy, cultural outreach, education, aid—rather than hard power as our incentivizer.

The future of the Earth is in our hands, and we have to be concerned about the future of the Earth because the future of America, the future of our children and their children, is deeply entwined with the problems that exist beyond our borders. Therefore, let me conclude with a message of hope. I believe in the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I believe that America is the richest nation on Earth, and that collectively we can save the Earth by redirecting our wealth and our policies away from selfish amoral endeavors that strip foreign indigenous peasants of their rights and property, and toward diverse models of regional capitalism and democracy that honor local cultural traditions, traditions based on centuries of adaptation to the precise conditions found in each distinct region.

Now, having said all that, to provide the larger context within which America must get back on track in its relations with the rest of humanity and with the basics of life on earth, I want to stress that the winning challenger must approach all this from an “America first” perspective. It is in our best interests to stabilize the world. It is also in our best interests to avoid spending money on overseas adventures when it might be better spent on creating jobs and making homeless shelters unnecessary.

A winning challenger will be committed to collective security, collective prosperity, and to a restoration of American values here at home, from Main Street to Wall Street.

Experts have identified over $50 billion a year in export-import fraud—the over-pricing of imports and the under-pricing of exports as a form of corporate money-laundering and tax avoidance, and I believe that we can find a total of $100 billion a year in additional corporate tax revenues that can be directed toward equalizing education, funding universal health care, creating jobs with a fair wage and strong labor rights for every American (while leveling the playing field by extending labor rights to all those who make the goods we buy), and in helping every homeless person get off the streets and back on their feet. We will get corporations in America to bear their fair share of the social costs of capitalism, costs that must include provision for a healthy, educated, and happy populace. A winning challenger will be especially concerned about the many Americans that get “nickel and dimed” to death by employers that cheat them of their labor rights, forcing them into part-time or “management” positions as a means of avoiding employer responsibilities for overtime pay, health care, time off, and other basic human rights that labor unions have sought to defend. Such a challenger will promise to act in ways that make America safe in the larger global context, but will never forget that here at home, it is the average American, working hard every day to make ends meet, that is the true foundation for national security. In making America safe and prosperous at every level of society, the winning challenger will form a coalition government will inevitably ease racial, class, and ideological tensions across the land while eliminating electoral and governance shenanigans that make a mockery of both democracy and moral capitalism.

Today, Thanksgiving Day, I look for two promises to every American from a winning challenger: first, that they will announce a Coalition Cabinet in advance of Election Day, so that we might all see their firm commitment to both the restoration of true democracy and the reform of our electoral process so that third and fourth parties have a fighting chance in every election; and second, that they will strive to make America a force for peace and prosperity, instead of a force for instability and fear. America is a big complicated nation, one that has on too many occasions substituted myths for reality. We will not take back the power if we continue to believe in the myth of Democracy and elect a Bush Lite elitist, a Democrat that takes corporate money and believes in the prevailing gerrymandering and other “tricks” that are used to deprive over a third of our Americans of a fair vote or a reason to vote. We will not survive in this globalized world if we continue to export guns and violence, and to look the other way when dictators and war lords—and extremist Israelis—sponsor genocide and terror against largely defenseless minorities whose humanity is being scorned. “America the Beautiful” in the national anthem that I want to see us adopt, and I want us to restore the tarnished image of America, within our own minds as well as the minds of billions around the world who fear us. We are the land of the free, we are the land of opportunity, but only if we take back the power and demand that our government act in accordance with our values, values that include faith in God and adherence to the Golden Rule: we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. A winning challenger will bring us this vision of hope and destiny, instead of a narrower vision focused only on partisan victory.

There is absolutely no question in my mind but that we are at a decisive point in the history of this great Nation, a point as important as Independence Day, the salute by Chamberlain and the North to the South upon the conclusion of the Civil War, the end of World War I, World War II, the Cold War. How we engage in the primaries and the general election will determine the future of this country. America can give up its prospects with four more years of the unilateralist, militaristic, incumbent regime, or it can choose to live free and live in peace with the rest of mankind, by voting for a government of, by, and for the people of this great Nation.

God Bless America, and God Bless every American, who, in the aggregate, make up a population that cannot be fooled, sold, or trampled. It’s time to take back the power by supporting the challenger who best reflects the above vision of hope.

Robert David Steele
Citizen, Born in the State of New York
16 July 1952

The Margin of Victory

by Michael Cudahy

As the days grow shorter, and the nights get colder, and sleep becomes something that is measured in minutes – not in hours – it would seem that many Democrats have been forgetting the true purpose of the 2004 Presidential election.

To defeat President George W. Bush, and put an end to two decades worth of neo-conservative abuse of the American system of democracy.

These primary elections are not about inciting a new American revolution. Our system of government is too strong, and the people of this country are too wise to embark on such a potentially destructive journey.

These elections are not about "Taking America Back." It does, after all, belong to us. They are about reminding those who have so slyly exploited the system that their manipulation is no longer welcome, and will no longer be tolerated.

We do not live in Tiananmen Square. We are citizens of the United States of America. We are blessed with an eloquent set of canons drafted by gifted visionaries that begins, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union."

Somewhere along the line, as the counters on the various presidential web sites and blogs click down the days until the first meaningful votes are cast, the tone has become increasingly shrill, amongst some in the Democratic political community.

Meanwhile at The White House, Karl Rove and his campaign advisors are laughing. He is telling his friends, "I knew they'd do it, they're Democrats they just can't help it."

If we play into Rove's hands, we will have squandered a rare opportunity to reshape the face of American politics and government. And, the Democratic Party will run the risk of exiling themselves to minority party status for the next generation.

History has shown us that every presidential election has a dynamic that drives it. In my opinion, one of the defining issues that will decide this election is whether the Democratic Party is willing to embrace the hunger for change that is sweeping this nation, and welcome the millions of voters demanding that change into its ranks.

As a disenfranchised Republican who is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo, I am looking for a home. And current polling shows that 14% of registered Republicans feel as I do.

That is a potential of a minimum of 7,000,00 votes.

Millions of Independents feel the same.

It is the margin of victory.

In this primary election season 20 states will allow Republicans to crossover and vote in Democratic primaries. Another 9 states will allow Independents to vote in either primary they choose.

It would seem, however, that none of the Democratic presidential candidates have any particular interest in including those of us who do not have a (D) behind our name.

The closer we get to the primaries the more partisan these contests become. And, at a moment when innovation, integrity and intellectual audacity would be deeply welcome, we seem to be returning to the politics of the past.

If in fact the Democratic Party is to be the agent of change in next year's election, they must be willing to reach out to all of us who so desperately want to remove an administration that has abused its power, and our trust.

Democratic presidential campaigns are implementing remarkable Internet innovations. Traditional web pages are being transformed into portals of meaningful policy, and organizational dialogue – using political blogs. Vast amounts of money are being raised – most in small donations, and thousands of Americans are being drawn into the political process – many for the first time.

These web based interactive communications tools present the Democrats with the opportunity to reconfigure the landscape of American politics. They are engaging American voters in critical conversations about issues that will affect their lives, and the lives of their children. Instead of driving wedges between groups, like the Republicans have been doing for the last 25 years, they have the potential of creating a dynamic that can begin to bring people back together – in the great Democratic tradition.

To have real power and value, these conversations must be welcoming and bipartisan – not just animated voices in self-contained echo chambers.

This discourse must also contain a long term, visionary component.

We must lay the groundwork for a new approach. We have an opportunity to establish a new American politics. A chance to distinguish the third century of our republic by reviewing and restoring the visionary principles provided to us by our founding fathers two hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

This restoration must be built upon a willingness on the part of our leaders, and citizens alike, to anticipate, cooperate and innovate.

As with all opportunities, however, it will not last forever. If we observe it, but allow it to slip away, we will face a political future written in the hand of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

The choice is ours, and we must make it now.

Equally important, thousands of campaign workers must be willing to understand that political primary campaigns can be exhausting, nerve wracking crucibles that do not always end up the way they might hope.

Whether people are working for Kerry or Clark, Dean, Gephardt or Edwards, they must make a personal commitment to the fact that the prize we are all fighting for is to take back The White House, and seats in the Congress as well.

The answer is in our hands.

Can we wage a tough, honest fight and emerge united in Boston this August?

Or will we shatter the way Karl Rove is counting on, and deliver the election into the hands of George W. Bush?

I, for one, am not eager for four more years.

Discuss