Howard Dean Meet-Up

[brdgt]

So I finally went to one of the Howard Dean Meet-ups. Johnny Two Cents wanted to see what what all the fuss was about too, so we headed to Coogan's around 7 to check it out. Besides getting some free buttons and stickers, it was a good place to get more information about volunteering. I don't think the whole "meet fellow Dean supporters" is the real strength of these things (people mostly stayed in their cliches) but the organizers gave a lot of detailed information on how to help.

I'm going to try to get the HUTCW (Harvard union) to give me ten minutes to share information about Dean :)

Plus they aired this nice little video. If you are interested they have a bunch of videos here.

While I think the Dean campaign doesn't have a strong national organizing policy, neither do a lot of the other candidates, and these Meet-ups represent a "grass-roots" indie cred kind of support. As time goes on, these people need to be organized into voter registration drives and door to door billeting.

For example: From the Howard Dean Blog: "32,044 people have now signed up for the Dean 2004 Meetups. This means that in the past 48 hours ALONE, 3,149 new people signed up. To put that in some perspective, less than 3,000 people are signed up to Meetup for Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Lieberman, and George W. Bush combined."

And a related CBS news story.

And I am so sick of this whole "unelectable" rhetoric that the DNC is throwing out there. In Massachusetts they picked O'Brien to run against Romney because they thought the other candidates were "unelectable." What happened? Romney won by a landslide because there was no real difference between the two. I bet there a lot of Democratic and Independent voters out there who just didn't vote because - whats the point, the candidates were essentially the same thing. The Republicans said that McCain was unelectable and if they had put some support behind him who knows what would have happened?

Personally I don't care about putting someone up against Bush if that means they have to be just like Bush - where is the choice in that? I want someone that is not only distinctly different from Bush, but someone who is distinctly different from the way the Democratic party has been running itself lately!

Related articles on the "electable" issue:
In Mother Jones and The Nation.

/rant.

Comments

[astronautical.livejournal.com]

I think "unelectable" is a code word for "is a loose cannon and we know we can't control him." I think McCain would have won so easily, I know a lot of central-dems would have voted for him. But he has a no-nonsense attitude and reputation for following (gasp!) his own conscience.

If Dean doesn't figure out a way to effectively use the meet-up people then he's at a huge disadvantage. The grass-roots cred is the only thing I think that's putting him up at the top right now.