Some thoughts

Written by: John McBride on Sep 19, 2006 4:50 PM EDT

For the period between the election and the end of the year, it seems to me that it will depend to some extent on whether we win the house and/or the senate. But that may be just a difference in the strategy we use.

Here in NY, the leading Gov candidate is running with the tag line- Day 1 Everything Changes. Groups are lining up and gearing up to have some influence on just what those changes would be and how they might be implemented. At the federal level, the story would be pretty much the same thing.

We can get out on a single issue or perhaps a couple of them and try to push them up to the top of the agenda for Congress on day 1. I would like to call on Congress to rapidly convene hearings to develop a plan for Iraq. (In case you have not seen Harper's this month, Sen. George McGovern and his co-author have laid out a detailed plan to get out.) But there could be other issues as well that we could push.

As for the big issue which Andrew mentioned in the last call, i.e. what do we do about the '08 presidential campaigns? Here is an idea: Lets invite the leading progressive candidates, perhaps even the not so progressive ones, to Linkup meetings. More likely, it might be good to invite them to statewide DFA conventions. For us, I am thinking that we might have our DFNY convention sometime in February or March. We could make it a two day event and have two candidates come to speak and meet with leaders for an hour or so.

It seems to me that we can accomplish a few things doing this. One is that we might more quickly see if there is any consensus within DFA for just one or two candidates. If we as leaders push our people to choose early, then we have less of a problem for defection of our core people to the various campaigns. The other big advantage is that it reinforces our strength and our importance to the candidates.

If we got NY, NJ, CA, FL, TX, IL, MD, DC and more to do this, we could have a significant early impact within the grassroots community.

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