Ginning up the grassroots
By way of DNC blog Kicking Ass comes this hilarious blatant ripoff of a Dean campaign image by a conservative Republican, Bret Schundler, running for Governor in the New Jersey primary.
I’m in Missoula, Montana, on my way to the Western Region DNC confab in Helena this weekend. Up on the menu: Howard Dean and Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, as well as some interesting looking panels, including one called, “The Changing Sources of Political News,” with guest David Sorota. Here’s the preface to the agenda:
Two themes will thread through this year’s Conference exploring two principal concerns facing the Party over the next few years. One will consider how it is that Montana and other Western voters chose Democrats for state and local offices while they were voting Republican at the national level. We will hear from presenters looking at our country’s public policy debates, our Party’s responses, some good and some not, to those debates and how the voting public learns and digests all of this.
The other theme will look at a worrisome trend that threatens the orderly handing over of power from one administration to the next. We all know that the Republicans have worked to suppress voter turnout at least back to the time that Chief Justice Rehnquist got his start by intimidating Hispanics in Arizona when he was a young man. Now they are attacking the integrity of elections themselves to discourage participation at the polls. While we know about Republican tactics in Florida in 2000 and suspect skullduggery in Ohio in 2004 concrete examples of their post-election challenges, especially in the Governor’s race in Washington State, foretell convoluted and very costly confrontations in the future. Unfortunately, our state parties will have to assume most of the work and expense of thwarting the Republican plans. We will hear from people in the thick of the battle to learn something of what can go wrong in the conduct of elections, how the Republicans abuse these weaknesses in our system and what we can do about it.
I’ll be blogging the event here at the Street I’m not sure how easy it will be to get net access, but I’ll do my best.
