Washblog

Here is one of my other state committee people, Zach Smith, making the argument for participatory democracy and party building in the Olympian article reviewing our endorsement of the primary:

(Smith) said caucuses are key to building the Democratic organization and need to be supported.

"It's where we get candidates for school board, where we get candidates for city council and for the Legislature," he said. "If it wasn't for the caucus system, where they could discuss issues and party politics face to face, we wouldn't have that tool to build representation in our government."

Karen Marchioro, former state chair, making much the same argument in an email from yesterday:

Before I became the State Party Chair I always looked with envy at Oregon’s Party.  They had voter registration by party and they had a presidential primary that restricted voters to the party of their registration.  Once I became chair I learned that it was because of this system that the Oregon parties were incurable weak.  The public’s belief that voting in the primary was all that they needed to do resulted in “drive-by participation” in politics.  And the number of names the primary generated was so large that it could not be used in any efficient manner for any political purpose.

When I became State Chair I began with no list of names (and no office for that matter, but that’s a different story).  We had no party registration (and still don’t), a blanket primary, and no presidential primary.  Using the caucuses as a Party building tool allowed us to develop one of the strongest, largest and best grassroots based Democratic Party in the country.  By the time I left office the Washington State Democratic Party had a membership list smaller than only Iowa and California (yes, even bigger than New York’s, Texas’s, Florida’s and all the rest).  And we raised more money than almost all of the other states regardless of size.  We can be proud that our Washington State Democratic Party is still considered at the D.N.C. as one of the best organized and strongest in the country.  All build on organizing the caucuses and using the information we gathered from the committed Democrats who turned out for them to build the Party.

I love caucuses for the same reasons that Zach and Karen do. I got involved in the local Democratic organization directly from my caucus when my PCO at the time signed my proxy application right there in the elementary school gym. But soon after the caucuses were finished, my zeal quickly dissipated. When I was at that first caucus, I thought being involved in the Democratic Party was great. I was grassroots, it was face-to-face, it was everything that Zach and Karen are saying. But, outside of the caucuses, there is little we do as Democrats that embrace participatory democracy.

Outside of the caucuses, we don't encourage participation. So, the party building/participatory democracy argument for me is disingenuous. If we really believed in these things as a party, we would focus more of our attention on them.

What the caucuses are really for is recruiting volunteers that we're expecting carry us through November 2008, then we have no plans on keeping them involved. After the eleciton, we don't really care what happens to these folks, if they stay engaged or not. Participatory democracy doesn't start with caucuses and end with the election, its ongoing.

If we really cared about participatory democracy and building the party beyond a mailing list, the caucuses would be the end result of a civic engagement campaign, not the beginning of a volunteer recruitment campaign. And, we would get a lot more than 2 percent turnout.