Washblog

There were brief speeches by Darcy Burner (candidate for US Congress in 8th Congressional District), Jim Dean (chair of DFA and brother of Howard Dean), and Arshad Hasan (executive director of DFA).

Attendees included several chairs of local Democratic organizations, interns and staff members working for Darcy Burner, several future candidates for office, and the usual suspects of political activists and do-gooders like me.

Darcy Burner gave the opening speech, in which she told how close the election race was for her in 2006 against Republican Dave Reichert. The southern part of the district. But there was one precinct in conservative Pierce County where Darcy won big, largely due to the efforts of one PCO, whom we all applauded at the training. The lesson: having active PCOs and an engaged, grassroots organization is really important for winning elections.

You have to raise the negatives about your opponent, emphasize the positives for your candidate, and stick to your message.

Suppose the message of your campaign is "My dog has three legs." Then when a reporter asks, "Your opponent accuses you of ignoring the security issues facing our nation. How do you respond to that?", you should say, "Thanks for asking that, but what I think is really important for the people of our district is the fact that my dog has three legs."

Obama is doing well because he sticks to the message of "change" and "hope." Republicans did well for years because they stuck to their message of "security", "low taxes," "family values", and "faith." No matter that it's all based on lies and distortion!

There was a technical but informative training session about calculating which disticts to canvass, which districts to do Get-Out-the-Vote in, and which districts to ignore -- all based on historical data about turnouts and Democratic performance.

For an angry political junkie like me, it's painful to realize that the candidate who is likable has a huge advantage even if his policies suck. I guess that's why Bush remained popular so long.

I was somewhat disillusioned by the realities of how campaigns are won.

During part of the day we had a choice of training sessions to attend. I skipped most of the training session on raising funds.

Another hard lesson that I heard was this: Impeachment is a losing issue for the Democrats. That upset me and I raised my hand and argued that the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot by letting Bush, Cheney & the Republicans off the hook.

The campaign consultant agreed wholeheartedly with my suggested cynical aphorism: hatred is more powerful than love in politics. The Democrats won in 2006 not because anyone loves the Democrats but just because they can't stand what the Republicans did to the country. Similarly, from 1996 til 2004, the Republicans won because lots of Americans were angry at Democrats, because the Repulbicans were able to trick them into thinking that Democrats were responsible for crime, pornography, secularism, and elitism.

Lynne Allen of the Darcy Burner campaign gave a training session about organizing a network Neighborhood Captains -- basically, precinct organizers who will attempt to build a long-term sense of community among Democrats and progressives. For many people the Democratic Party has a bad image. Indeed, attending a Democratic LD meeting can be pretty depressing, To change that image will involve a lot of work and a lot of new blood. It might be better to build a progressive community via auxiliary groups like DFA, MoveOn, and issue-oriented groups.

Local organizers of the event included the Darcy Burner Campaign, Eastside DFA, and Bryan Kesterson, Chair of the 47th LD Democrats.

The IBEW Union logo:

Weird union regulations. At first I thought these were jokes. But I think they're for real.