Countdown to Election Day: Where I've Been / What We Need to Do / Why
There's only 7 days left... one week... somewhere between 100 and 125 working hours... very little sleep. I've been here in Seattle for nearly 5 weeks and it barely seems like the 14 days I spent in Columbus in 2004. I think that's mostly because I've spent 90% of my waking hours in this office, working at an increasingly frenetic pace, without any weekends or other events to mark the passage of time. It's been overwhelmingly great, though, much better than I had expected, and much less frustrating than I had worried it might be, given some of the more problematic aspects of the company that is running the campaign on behalf of MoveOn. Plus, the other day this dude stopped by:
Totally sweet.
The real saving grace, though, is the fact that the organizational model we're using is really quite amazing. I'm sure most of my friends have heard me rant and rave about the potential the Internet has for connecting, organizing, and mobilizing great masses of people to effect positive social and political change. Here MoveOn, itself a grassroots, bottom-controlled organization enabled by the Intarweb, has created a great framework to mobilize its 3.5 million members to put in serious work on key campaigns around the country.
So basically, I spend a lot of time doing this:
MoveOn Member (MOM): Hello?
Me: Hi, is [MOM] there?
MOM: Yeah, this is her.
Me: Hi! My name's Tim, and I'm an organizer with MoveOn.org here in Seattle. How are you today?
MOM: Good! I love MoveOn. What can I do for you?
Me: Wellll..... wanna make some phone calls?
And then when MOM comes down to the office, they do a lot of this (not pictured):
MOM #2: Hello?
In-office MOM: Hi, is [MOM #2] there?
MOM #2: Yeah, this is him.
In-office MOM: Hi! My name's [MOM], and I'm a volunteer with MoveOn.org! How are you?
MOM #2: Good... what do you need?
In-office MOM: Wellllll..... wanna make some phone calls?
And then MOM #2 sits down at his/her/per computer, calls up Callforchange.org and gets hooked up with an easy script, a list of numbers to call, and an easy system to mark their results. And then they call voters, for as long as they can stand, finding out who's going to vote Democrat in races like Washington's 8th, Iowa's 2nd, Texas' 22nd, RI-Sen, etc. They're super-easy conversations but they've helped us to build a list of solid but "unlikely" Democratic voters -- exactly the people that we need to turn out in the final weekend of the campaign.
So basically... at this point, with the help of about 100,000 volunteers around the country, we have identified more than half a million (500,000+) voters in the top 50 most competitive races -- voters who have a history of missing midterm election years like this one; voters who, if they turn out, -will- win us a working majority in Congress. Any poll of "likely voters" does not include these cats, and since most of the key races will be won or lost by less than 10,000 votes, we can turn out more than that margin and make all the difference. The only thing is, it completely and totally hinges on whether or not people step up and do the work of making phone calls.
So here I throw my offer on the table... enter my plea before the jury... whisper my demand with cautious respect: please, friends, please, make a conscious and determined effort to do something this weekend or on Election Day to help end Republican domination of our Federal Government.
Set aside your daily concerns for a brief period of time and harness this moment; use your clout to push us a little closer to justice. There is no other comparably sized political movement today working towards these ends; if you have been waiting for hope, now is the time to throw down.
I'm talking to every single person I know, regardless of political stripe, radicalism, or philosophy. If you don't agree that Dems are preferable to Republicans, or believe that their leadership can have a tangible positive effect within a system as admittedly problematic as our government -- listen, friends, I respect your skeptics, but take a look around outside your philosophical bubble for a second. There are terrible things in store for us the next 30+ years if we don't oust these corporatist villains from the controls NOW. Whatever kind of conversation, dialogue, progression we can achieve as a unified but separate whole is impossible with these villains in total control, with their stacked Supreme Court, with their inability to even consider our pressing problems, nevermind have enough imagination to build some solutions.
If you won't do it for your constitutional rights, do it for the 500,000 Iraqis who have died at our collective hands over the past 3 1/2 years. If you won't do it for them, do it for New Orleans, which badly needs a Federal Government that is an ally to its efforts to rebuild itself and not a powerful advocate for the corporate wet dream that is NOLA's gentrification. If you won't do it for New Orleans, do it for the planet which we're destroying everyday due to passively complicit government. If you won't do it for clean air and non-drowned urban areas, do it for the answers we'll get once Democrats take control of the House ethics and judiciary committees. And if you won't do it for the truth, friends, please do it for me.
We NEED to stand up together and put it all on the line. There's lots of ways to do it, but this is the one that I'm working on, and one in which I truly believe: MoveOn's Call for Change.
The big push begins Saturday. Let's do this.
Next post: The Top 10 Reasons Why Progressives, Liberals, Libertarians, and Anarchists Should Work Harder Than They Have Ever Worked Before To Elect Members of the Democratic Party to Congress on November 7, 2006: Somewhere in between sleeping and working I'll find time to offer all y'all skeptics, activists, and conscientious objectors some very solid reasons to look forward to a Democratic majority in one or both houses of Congress -- and to work to make sure that's what we get on the 7th.
technorati tags:moveon, politics, revolution, anarchism, directaction, callforchange, lesstalkmorerock