The Power Of Activism

The LA Times is reporting on its website that the dirty tricks campaign is dead in the water:

Plagued by a lack of money, supporters of a statewide initiative drive to change the way California's 55 electoral votes are apportioned, first revealed here by Top of the Ticket in July, are pulling the plug on that effort.

In an exclusive report to appear on this website late tonight and in Friday's print editions, The Times' Dan Morain reports that the proposal to change the winner-take-all electoral vote allocation to one by congressional district is virtually dead with the resignation of key supporters, internal disputes and a lack of funds.

The reality is hundreds of thousands of signatures must be gathered by the end of November to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot.

That's actually not quite true, the signatures have until February, I believe, so there's plenty of time for them to restart this. But the money coming in to fund this thing was extremely dirty, and once it was exposed maybe they said "to hell with this pipe dream."

If this holds, it's important to note that we did this. The Democratic Party, a big-money independent campaign, and the 'roots all worked toward the same goal on this one, for once. This got about 200x the attention that any initiative I've ever seen pre-ballot. The governor was repeatedly put on the spot. The media was alerted over and over. The netroots rose up to fight this from day one and a lot of very talented people put in a lot of early effort. I think that the backers recognized that this fastball wasn't going to slip by the outside corner.

Making noise early WORKS. This doesn't mean it wasn't a big deal to begin with - it was. But they understood that they were about to arouse a sleeping giant, and energize California Democrats like never before. Hopefully, we can STILL do that, dirty trick or no dirty trick.

UPDATE: The full story is now up. Here. Hiltachk and spokesman Kevin Eckery apparently didn't like the undisclosed nature of contributions.

The campaign received only one sizable donation -- $175,000. That is less than one-tenth of the $2 million typically needed to gather sufficient signatures to qualify a measure for the California ballot.

The donation arrived on Sept. 11, one day after Missouri attorney Charles A. Hurth III created a company called TIA Take Initiative America that served as the vehicle for the donation. But the individual donors to the organization were not known.

Hiltachk said he had demanded that "Take Initiative America fully disclose the source of its funds," and said he was assured it would make such a disclosure soon.

"Nonetheless," Hiltachk said, "I am deeply troubled by their failure to disclose prior to my demand and by their failure to disclose to me or to our committee that Take Initiative America had been formed just one day prior to making the contribution. . . .

"I am not willing to proceed under such circumstances," Hiltachk said. "Therefore, I am resigning my role in this campaign."

Eckery added: "There's no reason to be cute on campaign contributions. We had nothing to hide, and the public has every right to know."