I gave the first campaign speech of my life last night

Let's get the particulars out of the way. I'm dday, in the real world I answer to Dave Dayen, and I, like hekebolos, am running for CDP (California Democratic Party) delegate this weekend. In fact, there are over 20 progressive bloggers running for CDP delegate slots all across the state. My district, AD 41 (the fightin' 41st), stretches along the coast from Santa Monica all the way up to Oxnard. There's a map here. The 41st AD caucus meeting is on Saturday, January 13th at 10 a.m., at the Malibu Library, located at 23519 Civic Center Way (Mapquest it). If you or someone you know is a registered Democrat in my district, I'd be honored to have you (or them) vote for me and the entire Progressive Slate. The full details are at this DFA link.

But what I want to tell you about is my experience last night, where I gave the first campaign speech of my entire life, and how I have this community to thank for the results.

So MoveOn.org is doing this "Mandate for Change" campaign, where members get people in their community to sign "photo petitions". Instead of just signing a petition asking for bold leadership on major issues (Iraq, health care, clean energy, restoring democracy through election reform) and sending it to your Congresscritter, in this campaign people are asked to take a picture holding up a personal message for their Congresscritter. Then we'll hold personal meetings with the Congresscritters or their staffs and hand-deliver the photos of their constituents asking them for change. It's a nice little idea. Here's a flickr photo set of hundreds of these photo petitions.

My local MoveOn chapter (yes, they have chapters now) held a meeting yesterday to discuss the photo petition project. I've been fairly active in this campaign and with this particular chapter, so I attended. I also printed up a bunch of flyers about my election on Saturday to distribute to the group. We ended up having about 35 people at the meeting.

I actually had a separate role to play at the meeting, to lead the discussion about the latest part of the Mandate for Change campaign, which is a drive to write letters to the editor (not astroturfing, but ACTUAL grassroots action!). So I went ahead and discussed that, and gave my thoughts on how to get a good LTE published (key point: less use of the phrase "ignorant MSM fuckhead" increases chances of publication). And right after that, the meeting organizer said, "And Dave also has something exciting that you can get involved in this weekend, and that's his election for CDP delegate. Care to tell us about that?"

This wasn't totally unexpected, but also not expected to the extent that I prepared anything. But in a way, I've been preparing since roughly 2002. This community and the progressive blogosphere is an incubator for ideas and framing and ways to relate your message. I knew why I was running (in fact, I wrote about it right here). The California Democratic Party is an invisible institution that comes around for two weeks every two years and places election ads. Other than that, they're a nonentity. Here's what I wrote then:

I've lived in California for the last eight years. I'm a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority. But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me. Neither do its endorsements. The amount of people who aren't online and aren't in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I'd peg at about 95% of the electorate.

I mean, I'm a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party. I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved. They don't. The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads. The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace.

And this has a tremendous impact. The state of California is hardly deep blue. It's had Republican governors for 80 out of the past 100 years. The last time the Democratic Party meant anything to California's citizens was in the time of Alan Cranston and Pat Brown in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Democratic Club movement began, and when the state party was most involved with the grassroots. At the time, the party was committed to progressive values and offered a real politics of contrast to move the Democratic brand in the state forward. This has receded in the past 30 years.

But it's actually worse than all that. The Republican Governor of this state is getting a lot of publicity this week for submitting a universal health care proposal that essentially says: "I won't rest until everybody in this state is paying for really crappy coverage!" The plan doesn't go far enough in addressing cost containment, forces people to buy insurance without defining what "basic coverage" is, provides a cheap opt-out of providing coverage for employers, and basically maintains the same system where greedy insurers get rich off the backs of the citizens of this state. Most solid progressives, like my state senator Sheila Kuehl, understand this. There are only two figures statewide who have had nothing but good things to say about the governor's proposal. They are Don Perata, Democratic leader in the Senate, and Fabian Nuñez, Democratic leader in the Assembly. It's a curious way to negotiate.

That's because the state party and its top officials are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo. They have incumbency protection through redistricting, are slathered with special interest money by being in the majority, and have no desire to upset that apple cart. This is EXACTLY why membership in the CDP is slipping. They work around the margins and do generally a decent job, but they have no leadership on the big issues, and no connection to the grassroots progressive movement that attracts ordinary citizens and lets them know that the Democratic Party is working in their interests.

So it's with this as background, that I began to say a few words about the election. And it became entirely clear to me that I was actually making a campaign speech. I was talking about the need to build a movement from the bottom up and not the top-down. I was talking about how the national agenda is important, but what happens in your own backyard really matters, especially in a state like California, which oftentimes sets the agenda for the rest of the nation to follow. I was talking about the need for bold, progressive leadership, to make the CDP more responsive, more effective, and more relevant. I was talking about the Governor's health care proposal and how we need a credible alternative. I was talking about how we had to wrest the party away from the narrow-cast, special interest-driven agenda of the current leadership and return it back to the people, about how we have to compete everywhere in the state and not just where we have large majorities.

And I realized that I have written about all of these things at one point or another. I've internalized the concepts and sharpened my dialectic to a knife's edge. I've tried arguments, seen them rise or fall, seen people agree or disagree, and tried them again. I've been running this speech through in my head since I first discovered blogs in 2002. It came out so naturally and easily, that I have to conclude that the blogosphere is the greatest primary campaign that any candidate has ever experienced.

Now, this was a friendly audience made up of MoveOn members. But I'm fairly certain that a bunch of them had about as much of a relationship to the CDP as most of the rest of the state, which is to say none, before that speech. But before I even got around to saying "I'd like your vote, and I have some flyers here with all the information," one of them asked, "How can I get involved?" Then another. They were really interested in the process and surprised that they didn't know about the election at all. I sent around the flyers and got commitments from a bunch of people to come out and vote.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the people at the meeting was a fellow colleague on the Progressive Slate, Ellis Perlman, a retired political science professor with an incredible array of knowledge about state politics, and a desire to see change. He spoke as well and he was fantastic on giving the history of grassroots movements in the state, and the need to check runaway executive power - sound familiar? - with a robust legislature committed to offering real alternatives.)

Upon leaving to go to the crappy night job I have this week (I didn't get home until 5:30AM last night, so forgive me if this is rambling), I reflected on how this speech and this moment changed me. In a way it was both a culmination and a beginning. If we're ever going to change America, all of us need to understand that democracy demands participation. Online activism of the "I did something for the movement! I clicked SEND!" variety is nice and all, but it's ultimately insufficient. I'm comfortable with public speaking but not necessarily with being a leader. But what I took away is that we all have the capacity to lead, to call for change, to be a part of this progressive movement all across the country. All it takes to do so is the will. You can create the opportunity.