Thursday, March 27, 2008

Blueprint For DL21C: Party Inside A Party





At a gay rights event on the Upper West a few months before he became state party chair, Dave Pollak suggested I do it and I produced this: Democratic Vision For The 21st Century. I emailed it to him the following morning.

DL21C is the top political organization in the city. It is just that Charlie Rangel is not in my political league, who the fuck is Dan Berger? (
Madhesi Movement Victory In Nepal, Don't Forget Burma, Pay Attention To China, Yellow Rose, Eliot Spitzer Needs To Go Into Business With Me, Barack In Town With South Asians For Obama: March 27, The First Major Revolution Of The 21st Century Happened In Nepal) Don't you threaten me?

I think the DL21C Chair should gun for running for President Of The United States. If you can run the top political organization in the top progressive city in the country, the world, why can't you run a country? Maybe not now, but down the line. Barack will get his eight years, then it is an open field.

I carry 10,000 years of male guilt. I am ready for a woman president.

In this post, I will touch upon mainly on organization.

2016 will surely be a broadband election, likely a wireless broadband election. Media as we know it today will not be there. Anyone running for president will have to be their own media for a big part.

DL21C has to become a completely digital organization. Every event has to be videoblogged. And it is okay, actually desirable to have more than one video blogger in attendance. This is key. This might be the single biggest step the DL21C could take at this stage. It is so easy to do, hosting is free. Anyone can purchase a video camera for a few hundred bucks. Many people already own one.

Then the DL21C also has to move to videoblog many of its internal meetings. Ordinary members should be able to see how events are planned. You got to open things up.

New York City is a very special place. When you organize a political event here, you can assume there is a national, global audience for it. All the fancy guests you bring, but if you don't videoblog the events, I am like, what a waste.

The Facebook page for the organization is impressive:
Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century. There are almost 600 members. It is amazing to me how many of them are women. But so few of them show up for events. At some point these women will come out of the closet. That also goes on to show traditionally excluded groups of people find the digital tools of involvement very appealing. It is egalitarian to go digital.

If there had been online video for all past DL21C events, can you imagine what that would have meant? Granted online video did not exist in 1993 or even 2003, but just a thought.

DL21C organizes great events, but it can not stick to only organizing events. There is an urgent need for an online think tank. And this would be almost entirely online. You would use Blogger, word processing for the internet age. Here, the key thing would be to employ the spectrum concept.

Health Care As A Spectrum
The Spectrum Concept: Wide Applications
The Spectrum On Gender
The Spectrum/Dialogue Concept Is Key To Power

You build a spectrum on all policy issues: education, health, you name it. The spectrum idea is that if you can rope in people from 5 to 10, you got a majority. The idea is to try and build a permanent progressive majority. People at the cutting edge can do all the cutting edge work they want to do, but those who run for office take people from 5 to 10 on each spectrum along with them.

This think tank would be run by the DL21C central chapter in New York City, but it will be peopled by members across the country. There would be a special effort to dig into the top academic institutions across the country.

You build a robust, local template, and then you work to set up a chapter each in the largest city in each state. All the top elected officials in the state should think it an honor to show up for a DL21C event. And the entire time you are building this huge online video library of their appearances.

Money, Message, Organization

Organization would be the 50 plus DL21C chapters across the country. Message would be the think tank. Money will be raised online aplenty. Look at my boy Barack, he seems to be doing just fine. In my personal capacity, I take my company public. Right now I am busy assembling my tech team in Mumbai, NYC's sister city.

We go take the White House. We start by lifting the DL21C ban on me. I should be able to go to all DL21C events I might want to go to. I would like to start with the event on April 1. Mr. Pollak, Chairman, Sir, can you help?

Tuesday, April 1

7:00 pm

Superdelegates: A Foolish or Smart Solution to the Democratic Nomination Battle?
Location TBD

Please RSVP!

My take on the situation: A Model Primary Season.





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