Short Stories, Long Odds

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the UNT College Democrats mailing list. It hints at some salient points about the party I thought you guys might take interest in. It features some comparisons between the College Democrats and the YCT, or Young Conservatives of Texas.

The YCT just recently staged “Capture an illegal immigrant day” on the UNT campus, and if I’m not mistaken the event was coordinated with similar ones all over Texas.

You can image how people reacted. Behold, the face of campus activism:

Follows, the letter:

From what I can tell, the YCT has many advantages over us:

1) They have a slick website. We could have a slick website too and I
could build it and even add blog capabilities - before I started
writing freelance I was a web development contractor

Its true. Don’t let this site’s design fool you, I can make things that look pretty.

2) They have a lot of interested people. We have our “contributing
elites” but obviously that isn’t winning us any battles. We have to
not only engage in committee work, but we also have to figure out a
way to reach out to more students. I was at the DFA meeting Wednesday
night and they told me that the Students for Dean group at one point
had 300 people in it and they were meeting twice a week. Dean
provided a leadership-in-absentia, and as far as I have seen, there’s
no public face for the College Democrats at UNT. If we were able to
imbue one of our contributing elites with some hot PR, we could get
more people in engaged.

With as crazy as some people in Denton get about certain issues, we should have any problem finding willing volunteers with strong hearts. We just have to sell the whole progressive package so that the Sieera Club members are just as eager to stand up for women’s rights as those of the noble guppy squid.

3) PR - Because of the traditionally careful nature of Democrats, even
when we get letters published people aren’t entirely sure what we
stand for or are opposed to. Outlining a set of defined principles
and then engaging the public in discussions or events surrounding
those issues is a must, an absolute. Edra Bogle informed me that a
committee was appointed to establish a set of principles and issues
that we’re going to inculcate the county with, and we should be
contributing to that process as well as defining our own additional
pet issues. If we want to get the student’s attention we need to find
things that they will care about, either vehemently (the immigrant
issue) or in an indirect sort of way (our trade imbalance with China
destroying the job market, etc).

We all know this is true. Sometimes it seems like Democrats and progressives outside the Senate are afraid to call bullshit on anyone. That has to stop.

4) Leadership and organization - whatever they’ve got, its smoking.
What we have, organizationally, is not. We must stop being an
ancillary limb of the party and become a cooperative but independant
force, and we must demand more of ourselves and our members. This is a
never-ending zero sum game, and a political party’s primary (and some
would say sole) function is to win elections. In order to win
elections we need, in all seriousness, to build a dedicated army of
zealots, true believers. That’s how Dean was able to raise and spend
$70 million by New Hampshire, and if he’d had better, smarter
financial management he would have done a lot more damage than he did.

See my above comment about the Sierra Club members. THe time to start is now - if we wait until the election to start recruiting it’ll be too late.

We need to figure out the aims of the party at local and state-wide
levels for 2006, and we must identify if the goals handed down by the
state and local organizations of the party are actually in the party’s
best interest. Then we need to figure out what we can do to best serve
the party, and then we have to do it, or we are fucking condemned to
relive the past.

I’m tired of Democrats deferring to the state and national parties on every little thing, and I’m tired of it because obviously it isn’t working. The Democrats have been a party of” targeters” - mainly concentrating only on races they think they can win - and that strategy is a recipe for the long term destruction of the Democratic party. The current leadership of the Texas Democratic Party engage in a targeting strategy, and they need a little of that good ol’ “Come To Jesus” talking-to.