Reader Submission: Goodbye to Bush

Editor's Note: The following is a submission from one of our readers. 

Good riddance George Bush. Your reign of terror may be ended, but the effect of your evildoing will last as it shapes your legacy into a history lesson that will be incorporated into my grandchildren’s adult lives and into what was supposed to be my retirement. Your legacy will be fear.

 

The America you are leaving behind contains a terrified shivering mass of people who are now so afraid to spend whatever money they do have that our economy is frozen and teetering on the brink ofGreat Depression 2.0.  

 

A country filled with citizens so frightened that they have agreed to be publicly searched before they get on an airplane or enter a County Courthouse - a people so terrified that they allowed their Government to order the torture of fellow human beings and so fearful that they allowed fundamental aspects of their judicial system to be violated when there were clear absolute directives preventing that very action by the founding fathers.  

 

A Government so terrified of further job losses that they are throwing bailout money at every company that asks for it when we all know it represents a tax burden that our grandchildren will be paying for long after these specific saved jobs are gone.

 

George Bush will never feel the intrusive hand of a pre-boarding pat-down security search or a cold chill of fear when he looks at his checkbook or credit card balance, but he may fear a future where there is an unprecedented and very powerful multinational effort to try George Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes.

 

I hope by then America will have overcome its national petrifaction and has the courage to do the morally right thing when the extradition requests are made.    

John Galish

Reader Submission: Holiday Bailout Song Video Clip

A reader sent us a link to this video clip. Check it out, it is pretty funny.

Reader Submission: Thoughts on Medina County Dem Campaigns

A reader who is active in Democratic politics, and who has been involved in winning campaigns at the county-level sent us these six points and gave us permission to run them as an entry on our blog.

We urge all Medina Democrats who are interested in local campaigns to read our reader's suggestions on how to win local campaigns.

1. The local candidates developed a really nice joint piece for lit dropping and canvassing. An individual piece of literature, however, would be better for the absentee mailing. People who vote at home take it really seriously and like to review the lit. It would be money well spent for each candidate to do a piece to tell his or her own story for this mailing.

2. I have voted early at the BOE for 3 election cycles and did not receive one piece of lit from D or R local candidates - this means advantage incumbent. These are good voters and can't be missed. These voters can be identified because their absentee applications and the submissions of their ballots are on the same day.

3. Some local candidates targeted only Independents with their mailings. Given this was a year where so many more people than the loyal base pulled a Dem primary ballot, this probably overlooked many good and persuadable voters.

4. Only one local candidate made a case for change, but it may have been too late. The case must be made before the campaign begins. With 20,000 plus good voters voting before Nov. 4th -- the case has to be made before the early voting begins.

5. TV advertising is essential. People need to see the candidates in their homes to "know" them.

6. The cooperation was impressive this year amongst candidates, but the party needs to organize a ground game. Until there is a geographically based organizational structure that survives from year to year, this will never be a blue county. Blue counties aren't necessarily blue because everyone is left of center, but rather because these counties have infrastructure.

Online Petition Regarding Lieberman

A reader of the Kicker sent us the following email correspondence. We thought we would share it with others:

Senator Lieberman has supported a war in Iraq that has, by nearly all accounts, weakened our security rather than strengthened it. He has stood idly by and allowed the Bush Administration to spy on Americans and torture innocent human beings.

I've had enough of Senator Lieberman squandering his power to aid the likes of President Bush - so I just signed a petition asking my senator to vote to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship. I hope you will, too.

Go to http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/no_chair_for_lieberman/?r_by=1534-1757677-igKIfbx&rc=confemail

Please have a look and take action.

Reader Submission: No Comparison Between Kerry 2004 Ground Game and Obama's 2008 Ground Game

Editor's Note: Mr. David Brown headed up the Kerry effort in Medina County in 2004 and also the Brown/Strickland effort in 2006. He sent this letter to Nate Silver of www.fivethirtyeight.com. Nate was in Ohio recently reporting on what is going on in our state.

October 13, 2008

Nate:

Because you are writing from Ohio now, I thought I would give you one Ohioan's response to Michael Barone's suggestion that Barack Obama's ground operation does not involve peer-to-peer contact.

I am 64 years old and have worked on Ohio political campaigns since 1972. I live in an exurban county just southwest of Cleveland. I was the county coordinator for John Kerry in 2004 and for Sherrod Brown in 2006. Our county is a swing county. Kerry lost it to Bush by a 57-43 margin, with a total of 84,000 votes having been cast. Brown won it by a 55-45 margin, with 65,500 votes having been cast.

Our loss in 2004 was not for lack of effort. In fact, we ran such an intense campaign that Kerry's brother Cameron came to our headquarters to thank us personally the day before the election. Our campaign involved the staples of campaigning: voter registration, a yard sign campaign, phone banking, canvassing, and GOTV. Obviously, it was not enough.

I can assure you that the Barack Obama campaign in this county is vastly superior to the campaign we ran for John Kerry. To begin with, even though Kerry declared Ohio to be “ground zero” in his campaign and even though he invested huge resources in this state, our county had only one paid field organizer, and we had to share this organizer with a neighboring county. By way of contrast, Obama has three full-time paid field organizers in this county alone. They have been here since mid-August.

These field organizers are both well trained and effective. Instead of trying to do canvassing themselves, they have developed neighborhood teams in the three principal cities in the county (we had nothing like this in 2004), and the neighborhood teams are made up of local people who are canvassing in their own communities.

For example, my daughter is the neighborhood team leader in our community, and she has organized and worked with the canvass teams who have been going door-to-door here for the past month and a half. The past two weekends the canvass team has consisted of seven people, including my daughter and me. Every member of the canvass team other than my daughter was over 60 years old and has lived in the community for at least 30 years. We contacted people who the campaign had identified as persuadable voters. Each person we contacted lived within a half mile of my home, which served as the headquarters for the day's canvass. Because of our familiarity with this community, many of the people we contacted were quite receptive to our campaign effort. On several occasions this past Saturday, I spent at least 15 minutes at an individual doorstep talking to the voter or voters who lived at that address. In spending time with them, I was able to persuade a number of people to vote for Obama after they had first declared themselves to be undecided. Other canvassers reported the same experience.

If my personal experience this past Saturday morning is any indicator, Obama is in good shape in this city. Each of the persons to whom I was directed to by the walking list was classified as an independent by the list, and in fact many of these people identified themselves as such. Nevertheless, by the end of the morning I had talked to 15 strong Obama supporters (three of whom had already voted for him), one person who was leaning to Obama, three voters who continued to be undecided, no voters leaning to McCain, and five strong McCain supporters. (A number of other households had no one home.) This was in a precinct which normally votes Republican by a 60-40 margin.

What is also different this time is the good use to which the data entered on the walking list during the canvass is put. It is entered into the database immediately, so there can be follow-up with voters who have concerns about a particular issue or who remain undecided after the initial contact. The field organizers tell me that we have sufficient resources, particularly including volunteers, to reach each persuadable voter three separate times. By way of contrast, during the Kerry campaign we were only able to attempt one contact with each such voter.

In addition to the campaign effort I just described, the campaign has a volunteer-staffed phone bank running seven days a week—part of it running from headquarters and part from volunteers’ homes. The campaign also registered voters and will do a precise GOTV effort which will be based on the constantly-updated voter information in the database.

On a related note, a local paper reported that as of the 10th of October 9,000 people in the county had already voted—either by mail or in person, which means that more than 10% of the ultimate vote has already been cast, and this at a time when Obama is leading in most Ohio polls.

In sum, if Mr. Barone is pinning his hopes for a McCain victory on the failure of the Obama campaign to run a strong field operation centered on a great deal of peer-to-peer contact, he is in for a disappointment if the Obama campaign elsewhere if anything like the campaign here.


David Brown
Medina, Ohio