leadership

cross posted on the CDNY blog: http://collegedemsny.com/...

As a Political Science major in college, I have taken several campaigns and elections courses as well as voting behavior seminars. Yet few have helped me with leadership skills as the President of the College Democrats of NY as Taking on the System by Kos. I realize that many of you have read his book I'm sure, but call me a late bloomer if you will, I didnt buy his book until 2 weeks ago, although I was so mesmerized by the reading that i finished it in 2 days. About 2 months ago, I finished reading Netroots Rising, another great read by Lowell Feld which contained many passages from Kos.

I have based much of my leadership off of the ideas I learned from Kos and it has truly helped make a difference here in NY. The blogging community has inspired us to post blog entries every day on liberal blogs such Kos, The Albany Project (NY), Future Majority, and our our website blog. We now average almost 100 hits a day on our blog which is quite an achievement for our once small movement.

From Kos, I learned to go after your enemy and hit em' hard and not to take anything for granted. It was after all, the Drudge report that cracked the Lewinsky scandal and it has been the netroots which has broke many other scandals or released information damaging to Republican candidates. Several of our hardest hitting blog posts bashing the National College Republicans got our enemies' attention, forcing them to respond to our attacks while their very own membership posted comments on their blog agreeing with us.

Kos preaches that there is nothing wrong with being liberal and to refuse to let Republicans frame the debate and not to give in to anything.

Some of our organization's best ideas have come from the netroots like texting the vote and we have been able to give a voice to college students who have historically been apathetic.

The final idea that I love is the notion that we need to get the right Democrats elected into office- ones that will stand up to the hardliners in the conservative base and that will bring the progressive values we need to our country. For too long, American politics have been to the right of center and we need to move that back to the left.

The netroots will lead the way moving into Obama's presidency.

Well, one day after putting forth his health care plan, which I thought was pretty bold despite its "wishy-washy" tone, John Edwards took a gun and shot himself in the foot... multiple times. Apparently, in response to criticism from the most extremist Right-Wing nutjobs, like the Fascist Ignorant Asshole Catholic League's Bill Donahue and uber-winger/idiot Michelle Malkin, Edwards fired the two bloggers whom he just hired a week or so ago. Chris Bowers has a great rundown of why we should be mad as hell about this.

For the record, here are some good quotes from Donahue, from the above linked Media Matters piece, to give you an idea of who Edwards is looking to for support:

Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style.
***
Well, first they said it [The Passion of the Christ] was anti-Semitic. That didn't work. Then they said it was too violent. That didn't work. Then they said it was S & M. That didn't work. Then they said it was pornography. That didn't work. Now they're saying it's fascistic queer-bashing. That kind of language would ordinarily get somebody taken away in a straitjacket and -- put you in the asylum. I don't know what about -- the queer-bashing is all about. I'm pretty good about picking out who queers are and I didn't see any in the movie. I'm usually pretty good at that.
(Ed note: It takes one to know one, Mary)
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Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, okay? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions
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There's nobody in the United States Senate who has a more radical voting record on abortion than John Kerry. He's never found an abortion that he couldn't justify. ...

And that's just a small taste of Donahue's ignorant idiocy.

Unlike Bowers, I will not reconsider the following: As of today I will not vote for John Edwards under ANY circumstances in the Democratic Primary.Edwards has shown himself to be both an idiot and a coward, and if I wanted a stupid chicken-shit in the white house I'd vote Republican. [I'll revise this last statement. If Edwards comes out and apologizes profusely for this screwup, states that he supports the bloggers unequivocally, and maybe fires the person who made this fantastically stupid move, than I might consider supporting him again....]

I just received an e-mail blast from John Edwards that is a good example of a candidate taking a strong stance on an issue of great importance to many Americans, and especially young Americans: Health Care. My favorite part is that he wasn't afraid to use the term that many beltway folks seem deathly afraid of: Universal Health Care. From the e-mail:

As you well know, the American health care system is broken for far too many of our families. Today, 47 million people are uninsured, while uncertainty grows and costs spiral for nearly everyone else. To fix this crisis, we don't need an incremental shift, we need a fundamental change.

So today, I'm proud to announce my plan to guarantee top quality health care to every man, woman and child in this great country.

Now, I do think that the plan sounds a little wishy washy, but hell, this is a complicated issue. But as someone who has been dealing with the fear and general unease of living without health care, I can say that this will be the #2 issue that I vote upon in the upcoming election (the environment, that system upon which all other systems depend, will always be numero uno), and the fact that Edwards has come out in front of this issue greatly increases the chances that I'll vote for him (unless Gore jumps in or someone comes out with a less wishy-washy plan), and I assume that many other active politicos might feel the same way.

The full e-mail, including the usual pitch for volunteers, is after the jump...

In their July/August issue, Utne explores the differences between how Conservatives and Progressives build their bench. It's an OK primer on how the Republicans fund/foster leadership programs for their young prospects, and how Progressives are playing catch-up (the real article to read here is My Right Wing Degree), but I'm not wild about some of the examples they used to depict young progressives. Particularly their focus on GreenCorps. Whether that says more about the depth of reporting or the state of young progressive leadership programs and those who attend them is debatable. And it probably should be debated.

But in writing this, I wanted to highlight one particularly troubling fact (emphasis mine):

"We do have more people [than the right] to draw from as raw material on college campuses," says David Halperin. But the Leadership Institute has a $9.4 million budget, and its Campus Leadership Program is expanding rapidly. Between September 2004 and May 2006 the number of conservative student groups it helped start grew from 216 to 731. This fall Blackwell will dispatch 60 field staff members across the country and expects to push that total to 1,000 groups by the end of the year. By contrast, Green Corps and Campus Progress each have fewer than 20 staffers and budgets of about $1.5 million.

To put it bluntly, this is bullshit. In 2004, over $200 million was poured into building progressive infrastructure for the election. Many of those groups, like America Coming Together, were mothballed after the election. Some are reemerging now that the election cycle is heating up, others disapeared for good. The amount of that money directed to "young voter programs" during that same period was probably somewhere around the vicinity of $6-8 million.

Despite the fact that many of these groups (Music for America, PunkVoter, Indyvoter, Young Voter Alliance, MoveOn Student Action) were started from scratch in late 2003 and early 2004, and most of the staff were political newbies, we were still able to increase turnout to record levels and young people were the only voting block in the country to swing for Kerry. That $6-8 million was clearly the best investment progressive funders made in the 2004 election cycle. So why are our "youth" groups struggling to find funding in these off years, and why aren't progressive funders working to correct the imbalance between the Right and the Left in building our respective benches? More after the jump.