youth leaders

OUCH! This morning's new swanked up GOP website launched. But Ben Smith at Politico notes the the "Future Leaders" page has an unfortunate omission.

Leadership is key, not that the Democratic Party is much better... a little better... but not by much. Their saving grace is the many non-partisan progressive groups and indeed the Young Democrats doing everything they can to develop youth leadership. Hopefully, some day, that will translate into the DNC reaching out to these youth to take leading positions in legislative offices and campaigns, and eventually run for office.

There are those who organize. Then, there are those who organize organizers.

John Raskin is one of those meta-organizers. When the Republican Party decided "community organizers" were there new welfare queens / flag-burning hippies / married gay people / human-animal hybrids (basically whatever group they mark as the "other") at the GOP Convention, they forgot one thing: when organizers are attacked...they organize.

So Raskin (who organizes in my neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen) launched "Community Organizers Fight Back" to give a voice to this suddenly-maligned field.

And now, they are using Sarah Palin's name in vain (or at least, in absurdity) to raise funds for community organizers. The Sarah Palin Action Fund for Organizer Training is going to send folks to serious training sessions at the Midwest Academy. Then they are going to send the soon-to-be-failed VP candidate a big old thank you card.

Who knew Palin would become the poster child for the organizing movement?

John also works with ACT-Now in New York, which gets boots on the ground in close races (it got it's name by being a volunteer arm of America Coming Together, which it has far outlasted), and founded Democracy in the Park in 2004, the first time I'd ever heard of people using their cell phones to phonebank from wherever they are (now a common practice).

He was also just named one of City Hall Paper's 40-Under-40 "rising stars" in NYC politics.

So in other words, check out the Sarah Palin Action Fund...or else John will come and organize you.