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DemocracyFest: The other candidates

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/14/2007 - 12:55

I’ve already written about the Presidential and NH U.S. Senate candidates speaking at DemocracyFest in New Hampshire last weekend. However, there were several other candidates that were out presenting themselves to grassroots activists. It sort of had the feel of a tradeshow where the vendors, candidates in this case, jockeyed for the attention of the activists.

The most immediate campaign is the special election in Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District. Rep. Marty Meehan is stepping down to become the new Chancellor of UMass Lowell. There are five Democrats competing for this seat, including Jamie Eldridge. He had a large folded brochure talking about his positions on universal health care, the economy, global warming, education and Iraq. At the top of the front, he identifies himself as a ‘Progressive Democrat for Congress’. He has substantial support from the Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts and many Democracy for America members in Massachusetts. Kate Donaghue was showing Mr. Eldridge around and encouraged me to visit a fundraising page she, and a few friends, had set up on ActBlue.

Another congressional candidate that was there was Clint Curtis. Some of you may remember his name from investigations into voting machine tampering in Florida in 2000. Instead of recapping here, I would encourage all of you to go out and read his biography.

Another Floridian in attendance was Charlie Grapski. I didn’t get a chance to spend much time with Charlie, so I’m not sure if he is running for any office anytime soon, but he provides another fascinating glimpse into the Floridian political system.

Moving beyond the House and Floridian politics, another interesting candidate I met was Ed O’Reilly. Ed is running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against Sen. Kerry. His palm card talks about calling for an immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, pursuing renewable energy, universal health care and direct investments in local education. It will be interesting to see how much traction he can get against Sen. Kerry.

Yet some of the races that I’m most interested in are the state legislative races. New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana all have their state legislative races this year. In Virginia, Jay Donahue is running for the House of Delegates in the 86th District. His opponent was unopposed two years ago. You can contribute to Jay’s campaign via ActBlue.

One race that particularly caught my attention, however, is Deborah Langhoff’s. During one session, I spoke about how much I appreciated my DFA friends pouring into Connecticut to help with Ned Lamont’s campaign and I suggested that we should return the favor by visiting Massachusetts in August, leading up to the special election there, or going down to New Jersey for their state legislative elections.

Afterwards, Deborah came up to me and said, “New Orleans is wonderful in October”. As an Edwards supporter, I like the idea of going down to New Orleans to help with the post Katrina cleanup. Working to help get Deborah elected to the State House there is another important part of the house cleaning that needs to be done.

The session afterwards was led by Matt Dunne, who ran for Lt. Governor in Vermont in the last cycle. He was talking about Service Politics. I would love to go to New Orleans for a week in October with a group of old DeanCorps, as well as newer OneCorps and Service Politics volunteers to help rebuild New Orleans as well as to help Deborah in her campaign.

It is candidates like these that give me real hope for the future of politics in our country and I hope that everyone spends a little time finding out more about these candidates as well as talking about other exciting new candidates.

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Wordless Wednesday

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/13/2007 - 08:19

John Edwards addresses DemocracyFest, originally uploaded by Aldon.

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New Hampshire U.S. Senate Race

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/12/2007 - 10:23

At DemocracyFest on Saturday, I got into a brief discussion with Karen Liot Hill about the U.S Senate race in New Hampshire. I’ve known Karen from DFA days and I have a lot of respect for her. She told me she was running Jay Buckey’s campaign. Well, this will be difficult. I’m also a good friend of JP Boyle, whom I met on the DeStefano campaign, and who is now working for Steve Marchand’s campaign.

Katrina Swett had a table up at DemocracyFest and I’ve been speaking with JP about making sure that Steve makes an appearance. I first spoke with JP about Steve when he was trying to get Steve and Ned Lamont to speak. Opponents of Swett are quick to point out that she was national co-chairwoman of Lieberman's 2004 presidential bid. Her supporters say that it is not fair to paint her with a broad brush as a Liebercrat.

In digging around, I found an article by Eric Moskowitz in the Concord Sunday Monitor on August 13, 2006, after Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman in the primary. The article said she “supports Lieberman's decision to stay in the race”. It went on to say,

Swett believes Lieberman lost because of three perceived Democratic "sins": the sin of supporting the Iraq war and being tough on defense, the sin of being bipartisan and the sin of displaying religious faith. Swett said those traits might make Lieberman undesirable to many Democrats but they could be key for Democrats in winning future national elections.

Swett may be trying to present herself as being other than a Liebercrat, but as a strong Democrat, I feel that I must work hard to oppose anyone that supported Lieberman after the primary. The question for me is should I work for Steve? Should I work for Jay? Can I work for both?

So far, I’ve offered what I hope were helpful suggestions to both campaigns and I hope that the fact that I’m currently willing to help both of them doesn’t alienate either of them.

With that, let me run through some of my thoughts and views about the candidates. Both of them come across as charismatic good people. Both of them have hired some good people. Steve gets points in my book for reaching out to Ned. He gets points for having a nice palm card that he handed out at DemocracyFest. He loses a couple points for not having the URL to his website on his palm card.

As a fiscally conservative social liberal, Steve hit some of the right notes on his palm card, ending the war in Iraq as his top priority, defending a woman’s right to choose, working to make health care more affordable and accessible, protecting the environment, improving the quality of education. It notes that he is the former Northeast Regional Director for the Concord Coalition.

In 1992, I was a Paul Tsongas supporter. I liked the Concord Coalition as a fiscally conservative group that welcomed social liberals. Swett might laud bipartisanship, but I find Lieberman’s version of bipartisanship abhorrent. The Concord Coalition is a much better model for bipartisanship.

Steve’s website looks nice. They are using NGP for their donation processing, but they are also taking donations via ActBlue. So far it is just a few donations, but they are ahead of Swett.

Jay’s website isn’t quite as attractive yet. He isn’t up on ActBlue yet. Some of that is because he just moved from having an exploratory committee to having a full campaign. The website still claims to be an exploratory committee. The issues section is a little anemic. He does get major points for providing a link to an image of an email that Jay sent to Sen. Gregg opposing the Iraq resolution back in October, 2002. Yet it talks about there being no easy solution and could go further in calling for bringing the troops home.

What I find surprising is that there isn’t a reference to health care on the issues page. Jay is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth, and I would love to hear his thoughts on addressing the health care crisis in America.

All three candidates ended up at DemocracyFest Sunday evening. Buckey and Marchand stuck around to hear Gov. Dean, who spoke about the importance of getting rid of Sen. Sununu. on first glance, it looks like there are two interesting and exciting candidates running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. It will be great to see this race develop.

(Cross-posted at BlueHampshire)

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Political Social Media

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 12:13

Over on Cat On My Head, Jaya writes about a ViralTags Blog Rank Boosting Experiment. She worries about whether or not this will boost her ranking, or if there are algorithms around that will cause it to have a negative effect. I suspect there is a little bit of both.

In particular, she encourages people to copy and past a large block of text. However, copying text as is, is one of those things that algorithms search for. If everyone writes their own version, it is more effective.

Also, the question becomes, how do you want to be ‘tagged’. ‘Cat on my head’ might not be the most useful tag. In my case, Orient Lodge is already the top listing for my blog. I don’t need more people coming to my blog searching for Orient Lodge. Drupal Themes and Smoking Jackets are also already key searches on my blog. What do I want?

Well, since it is limited to three words, I would like to see if I can get more people finding me if they search for something like Political Social Media. If I were really serious about search engine optimization, I would go and find the phrases that people search on most frequently that are close to that. However, for the time being, I’ll simply use Political Social Media.

One other concern: This has a certain about of MLM feel to it. People who get on board early are likely to get lots of links, others, down the road are likely to get much fewer links.

So, on to the idea. Add a matrix of links to a blog post of other people that are doing this. Copy the matrix from an existing site. The original idea and matrix can be found here. Copy the matrix, change the Host Tag to the three words that you want to use, and add their tag into the matrix, if it isn’t there already.

Most importantly, when someone adds a matrix, be sure to add them to your list. Then, spread the word.

Here is the current matrix:

Host Tag: Political Social Media

Important: Once I get a ping back from you (I promise to do the best I can), I will add your anchor text and the associated link you designate as “Host Tag” here, replacing one of the “ViralTags” from the matrix above. As more and more bloggers copy and paste this matrix, the more backlinks you will have with your anchor text. If everybody who copy and paste from your blog does the same, pretty soon this will spread and go viral. So, the sooner you participate, the more links with anchor text you will receive.

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Cultural Preservation as a means of neutralizing extremist terrorists

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 10:03

Late last night, as I was driving home from DemocracyFest, I tuned in the local public radio station to hear a program from the World Affairs Forum about the results of the Iraq Study Group. I was very tired and concentrated on driving, so I didn’t follow the show as closely as I would have liked, especially since it was getting into some very interesting ideas.

A starting point of the session was whether or not the idea of a ‘Global War on Terror’ was a useful framework for thinking about our response to 9/11. If not, what would be a better framework and if so, what strategies would be best for waging such a war.

The first speaker did a very good job of explaining why thinking about our response to terrorism as a ‘global war on terror’ is detrimental. First, it places the issue into the context of militarization. It causes us to think of the solutions as military solutions while missing other solutions that might be more productive. In addition, it confuses the issue by leading many to think of ‘the enemy’ in terms of Arabs or Muslims as opposed to the extremists that make up a very small percentage of these populations.

It feeds into the narratives of the extremists by promoting a framework of a holy war. The speaker asked how our approach to extremists and terrorists could be framed in a more productive manner.

The second speaker brought up even more interesting ideas. He contrasted the idea of nations and states. He suggested that a nation is a group of people with a common identity, traditions or language. He spoke of states as locations having internationally recognized boundaries and governments. He then went on to speak about the problem of when nations and states do not coincide. As an example, he spoke about the situation with the Kurds, which he referred to as the largest stateless nation in the Middle East.

Yet the idea that really grabbed my attention was that of identity markers. The term was not defined, so I’m not sure if I fully grasp the concept. The speaker spoke about how identity markers are regularly destroyed in times of conflict.

From my brief reading on identity markers, it seems as if some of them are physical; monuments, places of historical importance, or even symbols of the marketplace. Others are linguistic, indications of a shared identity through languages, accents, and other linguistic identifiers. Some may be rituals.

How much of the conflict that we see in the world is a result of people fighting to hold on to their identity markers? In a world of globalization, American cultural markers are showing up everywhere. U.S. pop songs, golden arches show up everywhere. Is it any wonder people seeking to maintain their own cultural identity would feel threatened? Even in our own country, we find different groups finding their cultures threatened and fighting ‘culture wars’. In so many other conflicts around the world, one side actively seeks to destroy the cultural artifacts of their opposition.

So, how can we reframe the ‘Global War on Terror’ to something more productive? Well, perhaps a starting point is instead of trying to export American style democracy, business, and media, we would be better off trying to export an idea that has truly made our country great, America as a melting pot.

Perhaps, instead of vilifying Arabs and Muslims, we should honor their cultures. We could lead by example in seeking and promoting the beauty of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish cultures. By recognizing and promoting the great contributions that moderate Muslims have contributed to our world, we will help neutralize extremists, making it harder for them to organize, recruit and carry out terrorist actions.

As individuals, it may be harder for us to do this, but we can still lead by example. We should all seek out chances to experience, appreciate and honor cultures different from our own in our daily lives. Is there a culture center near you that you haven’t visited yet? Go, visit, and learn about other cultures. Even driving past the local golden arches and having lunch at a local ethnic restaurant is a start.

So, let’s change the global war on terror to a quest to appreciate global cultures.

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