(This is a long post on my views for the future direction of the Democratic Party. If you are interested, please click on 'read more')

Introduction
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been getting into all kinds of interesting discussions, which I will try to tie together into one unified coherent blog entry. Many of these discussions are at least about some sort of job possibilities. I am very interested in these parts of the discussions, because I need to get some money coming in soon.

However, the bigger discussion is about how we help get our country back on course. Much of this gets boiled down into three inter-related topics. What is, or should be, the message of the Democratic Party, How should the message be delivered, and to whom do we deliver the message?

The message
A lot of people have been talking in the press, on mailing lists, and in the blogs recently about the direction the Democratic Party should take. There are some that suggest that the country is moving to the right, and the only way the Democratic Party can retain any relevance is if it moves to the right as well. Others have complained that it has moved to the right so much already, that it doesn’t stand for anything anymore.

Numerous groups have sprung up suggesting that electing Howard Dean to be DNC Chair will solve all our problems. (Draft Howard, etc.) Others have taken to have taken to posting theses on State Democratic Party office doors.

First principles
Some have suggested that the Democratic Party needs to focus more on first principles. What does it mean to be a Democrat? What is the ‘Democratic brand’, if you want to talk in the language of marketers? What is a Democrat?

The other day, I got an email from the SEIU addressing this a little bit. They were talking about people voting on ‘moral issues’ and wanted to know what union members thought the real issues were.

As I’ve been thinking about it, I like the message, “Democrats are people that care”. It fits well with the SEIU. The SEIU is a union of professional care givers.

A religious framing
For those who want to frame things in the religious context, Democrats are people that take “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” seriously. We are people that view ourselves as our brother’s keeper. We reject the greedy corporatism that is so rampant in so much of our country.

At least, that is my first take on what it means to be a Democrat. Various groups I’ve been part of have talked about starting a Democratic or Progressive Thank Tank. It seems as if a good starting point would be to get a group of people that can think and talk about these first principles and frame their thoughts in a way that will resonate with many voters. Is this something that should be done by the Rockridge Institute, or at least in some coordination with them? To me it would seem a good approach.

Delivering the message
There will always be the mailing lists and a lot of mail is flying back and forth as we speak. In addition, blogs continue to be an important area where the message gets discussed, honed, and delivered.

A lot of people read and discuss DailyKOS. Another emerging group worth following is the Progressive Blog Alliance David Anderson has posted an important entry for PBA people to read and think about how they organize to deliver the message as effectively as possible.

The investigative blogging effort continues to get more focus. While this is aimed at being non-partisan, I believe that uncovering and reporting the truth is a core progressive value.

Richared Hoefer has proposed ‘Grassroots TV’, growing out of the old “Dean Media Team”. It ties in nicely with the Media Tools 4 Change Yahoo Group. Many of the people on this list are people who burn CDs and DVDs with important progressive messages that they then deliver to friends off line.

From the distribution level, things like podcasting, peer to peer networking, and BitTorrent appear poised to join the effort.

The messengers
At last year’s http://www.ipdi.org/politicsonline/ >Politics Online conference, there was a discussion about Political Influentials. How do we identify the influentials?

One key way, it seems, is to look at the various mailing lists and blogs. It becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly who has something important to say, and who is just ranting.

From my personal view, an important place to look is at the people that are willing to step up and run for local office. These are the future leaders. For more about this check out my book idea about Kim’s campaign.

In other discussions, the idea of a Democratic State Legislature Campaign Committee (DSLCC) similar to the DCCC or DSCC has been bandied about. ‘Leave No State Rep Seat behind!’.

There are other groups working on this. Democracy for America and Progressive Majority come to mind. We need to promote more candidates like this.

Finally, to bring this back to the Draft Howard discussion, there are those people that end up getting involved in the party through efforts like Draft Howard. The people that get involved in the local parties, even if they don’t end up running for office themselves are going to be some of the key influentials that need to get a clear message that they can promote.

Closing comments
Everyone is looking at what happens next. I believe that coming up with a clear message, starting from first principles, framed in a manner that everyone can hear, delivered as a polished product to people that will effectively get the message out is crucial to reshaping the party and our country. I hope to find good ways to be involved with this.