(Originally published in Greater Democracy)

Recently, I’ve been on many mailing lists bewailing the results of the November election. There are discussions about how to reform the Democratic Party. Should Howard Dean become the DNC Chair? Should people leave and start a new centrist party or a new progressive party? Fighting between Democrats is rampant on the mailing lists, all as everyone searches for new messages, new ways to frame messages, and new voices to deliver the messages.

On a mailing list for Meetup hosts, people questioned if Meetup had outlived its purpose, if it was a good system to use anyway, and if Meetups were effective tools for organizing and for helping get people to move from being “transients” to being “Do-ers”.

I am a big fan of Meetups, and I think they serve a very important role in the reshaping of politics in our country. Zephyr Teachout wrote a great entry at the Personal Democracy Forum, which touches on the importance of Meetups.

I sent an email to the list expressing my views. I talked about the different levels of political involvement and the efforts it takes to move people from one level of involvement to the next. I talked about the importance of it being fun.

Today, I received an email from Hiram Wurf about my letter. The comments about fun particularly hit home, and he wrote a great blog entry about the role of fun as a political motivator and mobilizer.

I am glad that he picked up on and amplified this aspect. I went back to search for ‘fun’ in Zephyr’s blog entry. I found ‘fundraising’ and ‘function’ but I didn’t find any pure ‘fun’. I believe that ‘fun’ is the important missing ingredient. I had a lot of fun as a volunteer in the Dean campaign and as campaign manager for my wife’s campaign.

Our friends on the religious right understand this. Recently, I stumbled across a website called Leviathan. Their motto is ‘Putting the “FUN” back in Fundamentalism”

The Dean campaign helped bring back some of the fun in political action. We need to build on that and make sure it doesn’t fade away in all the post election soul searching.