Essential Estrogen

To: Interested Parties

From: A. Voter

Date: May 24, 2007

Re: An alternative candidate strategy

Issue: Big money wants to make the 2008 Democratic nomination unlike any other election in history. In past presidential campaigns smaller states with a highly politically educated base, like Iowa and New Hampshire, played a more prominent role in securing the nomination. That process was based on meeting one-on-one with citizens, shaking hands, attending picnics, serving pancakes and strolling through the local diners. Such activities would then lead to momentum created from winning Iowa or New Hampshire. As evidence, 13 of the last 14 major-party nominees have won Iowa, New Hampshire or both. But I think this old system, which has served a successful winnowing process for many years, is about to collapse because of the impact of primary elections that are being held on Feb. 5.

Proposal: I believe we need a new approach to interaction with the Democratic candidates.

This approach involves shifting the focus away from big money and toward in-depth issues which can be discussed in smaller groups. More specifically, I propose skipping any candidate event where an individual cannot have at least 60 seconds of one-on-one time with a candidate and dedicating more of our time and human resources on candidates who both understand and respect the importance of allowing the American people to have more than a 15-second video clip or sound byte.

I assessed this proposal across three key dimensions:

Cost: What is the exact cost to our nation when voters are only allowed a digital introduction and relationship with their highest officials?

Scheduling: What is the benefit to our nation and our country when candidates must be in a different state each night? What is the benefit to those who must vote or caucus as knowledgeable citizens? Are candidates who place more emphasis on our richest citizens truly serving the public? Do we want leaders who only listen to marketing firms, talking heads and walking checkbooks or do we want leaders who aren’t afraid to sit in a mobile home 50 miles off the interstate and have coffee with 50 average workers?

Impact of Feb. 5: Candidates, most of them who have been in and out of Iowa for months on end, should be chosen based on their beliefs, thoughts on the issues, character and personal presence. Candidates should not be chosen based on their ability to hire a good marketing firm.

After assessing this proposal against the best interest of our nation, my recommendation is to avoid candidates who pull completely out of Iowa; who spend money only in our nation’s largest states; and who avoid one-on-one interaction with voters of all walks of life. I believe that the changes to and the volatile nature of setting the Democratic nomination calendar has changed the way the candidates believe they can view and treat average citizens – the very people they one day hope to represent. I believe the “small state first” approach that we are familiar with, that requires candidates to interact with voters is about to become more important than it ever believed it could, but only if we demand our candidates campaign on the people’s terms. The party has no leverage to maintain fiscal conservative campaigns and now we face a national primary on Feb. 5 with 20 states choosing their nominee on the same day.

Key Points and Take Aways:

1) Candidates now believe they cannot compete in Iowa without spending millions of dollars. This is because candidates, flush with money, believe their time is better spent making commercials and doing interviews than actually speaking to constituents. Speaking to the lowly caucus goers is a duty now regulated to inexperienced field staff who often do not represent a candidate well or understand the caucus process. The answer to such inefficiency is to run better commercials.
2) Forgetting that each state makes up the entire nation, candidates have turned to their checkbooks in an attempt to divide our citizenry. While walking around larger, richer states with their hands out, candidates have devalued smaller states which can guide the process back to a conversation about the important issues facing our society.
3) Afraid to take the more difficult road of one-on-one interaction, candidates and their campaigns have effectively taken scrutiny from themselves by suggesting that citizens in Iowa and New Hampshire are somehow unqualified to narrow the field to candidates with the most value to our entire nation.
4) Recent interest in absentee ballots in larger states has proven candidates or their political advisers do not wish to have conversations on the issues, but wish to rely on easily swayed and mostly uninformed citizenry to elect our next national leaders.
5) Candidates believe they should only be competing with each other and not planning the future of our nation.
a. Remember campaigns like to use the phrase “you eat what you kill”
6) The game is no longer one of strengthening our nation or connecting with the voters, it has become one of generating a winning map based on gathering the most delegates, regardless of how ill-informed they might be.

Action items if we choose to proceed:

1) Press Strategy – If this direction is chosen, no real press strategy is needed. It will be very important to require candidates to come to us, our communities, our workplaces and our homes. Candidates who refuse to allow citizens to play a vital role in the selection process should be left to run advertisements, visit with talking heads and otherwise spend all the money they’ve gathered from sources who don’t necessarily have the best interests of our nation at heart.
2) We need more opportunities – we need to have homes, churches, community centers, union halls, and local diners opened to candidates who are willing to spend time talking to caucus goers and voters
3) Support Iowa Strategy – Iowans, specifically, need to make sure we articulate to the candidates that we expect interaction on the issues and will accept nothing less
4) Party Building Strategy – We must have weeks upon weeks of candidates being recorded by news crews and citizen journalists as they are asked real questions by real constituents. We are responsible for the part we play in this process and we are responsible for providing an understanding to the rest of the nation as to our responsibility and how seriously we take it.
5) We have to put in a message point that we are doing this so more people of all walks of life – rich and poor, young and old, black and white, buttered and unbuttered, purple and green, tall and short – can have a voice in the process and help to make our leaders accountable to us and not to big money.
6) If we implement this strategy, we need to immediately expect the candidates and their campaigns to get real and be real. No more phony faces. No more digital reenactments. No more politics as usual.
7) We are going to have to demand politicians step up their trips to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, senior citizen centers, VA hospitals, childcare facilities and community centers – and that they lighten their heavy checkbooks while there.
8) The Internet is allowing us – as individual citizens -- to show the entire nation how candidates react in small groups and when they are asked the hard questions.

In closing, we have the opportunity to change the focus of all the campaigns from big money to American citizenry first. Candidates who walk away from this time-tested process of winnowing the field do so at the peril of devaluing America and her citizens. While we cannot be assured all candidates can successfully fight the temptation of big money, we can draw national attention to those who prefer sound bytes to human interaction.

This is a better, smarter and more efficient way for the American voter and caucus goer to be assured his or her voice isn’t drowned out by large political machines.