My name is Greg. In August I start a position as Deputy Campaign Manager for Research with Jack Carter's campaign for U.S. Senate from Nevada, e-mail of
greg@carterfornevada.com. (I'm a frequent participant here, but especially since I'm still otherwise employed I'm not using my normal handle to maintain some anonymity. Thanks for respecting that choice.) I'd like to change your life a little -- and to change the Senate, and to change the relationship between blogs and politicians.
Yesterday I announced a new initiative from Jack Carter's campaign that, as you'll see from the comments, got a pretty enthusiastic response. I'm announcing this initiative several times here in the hope that everyone will see it. Basically, the Carter campaign wants to take advantage of the most striking characteristics of the DKos community: intelligence, dedication, and drive. Click that link or follow me over the jump to learn more.
Like other campaigns, we want your
monetary contributions (check out the link to Sarah R. Carter's diary -- see if the fundraising button still works!) and we will want your bodies for canvassing, stuffing envelopes, and the like. But we're also taking what may be an unprecedented step: we want your brainpower and your energy. We want this to be a
participatory campaign. (Please click the link to yesterday's diary and congratulate the commenter who came up with that term!)
To quote a bit from yesterday's diary:
You've wanted to know how you can contribute more than merely money to a critical campaign from your own home? This will be how.
We want volunteers to devote their intellectual skills and free time to coordinated activities that would otherwise take up a large amount of campaign resources. These include:
- opposition research
- polling
- translation (Spanish and otherwise)
- media/marketing ideas and approaches
- generating strategy and tactics, noting especially innovations from other campaigns
- issue-oriented research to inform and facilitate campaign position papers
- developing and pursuing legal strategies to preempt and counter voter suppression efforts
Each of these areas are described in greater detail in the previous diary. I hope you'll check it out and see how you might become involved.
Part of my update today is to let you know that we've already gotten a good number of people responding -- people whom you know here, people with outstanding skills. I have not even had time yet to respond to all of the e-mails. (My apologies if I haven't yet gotten to yours!) What's clear from these responses is that people are hungry to change politics in Washington -- hungry not only to open their wallets but to flex their muscles and their minds. You'd do it for something you'd consider a hobby, wouldn't you? Well, between now and November 7, we want helping elect Jack Carter, and turning the Senate blue, to be your new hobby.
Will you write me at greg@carterfornevada.com and let me know what skills you have to help our campaign? (Even simply the ability to follow a script and help us conduct a poll will be a great benefit.) I hope that you will. Wearing my blogging hat, I've long hoped that political campaigns would take what we have to offer seriously. Wearing my campaign hat, I can make sure that that happens. Let's get together and win in November.