Strategy for Moving Forward to 2008:
GÇó Identify the 20 surviving House Republican incumbents and 3-6 Senate Republicans that will be up for reelection in 2008 with the worst voting records on issues relating to members of the Armed Forces, their families, and veterans and their families. Initially I can use the legislative rankings of organizations such as DAV, Retired Enlisted Association, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. If you know of others please let me know. I will also review the margins by which they won in their last election to try to come up with a target list of the most vulnerable.
GÇó Develop a brief one page summary of each target incumbentGÇÖs voting record this will be pretty easy since the records will all be pretty similar.
GÇó Vet this target list on our website and on the blogs to get input for deletions and additions to come up with our final target list.
GÇó Develop detailed analysis of each targetGÇÖs voting record and post it on our website.
GÇó Write letters to the editors of local papers in each incumbentGÇÖs district (state-wide papers in the case of Senators) to raise the issue of their voting records right after the first of the year.
GÇó Call local Democratic organizations and recruit local letters to the editor writers that we can feed material to over the course of the next two years. Also, identify any local blogs and political websites that we can feed our material.
GÇó Track each targetGÇÖs voting record and keep the website up dated and keep the letter writers busy. The idea is to hit them every time they cast a vote that is contrary to our liking and to keep those votes in their constituentsGÇÖGÇÖ faces.
GÇó Launch a blogging blitz on particularly egregious votes.
GÇó Identify particularly helpful Democratic incumbents and keep their good deeds in their constituentsGÇÖ faces.
Volunteer now by going to Visit Our Site, clicking on GÇ£Contact UsGÇ¥ and sending the email.
Initially, we will need 10-20 GÇ£bird dogGÇ¥ volunteers to make this strategy work. More volunteers would be much better, a lot more volunteers will enable us to target more districts. Ideally, a volunteer would take responsibility for a particular target (s) and execute the strategy virtually on their own with a constant sharing of the lesson learned about what is working and what is not working via blogs on our website. These volunteers could develop a network of volunteers around particular targets that could help in recruiting veterans to run against these targets. In the best case scenario, we could be building grassroots organizations for candidates long before the runup to the election. The most ideal situation would be that these GÇ£bird dogGÇ¥ volunteers are voters in our targetsGÇÖ districts. These networks will also be the key to our fund raising by helping get the word out and to help steer traffic to our website. If we can raise some money early we can buy some web banner adds to help build traffic.
There is good news and bad news about this strategy. First the good news, everything does not have to be in place to get started. If any of you have particular targets in mind and want to start GÇ£bird doggingGÇ¥ he or she can get going as soon as possible. Also, we have time to build momentum and to learn from each other and our mistakes.
The bad news is that we go to sleep after the 2006 election and we cannot get the volunteer support we need. If that happens we are toast because we will have squandered our best asset which is time.
Volunteer now by going to Visit Our Site, clicking on GÇ£Contact UsGÇ¥ and sending the email.
Question: Does your PAC have any comments regarding Allen's support by veterans' organizations? It was disturbing that despite Allen's dismal voting record on veteran's issues and terrible report cards from organizations such as the Disabled Veterans of America, these same organizations nevertheless endorsed Allen over Jim Webb, a man who has donated so much of his life to supporting veterans.