...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Thursday, December 11, 2003
      ( 12:56 PM )
 
Hey, It's All About Me!

There seems to be a theme emerging in the last two days from the GOP and the corporate media. It's that the Bush Administration now feels confident in the inevitability of a Bush win in 2004 because they will face Howard Dean.

But as Political Wire succinctly puts it today, the GOP shouldn't be so confident. Things are a lot different these days. In other words, as Mama would say it: It's not Dean they should be afraid of, but ME. And not just me, all of us.

What Bush and Rove need to put into their calculations is a vast number of voters who are actually energized and willing to not only work to get out the vote, but to get out NEW voters. What the "inevitability meme" produces for republican voters is an apathy, a laziness that says that they don't have to do much because their guy is bound to win, and besides, he has all that money. But what they don't see is that despite the flurry of anti-Dean articles in papers across the country yesterday and today, the Dean Campaign stuck out its "bat" and has already brought in 500,000 NEW dollars from small donors.

What activists always say is that you've either got to have the money or the numbers. We many not (yet) have the money to match Bush, but we've far surpassed the numbers. The actions of every person who believes they actually have power again to change this country for the good are more effective than one shiny television ad from Rove.

The power of these people is also why Dean will have coattails and why the style of his campaign is changing the Democratic party at its core. And the latter is sorely needed. What the GOP and the Dem old-time power people don't realize yet is that the base of people that have complacently watched the Dem party collapse over the last 30 years are angry now. And despite the ongoing complacency of Dem leaders in Congress, the people are no longer willing to let things go.

The very fact that hundreds of thousands of people meet together every month, in person, to talk about the future of this country and the 2004 election and that organizations like DFA and MoveOn.org can raise millions from their members in just a call for donations should trigger some thoughts in the minds of people who think that the old ways of doing things are going to prevail next year. They won't. This election isn't about Howard Dean or any of the other good Dem candidates that I would gladly vote for. It's about us. It's about me. And I can be very persistent when it's all about me...

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