This weekend I had the honor of attending the NOI Blogger Summit. On Sunday we had the pleasure of getting a preview of the Responsible Plan a project of Darcy Burner and other members of the vast left-wing conspiracy. This is a remarkable project and an example of real leadership by Darcy Burner especially, but also to the nine other congressional candidates who have endorsed the proposal. The goal is two-fold 1) To have a proposal for ending the war that candidates, citizens and other leaders can endorse 2) Change the meta frames of how we discuss the war.

This is the first time that I know of where a group of congressional candidates have joined together to advance a piece of policy. Darcy Burner has invested significant resources in partnering with bloggers and policy experts to launch this project. They have set up an LLC to run this proposal out of, which makes sense given the legal restrictions placed on the various non-profit statuses. ResponsiblePlan.com is collecting citizen endorsers, capturing names, addresses and email addresses. Right now there is no carrot to get other candidates to endorse by giving them names back. The privacy policy states that they may not share their contact info without their permission, so they can go back to them and ask for permission, but that will have a big drop-off. Legally speaking they would have to sell the names to the candidates, but you have to think that would be well worth it for both sides.

Unfortunately no California contenders have signed on to this proposal yet. Hopefully we will see a few of them come on board. The blogosphere has promised to push candidates to endorse the proposal. That should be effective.

There may be no Californians but my old boss, or my boss’s boss is more accurate at Common Cause, Chellie Pingree is among the ten initial co-sponsors. Chellie as she notes in this HuffPo piece has been speaking out against the war since 2002. This here is one of many reasons why I am proud to support Chellie and place her on the Ruck Pad ActBlue page (which I just added Darcy to).

When I stood up to oppose an invasion of Iraq in 2002 it wasn’t a popular thing to do. I was running for the U.S. Senate and the “experts” said it would be easier if I were in favor of the war. “This isn’t the time to take a stand,” they told me. Going along with the invasion might have been the easy thing to do, but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do.

The right thing to do now is find a responsible way to end the war, bring our troops back home and make sure we take care of them once they get back here. That is why I was proud to endorse the ResponsiblePlan today and will be urging my social network, including congressional candidates to join me and what should soon be hundreds of thousands of Americans in doing so.

It is not just enough to sign. We must push this proposal out to everyone we know, blog about it and work to make sure that we change the conversation about Iraq. We should not be debating if the surge has worked or not. We should be discussion how and when we bring our troops home. It is time to change the frame. It is time that we lead, that our voices are heard and after five years we end the War in Iraq. We do that by electing more and better Democrats and we do that by helping them grow their megaphone. This project does all of that at once and that is really remarkable. This is the blogosphere and the progressive left at its best.

I had the high honor of being invited to moderate a panel for the Women Who Tech telesummit. Here is the description of the panel I am running.

Get Your Local Campaigns On!
This panel will explore what it takes to act local and achieve big results running local campaigns by synchronizing your offline and online tools and strategies.
Panelists: Jo Lee, Citizen Speak, Clarissa Goodlett, Color of Change, Dani Simons, NYC Department of Transportation
Moderator: Julia Rosen, Courage Campaign

If anyone has topics they would like to see covered please let me know. I am open to suggestions. Any woman who is a nerd should sign up. There are a bunch of awesome women participating and I am looking forward to some stimulating discussions.

Earlier today the Barack Obama campaign asked their list to write a letter to super delegates about why they are supporting Obama’s candidacy. Here is what they suggested people write about:

Our work so far has taught us one important lesson: that your personal story about why you support Barack Obama is often the most powerful persuasion tool for someone who’s undecided. That’s true whether that undecided voter is your neighbor or a superdelegate.

The story of where you’re from, what brought you into the political process, the issues that matter to you, and why you became part of this movement has the potential to inspire someone who could cast a deciding vote in this contest.

I took a different track and decided to explain why I am supporting Barack Obama on the basis of his orientation towards organizing and building the Democratic party.

I work in politics. My job is to build up progressive infrastructure so that we can elect more Democrats to office, pass progressive legislation and make this country better reflect our values as Democrats.

To do that we need someone in the White House and in control of the DNC who is dedicated to that. It is not enough just to have a Democrat in the White House, we must build up the Democratic party as a whole.

To me the easiest way to tell their commitment towards these goals are to look at the way they are running their campaigns. Hillary Clinton is running a 50%+1 strategy. She focused on the largest states and winning early races. She has not been concerned with building a grassroots army of donors and volunteers. It is only recently that she has started empowering and relying on her volunteers and discovering the freeing power of a small dollar donor base.

In contrast Barack Obama built a true 50 state strategy. Heck he has had offices in Alaska and North Dakota. Specifically in SC, he built a new model of politics, one that was reliant on volunteers and peer-to-peer organizing. When his campaign packed up and left their office they did not leave the state empty handed. Instead they handed over their volunteer contacts list and voter ID information to the State Party. They left the state better than they found it.

I want a president who is not just happy with 4 years in the White House. I want a president who builds the Democratic party so that we have working majorities in both houses and easily elects another Democrats after they are turned out after 8 years.

That is why I have donated and volunteers for Barack Obama and why you should use your power as a superdelegate to support him.

Good on Young Voters PAC. They have created a program to support Iowa students who want to participate in the Caucuses. This will help in a small way to counteract the attempts by Clinton and Dodd to depress the youth vote. Though they have both mostly retracted their previous statements, the damage was done and a problem remains. Here is what Young Voters PAC is doing.

The Iowa Caucus is almost here (January 3rd) and we want to do all we can to support young people and students get to their caucus location. Since the caucus is happening during Winter break, we are proving housing for students who need it as well as providing support for young people with anything they need to get to their caucus.

Help us support as many students and young people as possible by donating today. If you can’t donate but can offer a ride or a couch for someone to sleep on email janeATyoungvoterpac DOTorg.

I contributed and encourage others to do the same.

P.S. I can’t wait to figure out how they did that with ActBlue and replicate it.

I have loved these series of ads. You know you have something when professional advertisers use your formula for their own ads. I expect that this concept will be copied because it is an advancement in online advertising. I am of course like a good online organizer dreaming up potential uses. They simply did an amazing time integrating two different forms of advertising and timing it.

They translated a TV ad into something that can only work online. Sure they could change it up so the sign was hanging in the shot, but they did the online spot first. Very cool.

Back in 2004 after Dean went down in flames and my brother Zack was out of a job, he started a website called Progressive Pipes. PPipes was an email listserv aggregator. He built it on Drupal. It was subscribed to over 20 progressive email lists that would automatically be fed into a queue to be edited and published. Zack passed off the administration to me at one point and I spend a bunch of time tagging them by message type (action, donate…) and subject (good government, environment…). It was getting thousands of page views a day. People liked being able to pick up the RSS feeds, or go to the website and not have to get all of the emails into their inboxes. It has been three years since then, but finally somebody else is using the concept to track Presidential candidate’s emails.

techPresident just launched Politickr, which is an email aggregator for each candidate. Obviously this does not represent each and every email being sent out, but you can get a sense for how often they are hitting up their full list and what they are emailing about. It would be fantastic if techPresident would put the time into editing the emails, categorizing them and making a counter: # emails raising money, # that have videos, stuff like that. Then we would really have some interesting data. That would take a lot of time (I know from experience), but it would be data not available anywhere else. It is a great job for an intern to do daily.

Very cool, but I want more!

[UPDATE] Check out this post by Michael Whitney on techPresident, where he did some added analysis of the emails. And don’t miss the comment from Zephyr Teachout at the bottom. She makes some great points.

I have been too busy to post here over the last week and here is why. My buddy Dave sums it up better than I can. We are building my dream, a netroots organization that teams up with the grassroots to bring about political change. We talked about what we needed to do a year ago. Now we are doing it and damn it feels great. Not just talk. Action.

Julia Rosen has the full story on this at Crooks and Liars. Much ink has been spilled from the results of the executive board meeting and the squashing of the censure resolution of Dianne Feinstein, but the bottom line is this. That meeting will be remembered as the moment when the grassroots rose to prominence in California. It will be remembered as the moment that Courage Campaign became the MoveOn.org of California. And it will be remembered as a turning point, the moment when the establishment that has been running the Party their way for decades finally got nervous.

Indeed!

I have been too busy to post here over the last week and here is why. My buddy Dave sums it up better than I can. We are building my dream, a netroots organization that teams up with the grassroots to bring about political change. We talked about what we needed to do a year ago. Now we are doing it and damn it feels great. Not just talk. Action.

Julia Rosen has the full story on this at Crooks and Liars. Much ink has been spilled from the results of the executive board meeting and the squashing of the censure resolution of Dianne Feinstein, but the bottom line is this. That meeting will be remembered as the moment when the grassroots rose to prominence in California. It will be remembered as the moment that Courage Campaign became the MoveOn.org of California. And it will be remembered as a turning point, the moment when the establishment that has been running the Party their way for decades finally got nervous.

Some of my good friends are running Vote Hope, a new organization that is focused on trying to win CA for Barack Obama. They are hoping to gather up pledges from Californians to vote for Obama, thus “banking it for Barack”.  This is the initial project for Vote Hope.  It is designed for as long term progressive infrastructure and will live on after the Feburary 5th primary.

Here is a video, as part of the Bank It project featuring the rapper Common.  Cool stuff.

There appears to be some consensus that Clinton is attempting to use her gender to score points/fundraise and make it difficult for her opponents to attack her. kos points us this morning to this by Obama:

“I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else. And I think that that’s why she’s running for President.

“When we had a debate back in Iowa awhile back, we spent I think the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn’t come out and say: ‘Look, I’m being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage’. I assumed it was because there were real policy differences there [...]

“I don’t think that people doubt that Senator Clinton is tough. She’s used to playing in national politics. And in fact that is one of the things that she has suggested is why she should be elected — because she’s been playing in this rough-and-tumble stage.

“So it doesn’t make sense for her, after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly she backs off and says: ‘Don’t pick on me. That is not obviously how we would expect her to operate if she were President.”

He has a point. Meanwhile, this is such a Joe Trippi creation from the Edwards campaign. You don’t even know it is an Edwards piece until the small paid for box at the end. It is a very good video and is getting wide play. I expect that it will make the jump to TV. Well worth the campaign’s time.