We Can't Let Republicans Take Over in 2010 -- All Hands on Deck!

A lot of people remember 2004 as a bad year -- the year George W. Bush was re-elected. I remember that too. But mostly I remember 2004 as an amazing year, a creative renaissance in political organizing. We weren’t excited about the candidate (John Kerry, remember him?), but we were absolutely terrified of the opposition -- rightly so. There was no magical Obama campaign. So we had to invent our own organic ways to get people interested. 2004 was the year that grassroots artists, activists and organizers discovered a formerly despised tactic: Voting (eew, gross!). George W. Bush helped us realize we couldn’t afford to ignore it anymore.

 

2010 is a little bit like 2004. We’re not excited about the candidates (who are the Democrats running again?) but we should be terrified of the opposition. Karl Rove is back, raising $200 million for independent expenditures. The Tea Party is at high tide. And according to pollsters, Republicans are twice as motivated as Democrats to vote in the fall elections. Scary!

 

The parallels are a bit frightening. Even the dates are the same: Election Day 2010 falls on November 2 -- same as in 2004. But what is most scary is that our team appears completely demoralized, uninterested in voting, and basically resigned to losing big in the fall. Can you imagine a sports team doing this? Can you imagine a sports team going into a game like: “Yeah, let’s try to only lose by 15-20 points.”

 

No, stupid! That’s not how you play the game. If you’re the underdog, that means you have to fight twice as hard and come from behind. You have to play to win!

Even though we lost, my friends and I remember 2004 as an incredible year -- the year we launched the League of Pissed Off Voters. We had local groups self-organize and create their own local progressive voter guides in 31 states. We held a national conference called Smackdown 2004 in Columbus, Ohio. We gave local groups a 90-Day Plan. We had thousands of volunteers create and distribute 350,000 copies of 147 homemade local voter guides.

In 2004, literally every week, another creative new organization was launched to register voters or shoot spitballs at the Bush regime. There were literally three different Bike the Vote projects that weren’t connected to each other. There was a project to row a boat down the Mississippi river from Minnesota to New Orleans to retrace the path of Huckleberry Finn and register voters in the swing states along the river's banks. In addition to Rock the Vote, there was Smoke the Vote, Fuck the Vote and Votergasm. Yes, there were two different vote-for-sex initiatives. There was Music For America and Punkvoter and Vote Mob and Concerts for Change and Bands Against Bush, Drinking Liberally, and two separate groups of Moms Against Bush. Run Against Bush organized meet-ups for anti-Bush joggers who ran in matching T-shirts. They sold 20,000 shirts online and raised $250,000 for the Democratic Party. Then there was Operation Bubbe which transported New Yorkers to get out the Jewish grandparent vote in Florida. (In 2008, it was revived as The Great Schlep, and Sarah Silverman did a hilarious YouTube video.)