Our Opportunity

I read Brian Ulrich's latest (below) on the Daily Kos controversy and I feel very strongly this is the opportunity Dean Nation has been looking for to become relevant again.


I'm sorry to call us irrelevant but the fact is since the Good Doctor backed out we've been wondering what our purpose is. (The image, believe it or not, comes from Bangalore.)

Now we have one.

We exist to guarantee the Democratic Party a backbone.

The Right attacked Kos to deny our candidates a link to the blogosphere, and (since Kerry, not Dean, is the nominee) it worked. Because of one comment Kos made in the comments section of his blog, Democrats across-the-board have run for cover.

Stephanie Herseth has pulled her blogads, and pulled away from accepting our contributions, in fear of a phony scandal that she runs a "secret Web page" where "far Left organizations" are funneling contributions to her. Martin Frost has pulled his Web ads. The Kerry campaign has de-linked from the blogosphere.

We must do something about this now, or it is 2002 all over again. As soon as we walked away, the Democrats lost the backbone we spent a year building for them.

It's our job to bring it back.

So here's my proposal:

• We solicit ads from Democratic candidates we favor.
  
• We use links, and we use the efforts of everyone at Dean Nation, to go out into the blogosphere and talk up those candidates, and these links.
  
• We brag openly on how much money we're funneling to people.
  
• We cover their campaigns here. For every candidate we endorse, that means having a Dean Nation staffer (and we must find more staffers) covering that campaign -- the polls, the events, the coverage -- as we did for Dean.
  
• We re-institute the Backbone Award, and publicize it.
  

In just a few short weeks we have forgotten the key lesson of this campaign.

We Have The Power.

It's time we got serious about using it.

Are you with me, Dean Nation? Aziz? Anna? Brian? Anyone else?