[Sosfbay-discuss] Progress in the OC

[Andrea Dorey]

Hi, Wes,
Great nursing/monitoring of the group's activity with respect to  
using the Blogging effectively!  I am continually surprised and  
delighted with your political savvy.

Your analysis of GPSCC's past and present approaches in these areas  
seem to me to be correct.  However, my semi-retirement due to  
immediate health issues and impending surgery leave me with little  
room to criticize such lacks.     ;- )       I hope to back to more  
active status sometime in September.

Meantime, joining with the hard-working health care group at the  
SICKO movie on Friday was refreshing and inspiring.  Their  
magnificent activism was rewarded with overwhelming positive response.
Andrea

On Jun 22, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Wes Rolley wrote:

> I have spent some time this spring working remotely with a group of
> individuals in Orange County.  The original intent was to mount a
> campaign the out Congressman Crazy, a.k.a. Dana Rohrabacher.  
> (CA-46)  I
> find that what they are doing might sere as a good model for action  
> here
> in Santa Clara County.
>
> To begin with, since the target is a Republican and there is not  
> yet an
> announced Democratic Candidate (Green Tom Lash has said that he
> "intends" to run... again) to replace him, the group consists of  
> active
> Greens (One is a National Delegate) and PDA Democrats.  This may  
> change,
> but this group knows that they will have to make this decision at some
> point in time.
>
> One of the first tasks that took place was to establish effective
> communications channels.  This consists of a blog
> (crazydana.blogspot.com) and an email list (sane46).  The latter took
> about a month until everyone understood what it took to keep that list
> operational and effective.  (The participants in the Green California
> Forum could take a lesson from this.)
>
> After some discussion, the pieces started meld together into a work  
> plan
> that is being executed.
>
> - The have a voter registration list for the District and it is on a
> personal computer.
> - They have decided to target three specific issue areas: SB 840, Iraq
> War, Climate Change.  At some point in time, they will have to figure
> out what to do about Immigration, since that is where Dana opens his
> mouth almost every day.
> - Regarding SB 840, they have decided to also target State Senator Tom
> Harmon (SD-35), whose district is closely aligned with CA-46.   Harmon
> calls it "socialized medicine" and gets most of his campaign
> contributions from big pharma.
> - The have a plan to maximize the Letters to the Editors exposure in
> every local newspaper including the very Libertarian (surprise) Orange
> County Register.
> - They will be tabling at all of the showing of Sicko - objectives -
> Ridicule Harmon, Hit Rohrabacher on his miserable Congressional voting
> record (against funding veterans trauma care, 11% rating from the
> American Public Health Assn.) and registering new voters if possible.
> - They will start walking precincts in Harmon's district (especially
> where it overlaps with Rohrabacher's Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa,
> Fountain Valley, Seal Beach).  Issue: Health Care. Targets: both.   
> But,
> they will feed back the results of contacts into the voter  
> registration
> DB, making it a contact management system for use later.
>
> This is still all grassroots without any connection to the Democratic
> Party apparatus in OC.  However, some leading OC Greens are on the
> sane46 email list: including 2 members of the County Council.
>
> The degree of coordination that has been achieve between the various
> activities is extraordinary for a group that has been in existence for
> only a very short time.  They demonstrate a political maturity in that
> they are using individual actions to feed into an overall plan, one  
> that
> can be executed in sections over the time that they have.  This is
> something that this county could benefit from.  We do a lot of  
> work, but
> have not yet established the processes to connect them with each other
> or with an overall strategy.
>
> They have also been able to bring together three constituencies:
> anti-war, environmental and Health Care in such a way as to allow
> individuals to work on that which motivates them the most and still to
> connect it into the overall  objective, which is to Retire Dana
> Rohrabacher.
>
> While everyone cares deeply about the issues, the purpose of this
> collaboration is political, not just to advance the issues.  It  
> appears
> to me that much of what we do in Santa Clara County is only about the
> issues and not enough is done to use those issues to build a
> constituency for local political action.
>
> My contributions to this have been:
> - getting the Crazy Dana blog going.  There is one other author - a
> young  PDA type who is also blogging against another SoCal Republican
> Congressman. We are now to the place where, if one does a google alert
> on the name Dana Rohrabacher, you get the hits from our Crazy Dana  
> Blog.
> - some basic research for issues: e.g. Rohrabacher's voting record on
> Veterans Health care, and his scorecard with health care organizations
> and getting this information to the people who will use it... e.g.
> Military Families Speak Out..
> - establishing and setting the tone for the discussion on sane46
> - encouraging the use of targeted letter to the editor campaigns.   
> I did
> a couple of letters myself, responded on some newspaper owned blogs,
> made sure that the sane46 email list knew about what I had done,
> encouraged others to do the same.  Now, they do it themselves  
> without my
> having to spend time on it.
> - connecting the Rohrabacher record back to some national news
> organizations and blogs, e.g. TPM Cafe.  E.g. The recent Republican
> attack on Pelosi for her "diplomatic" role regarding Israel / Syria  
> was
> labeled hypocrisy when Rohrabacher had done the same thing himself  
> with
> the Taliban in early 2001. (Interesting sidelight here in that one
> reporter writing on this story was D. Kucinich's daughter.)
>
> I may just back off and monitor this for a while... too much going  
> on in
> the Delta.
>
>
>
> -- 
> "I find I have a great lot to learn – or unlearn. I seem to know  
> far too much and this knowledge obscures the really significant  
> facts, but I am getting on." -- Charles Rennie Mackintosh
>
> Wesley C. Rolley
> 17211 Quail Court
> Morgan Hill, CA 95037
> (408)778-3024
> http://www.refpub.com/
>
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