Draft Gore 2008 PAC

Already posted at BooTrib and dKos... (none / 0)

In response to your identical posts over there, but, what the heck, I'll do it here again.

In May, 2006, DraftGore2008 PAC was established, alongside a campaign website and growing community. We wrote a campaign plan, raised over 1000 $5 contributions, and set out to gauge initial support in early primary and caucus states (I spent a month in Iowa alone.) Dozens of blogs and even traditional media, e.g., Alterman, promoted our campaign, particularly during the summer (when it seems many in online communities were too involved with the Lamont campaign to notice.)

So what happened? After the initial bang, support died out. I couldn't even get the organizing committees filled. Everyone suddenly wanted to focus on the 2006 Congressionals, and funding dried up. Kind of hard to run even a draft campaign on hope alone.

As you can see from your poll, people talk a lot about drafting Gore, but they don't want to actually do anything about it. And frankly, it's an unbelievable amount of work. Even the campaign filings alone are a nightmare (we're actually behind because we lost all of our first set of data, the one with those 1000+ $5 donations, when our campaign database crashed last summer, and are still reconstructing. Finance reform, btw, sucks for small campaigns funded by lots of low dollar contributors.) But a draft campaign cannot be organized online alone - you have to have staff in the field, and to do that, you need to raise money - we calculated at a minimum that we needed to raise $1.5 million, in order to compete in a mere 20 states.

I love Al Gore - I was a paid staffer (dep. field director in CT and ME) for him in both 1992 and 2000, and think global warming is the most important issue facing the world today. But a handful of people cannot run this alone. Personally, I'm greatly conflicted, as I was a very early Edwards supporter (2002) when it became clear Gore wasn't going to run in 2004. I agreed to become the campaign manager for DG08PAC, believing that "if we built it, he would run". Well, we ended up nearly losing everything, so much so, that I now have a newfound appreciation of John Edwards' emphasis on poverty (did you know that TANF recipients in California are fingerprinted before receiving benefits? War on poverty? Try war on the poor, and sadly, Al Gore was a major proponent of "welfare reform" back in the '90s.)

I haven't given up completely, but I want to work this silly season, not bang my head against a wall. Not to be immodest, but I'm a damned good field director, and I don't want to see that ability squandered, as it was in 2006, when I could have been staffing a Congressional campaign, not flogging a nearly dead draft horse.

Anyway, I now think Gore is getting his own campaign together, using MoveOn.org and AlGore.com as his springboards. He's doing it nice and low-key, as he should. Whether he actually needs a "draft" campaign, other than for "cover", is not exactly clear anymore, at least in my estimation.

Nominations for the 2006 Koufaxes open soon...