Danny Westneat: Initiative 735 volunteers working to make sure ‘the small potatoes matter’

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/initiative-735-volunteers-working-to-make-sure-the-small-potatoes-matter/

I wrote about this same campaign last year, after it had failed. The headline was “It takes money to get money out of politics.” The problem is that because they are about getting big money out, they have no big money coming in.

A campaign director cited this “maddening contradiction” — that only with the blessing of a superrich mega-donor could they have blunted the exaggerated influence of superrich mega-donors.

Cindy Black, a Seattle office-supply rep who is working on the campaign, said that since the whole point was to build a political movement that isn’t about money, they decided their only choice was to do the initiative the quixotic old-fashioned way — with volunteers, again.

As Bill Noble, a Seattle mechanical designer and I-735 volunteer, put it: “I’m small potatoes. But it’s supposed to work that the small potatoes matter, too. Right?”

<snip>

In its first two months, the I-735 campaign has 37,000 signers — only about 10 percent of what’s needed. But this year they filed an initiative to the Legislature, so they have six more months. It’s targeted to a fall 2016 vote.

An initiative using all-volunteer petitioners that isn’t attached to a huge special-interest group like the teachers union hasn’t made the ballot in years.

You can call them crazy dreamers, or naive. But I’m rooting for them. It’d be great to call something a “citizens’ initiative” again that doesn’t completely sell out the meaning of the words.