Dare to Fight and Dare to Win!

The Texas statewide Democratic vote for state offices in the last 3 non-presidential general elections (1994, 1998, and 2002) was not representative of the Democratic base. The Democratic base is much bigger than the votes the Democratic statewide candidates received in those elections, but the party's message in each of those elections was not designed to motivate growth in the base voter turnout. Even when a Latino candidate and an African-American candidate were put at the top of the ticket in 2002, the consultantocracy made sure those candidates' campaigns did not convey strong populist messages of the kind that would speak to the base vote. I am convinced that strong populist Democratic campaigns appealing directly to the Texas Democratic base will wake the slumbering parts of our base from the sleep they have been in since at least 1994.

You cannot show me that a hard-hitting, statewide Democratic populist campaign aimed at the base will not expand the Democratic vote statewide into a majority, when it hasn't even been attempted in such a long time. How could one know it won't make a difference if it is not given a chance? We've been using the "take no risks" warm fuzzy platitude messages over and over. Now it is time to do it the other way. It is time for the Texas Democratic Party to reclaim the political legacy of James Stephen Hogg, James V. Allred, Ralph Yarborough, and Jim Hightower.

It is time to discard the "avoid polarization at all costs" strategy, the "take no risks" strategy, the "appeal to everybody" strategy, and the "chase the middle" strategy. It is time to remember what Jim Hightower told us 20 years ago, "there's nothin' in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." It is time to cease the followership strategies of scripting campaigns on the basis of what people thought yesterday in polls, and assert the leadership strategies of campaigning for what we know to be right based on our deepest convictions of what we want for tomorrow. It is time to stop worrying about whom we might offend if we speak truth to power, and start worrying about what value are our lives if we don't speak truth to power. It is time to cherish partisan Democrats and
reject nonpartisan Nothingcrats. It is time to forget "right-left" analysis and install "right-wrong" analysis. It is time to replace the
"liberal-conservative" spectrum with the "liberty-tyranny" spectrum. It is time to stop worrying about how to get money from big donors and start worrying about how to get more money into working people's paychecks. It is time to fight for better lives for voters instead of peddle promises to voters. It is time to treat public office as a duty, not a promotion. We must fight for the people, not in order to win their votes, but in order to win them justice.

When we Democrats as the heirs of the noblest political tradition in the world - the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, James Stephen Hogg, Ralph Yarborough, Ann Richards, and millions of unsung Democratic heroes - learn and relearn and apply these things, the people will know we are there for them and they will turn to us, because they are in need and have been in need for a long time. The more courageously and more vigorously we fight for the people against economic, cultural, and political tyranny, all the sooner will they turn to us. When that happens we will be prepared to win for the
people, because we will already be thinking like winners and conducting ourselves as winners. We will dare to fight and dare to win.

David Van Os
Democratic Candidate
For Texas Attorney General 2006
www.vanosfortexasag.com

Insert much of this same dialog into National Democratic races and it resonates just as strongly. Seems like people are a little more reluctant to buy into the spin they've been hearing from the other side. Simple truth delivered from the heart might just work.

Thank you David...I for one am behind you all the way!

for the Greatest page. Other people need to hear it. Is this how it's done?
:kick::kick::kick:

:hi:

I believe we can win and we can organize with the will to win.

Sonia

Great to see you here, and we hope you'll visit often!

You've met me several times at house parties and down in Austin. You go - we're behind you all the way!

5th nomimation! :woohoo:

The "We're just like Republicans only nicer" campaigns of the Centrists Democrats have proved to be a disaster. Whether you agree or not, the average citizen sees the Democratic Party as an imitation Republican Party.This is the result of two disastrous campaigns where the Democratic Party ignored traditional issues , and chased after mushy republican voters with campaigns of "Centrism". These polls shout that voters want a sharp distinction, NOT Republican lite.

If the Democrats want to turn the bush*/Republican drop in popularity into positive gains for Democrats, the Democrats must offer choices on issues that are "sharply different" from the Republicans.

The Democrats MUST offer clear alternatives on issues:

*Instead of Free Trade and Outsourcing, the Democrats MUST offer Fair Trade and (at least some) protections for American Jobs (not corpoWelfare tax credits, LEGAL protections)

*Instead of Staying the Course, the Democrats must offer options for withdrawal

*Instead of Big Business, the Democrats must offer REAL protection and support for the Working Class and Poor

*Instead of Patriot Acts, the Democrats MUST offer protections for Individual Rights and Freedom from Big Brother and BIG intrusive Government.

*Instead of Fighting Terrorism by expanding the Military Wars overseas, the Democrats MUST offer improved security within our borders, and International Cooperation of Intelligence Agencies to track and capture International Criminals

*Universal Healthcare...the Americans WANT it. The Democrats MUST offer it. (To hell with contributions from Big Medicine and Big Pharmaceuticals)

*Instead of a Bigger is Better Corporate Policy, the Democrats MUST offer restraints, consumer protections, and Fair Competition legislation that makes it possible for Mom&Pop Businesses and Family Farms to compete with Wal-Marts and Corporate Factory Farms.

K & R

issues that the Texas Democratic candidates in the recent elections have been reluctant to advocate:

The Pew Center’s polling report Beyond Red vs. Blue <http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=242> confirms that the extremist Republican-activists, called “Enterprisers” in the study, are a small minority of rich, white, mostly male gun owning Fox News fans who and support the PNAC foreign policy as well as the corporatist/anti-consumer domestic policy agenda which includes the elimination of both government social services and regulation corporate misdeeds. They compose just 9 percent of the population. On many key issues, these minority-Republican-activists do not share the views of the other Republican voter groups such as the Social Conservatives (the 11 percent of the population who are church-going, immigration-hating Republicans) or the Pro-Government Conservatives (the 9 percent of the population who are poorer, nationalistic, Christian Republicans).

Here are eight issues that divide the activist-extremist Republicans from traditional Republicans:



1. UNIVERSAL HEALTH INSURANCE



Who favors government health insurance for all (even if it requires tax increases)?



23% - Enterpriser Republicans

59% - Social Conservatives Republicans

63% - Pro-Government Republicans

65% - All Americans



2. RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE



Who favors raising the minimum wage?



46% - Enterpriser Republicans

79% - Social Conservatives Republicans

94% - Pro-Government Republicans

86% - All Americans



3. PROTECTION AGAINST JOB OUTSOURCING



Who is concerned about outsourcing American jobs?



43% - Enterpriser Republicans

67% - Social Conservatives Republicans

71% - Pro-Government Republicans

69% - All Americans



4. PROTECTING AGAINST CORPORATE ABUSES



Who thinks big corporations have too much power?



26% - Enterpriser Republicans

88% - Social Conservatives Republicans

83% - Pro-Government Republicans



5. REGULATING BUSINESS TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC



Who thinks corporations have should be regulated to protect interests?



16% - Enterpriser Republicans

58% - Social Conservatives Republicans

66% - Pro-Government Republicans



6. PROTECTING OUR ENVIRONMENT FROM INDUSTRIAL POLLUTERS



Who favors better protecting our environment from industrial polluters?



16% - Enterpriser Republicans

67% - Social Conservatives Republicans

61% - Pro-Government Republicans

77% - All Americans



7. NO DEFICIT EXPANDING TAX CUTS



Who thinks tax cuts are more important than reducing the budget deficit?



50% - Enterpriser Republicans

31% - Social Conservatives Republicans

37% - Pro-Government Republicans

32% - All Americans



8. UNILATERAL FOREIGN POLICY



Who supports Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy?



73% - Enterpriser Republicans

49% - Social Conservatives Republicans

40% - Pro-Government Republicans

37% - All Americans



Similar issues were compellingly analyzed by John Nichols in his article “Urban Archipelago” in at The Nation: <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/nichols>



The article discusses how progressive candidates even within Republican states have brought important issues to light. Here are excerpts:



“Something's the matter with Kansas: On April 5 Sunflower State voters overwhelmingly endorsed a … ban on same-sex marriages and packed school boards with more of those folks who want to teach creationism. But on the same day, progressives swept every open post in Lawrence, one of the state's fastest-growing cities, on a platform promising to fight discrimination, protect the environment and develop affordable housing.”



“Despite the challenges, or in some cases because of them, a growing number of progressives are taking their stand at the municipal level. "Local governments are the only place where progressive ideas can get any traction--where big ideas are being tried," says Madison, Wisconsin, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, 46, a former chief of staff in a State Senate office and an environmental leader who was elected in 2003.”



“More than 120 communities nationwide, from Ashland, Oregon, to Camden, New Jersey, have passed living-wage laws, raising hourly pay rates as high as $12 an hour for employees of firms that contract with municipalities. In Chicago, Moore is sponsoring a "Big Box Living Wage" ordinance that requires chain stores like Wal-Mart to pay workers $10 an hour and provide benefits. "That's an idea that couldn't get off the ground in Congress right now but that I imagine would have a lot of appeal in cities across the country," says Moore, who plans to spread the word about the initiative through the Cities for Progress network. Cities aren't just acting on the economic issues. While attempts to implement public financing of campaigns are often thwarted at the federal and state levels, they have succeeded in cities as different as Fort Collins, Colorado, and New York City. And 134 mayors in thirty-five states--including Republicans such as Mike Bloomberg of New York and Alan Arakawa of Maui County, Hawaii--have done at the local level what George W. Bush has refused to do nationally: agreed to meet the Kyoto Protocol's target of reducing greenhouse emissions.”

These polling results corroborate my lifetime personal experiences growing up in the rural East Texas that I greatly love, spending my career in the company of blue collar workers as a union-side labor lawyer, and stumping in rural and small town Texas for the last nearly two solid years. My experiences have taught me that:

-- grassroots working-class Republicans are generally hostile to the corporate power elite and to that elite's embrace of laissez faire economics; indeed they are substantially more anti-corporate than many upscale Democrats, and have virtually zero affinity with the "New Democrat" or DLC faction of "Democrats" (Democrat being a term that was ripped off and co-opted in this case by people who were and are essentially Enterpriser Republicans)

-- they didn't turn away from the Democratic Party over ideology; they turned away from us because they came to perceive us as the fancy-pants wimp party, always talking in ceremonially correct modulated tones with the passion of a cement block

-- they will come back in a heartbeat to a Democratic Party that is once again a plain-talking, fighting, "give 'em hell" party like the Harry Truman whom their familial older generations greatly admired

-- there is more connection between grassroots Democrats and grassroots Republicans than there is betweeen the grassroots and the elite in either party

-- the social-conservative wedge issues got the attention of working-class and rural people as voting determinants because the Democratic Party abandoned its fight for the little guy against the high-and- mighty and left a vacuum, and all the Repubs had to do was fill the vacuum, which was easy

-- we can refill the vacuum and it ain't even hard to do, as soon as we get rid of the consultantocracy and all their blow-dried and sculptured losers' formulae, learn to embrace risk instead of avoiding it, ditch all the damn positioning and maneuvering, say what we mean and mean what we say all the time, stop being scaredy-cats, learn to seize upon polarization and confrontation as opportunities to carry the fight to the enemy, do it from the heart with conviction and with passion, and learn to be the wind rather than the weathervane

--contrary to a popular urban myth, it wasn't LBJ's signing of the Voting Rights Act that triggered rural and working-class alienation from the Democratic Party (in fact Democrats scored huge in the midterm elections of 1966, after the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and a nearly 3-year blizzard of other Great Society legislation) -- but rather, it was LBJ's relegation of the Great Society to secondary status in deference to the Vietman War -- George Wallace's message was powerfully anti-corporate and anti-elitist -- it filled the vacuum left by Johnson's militaristic retreat from the Great Society vision and gave Wallace's ugly racist side something to piggy-back onto -- etc.

Thank you for your posting. It was stimulating to read and think about.

David Van Os