Blue Grit Democrats

Blue Grit Democrats have been doing more than voting, they've been doing what a generation of politicians has not. They listen to what's going on, not in the suites but in the streets; they organize; and they stick around after the ballots are cast.

AS the country looks forward toward 2008, people without portfolio (and many of them without pay packet) are stepping in, and they're making a darn good stab at filling the vacuum, where a functioning, people-focused Democratic Party is not. Fed up with the party's priorities, people who for years sat disgusted on the sidelines are stepping up and doing more than vote. Tired of watching the way the party treats the very Americans upon which it depends for votes, people who once contented themselves with voting "least worst" are taking politics back.

Gena Edvalson chose to engage rather than duck when she moved back to her native Salt Lakecity from California. "People from outside Utah are shocked when they hear I come from an LDS family and live in a conservative suburb of Salt Lake. They're even more shocked when they find out I'm a lesbian, that I have a partner who's about to have a kid, and that my father, who is eighty-three years old and very Mormon, lives in the house with us."

On Utah's DOMA amendment: By Edvalson's account, it was a forward loss. Progressives in many red states talk about "losing forward." It's the notion that you can end up ahead of where you started--even if you lose, because during the fight you pick up allies. "Our job is to build bridges to potential allies," says Gena. "If you don't go near the water, it's hard to build a bridge."

If liberal funders spent half the time studying the successes of the Left that they spend obsessing over the Coors Foundation, they'd be better informed, not to mention cheerier. Funders searching for a model of successful infrastructure building by a foundation would be hard pressed to find a better example than the slow and steady grants program of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles.

You'd think funders would be throwing money at the groups that mobilized downtrodden Angelenos to elect a mayor and that helped stop the Terminator in his tracks, but no. Adrienne Shropshire says that Los Angeles groups, which by 2005 had build a statewide coalition called the California Alliance, expected to see an influx of money, but it didn't happen. The California Alliance has since linked up with sister groups in Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, New Mexico and New York to go after national grant money as a united front.

The next Democratic candidate considering running for president would do well to talk to activists like Justin Turner of Cincinnati Citizens to Restore Fairness, fighting to overturn the anti-gay Article XII.

From a skimpy minority of 32 percent who voted in favor of repeal in February 2004, the Restore Fairness campaign won over 53 percent of the vote on November 2. The campaign set a goal of turning out 60,000 supporive votes; the repeal proposition won with over 65,000. The gains came disproportionately from the most conservative parts of town.

"The key was to put a human face on the message and to address it head on," Turner told me on the phone from his home after the proposition passed.

Kerry campaigned in Cincinnati with the losing, instead of the winning, side. he brought onto the stage with him the one group of African American leaders that was not part of the Cincinnati for Fairness Coalition.