Seattle Times: Draft Gore effort prepares for big push

Draft Gore effort prepares for big push

Posted by David Postman at 07:44 AM

A major effort to draft Al Gore into the 2008 presidential race will soon launch from Everett. It's an all-volunteer effort, but close Gore advisors are involved as well as a leading Democratic PR firm. Dylan Malone, chairman of "The People, Not The Powerful '08," which runs the draft Gore Web site told me:



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The campaign is also working with CivicActions.com, a prominent Berkeley-based firm, that is working on a new Web site. When that launches this spring, Malone says it'll be clear that this is a serious effort to get Gore into the race.

"We're deploying a completely new Web site to enable true distributed campaigning — beyond anything that has been done before on the Web by a grassroots organization. Because a draft campaign does not have the resources to open physical offices in the early primary states, we're incorporating most of the functions of a traditional campaign directly into the site. Gore supporters in key states will soon be able to phone bank, print walking lists, etc. directly from the Web site."

To test whether Democrats were interested in creating Gore committees, the draft Gore campaign went to MeetUp.com, which had proved to be a successful organizing tool for Howard Dean in 2004. As of today there are 100 Gore groups, 48 for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and 31 for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Malone says:




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http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2007/02/draft_gore_effort_prepares_for_big_push.html