Reply #54: I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. It's not going to all happen in [View All]

[MineralMan]

2010, either.

In the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota, there were a couple of possible outcomes. The race could have gone either to Norm Coleman, an asshole Republican of the worst kind. Or, it could have gone to Al Franken, a progressive Democrat with no experience in elective office. The odds were pretty good that Coleman would win. There were a couple of other Democrats, but they would have lost to Coleman in a landslide.

What happened was that a bunch of dewy-eyed college kids, along with a few aging hippies like me and many others decided that we'd all go to the precinct caucuses and get Franken nominated as the candidate. The Franken campaign held caucus training sessions, which were well-attended, and where the caucus system was explained and methods for getting what you wanted at the caucuses discussed. I was a newcomer to MN, and had never been in a caucus state. I had worked in the more traditional Democratic Party organization in California, so this was all new to me.

Well, we went to the caucuses and discovered that we could, indeed, make Franken the candidate, so we did that, from the precinct level to the state DFL convention. Then, we worked during the campaign to get the man elected. It almost didn't work, mostly due to an error on the part of the Franken campaign team, which didn't align itself well enough with the Obama campaign and lost a lot of votes when people who had never voted before voted for Obama but didn't vote in any other races. But, we won anyhow, in the tightest election I had ever seen.

So, instead of a knee-jerk GOP tool in the Senate, we now have Al Franken there. He's pretty popular now in the state, and will probably win again easily if he chooses to stand for re-election.

My point is that a lot of people, including a lot of old-line DFL people here in MN said that Franken could not get nominated and, if he got nominated, he couldn't win. They had just about given up that seat to a creep. It didn't happen that way. The reason it didn't was that Franken was a good campaigner and he had the support of a bunch of people who realized that it was going to take a steady effort over many months to get the man elected. And we did it.

So, simplistic? Sure. It's grassroots politics. It works. But saying it won't work is the first step to not working on it. I'm saying that we have to stop saying that and go after some races. We're only about six Senators short of getting something a lot more progressive in the health care reform arena. We can do it. But, if we say we can't, or that the solution is too simplistic to work, then we surely will fail.

Al Franken. There's the answer to your criticism. Al Franken.