Speech I'll TRY to give at tonigh's caucus. Think they'll let me?

[Ken Burch]

I'll let you know later if they do.

I came here to speak in support of Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Unfortunately, Congressman Kucinich, like Senator Edwards, and Senator Biden, and Senator Dodd and Governor Richardson, was forced out of the presidential race before he could present himself to the Democrats of Alaska and the vast majority of Democratic voters across this country.

With no disrespect intended to the local supporters of the remaining candidates, our party’s nominating process has been stolen from us by corporate power and corporate media.

They kept most of the Democratic candidates out of the later televised debates, starved them of the press coverage needed to keep their campaigns alive, recruited well-financed challengers for Congressman Kucinich’s own Congressional seat, and, in general used their self-granted powers to reduce our choice of candidates to the ones they approved of.

We, the people of the Democratic Party, those who supported the excluded candidates and even those who support the candidates who remain, are all victims of these undemocratic acts;

We have no Democratic candidates questioning what large corporations are doing to our society… none speaking seriously about the gap between rich and poor… none calling for not for profit single-payer health care…And none calling for a clear break with the foreign policy mindset that trapped this country in a senseless hopeless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatens to trap us in a pointless war with Iran as well, even though the overwhelming majority of our party and our country support such changes, and want them to be part of the national discussion.

We must stand against this theft of our votes and this limitation of our choices. We must do all that in our power, all that we have the strength, anger and commitment to do, to make sure that what was done to our party this year is never done again.

I am calling for those who support the values embodied in the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich to support us in the first fan out. I am also calling for ALL those attending this caucus tonight, whichever candidate you support, to hold up one of these signs during the fan out, and to support the resolution on nomination reform we will be presenting later this evening, and to sign up for a new organization called Democratic Resistance!

This organization will be dedicated to restoring democratic control of the Democratic Party and to working for electoral reform here and around the country.

I ask you to do these things not as an attack on those candidates who are still standing, but as an act of resistance against the restrictions on the democratic process and on our control of our own party that have been imposed by corporate media and corporate power.

All of us here tonight MUST pledge ourselves to this proposition:

WE, not MSNBC, not Fox News, not General Electric and not any other example of what Franklin Roosevelt once called the “malefactors of great wealth” should decide who this party will nominate as its presidential candidate and what this party will stand for. It’s time to fight for democracy. It’s time to fight for the soul of America!

[Yael]

1. I would hope that they would let you

Can you caucus for 'uncommitted' as a group with the others?

[Ken Burch]

2. We'll just see what happens. Our campaign did pay for a spot in the caucus.

n/t.

[Yael]

3. Good luck to you and DK!

[Ken Burch]

4. I was able to give the speech, and to a big crowd.

There were over a thousand people at the combined caucuses for state Legislative Districts 3&4. The speech got some pretty good applause, and about 50 people overall turned out for Kucinich in the first fan outs(well below viability). Got a few signups for the new organization, and will try to create a website for it soon.

After we released our delegates, most of us went to Obama(who ended up carrying the caucuses by about 2 to 1 locally