Changing America one election at a time.

I’ve been on vacation, and didn’t watch one little tiny bit of the Republican convention – other things were way more important. I did read about it on various blogs, which seemed about the appropriate level of engagement for me – unlike the friend of my mother’s, who spent the week yelling at her TV and raising her blood pressure. Got home tonight from watching “No Impact Man” to see a little bit of Mayor Castro’s speech, and all of Michelle Obama’s speech … and am really glad I did, if only to have it pointed out on national TV “Truth matters.” So often forgotten by our national media: yes, truth does matter – it matters inherently, but it also matters when it comes to the policies that are labeled one thing but will deliver the opposite. It matters when candidates lie: and it’s the job of journalists to know when they are lying and call them out on it.

And it all comes down to this: what are you doing to beat the Republicans this year? It isn’t going to happen unless we all engage. At NDFA, we could use your help. It takes work to help get out the vote for our Democratic candidates, it takes volunteers to go out and knock on doors, it takes people to get together and make phone calls to remind people that yes indeed, voting does matter.

You can start by coming to our meeting next Tuesday: we have a great line up of speakers so far. We’ll have a representative from Dr. David Gill’s campaign to win the 13th Congressional District – one more Red-to-Blue seat. We’ll also hear from Democratic candidate Dennis Anderson, running for Congress from the 14th District against Randy Hultgren. We’ll hear from a representative from Rob Zerban’s campaign in Wisconsin: Zerban has the honor of running against Paul Ryan for his congressional set. We're also expecting adopted candidate Leslie Coolidge to stop by to receive her check: national DFA has endorsed her, and we'll be presenting it to her at the meeting. Leslie is running against Peter Roskam in the 6th Congressional District.

In terms of votes, we’ll be voting on endorsing in several races: last month, we heard from a representative from Brad Schneider’s campaign (running for Congress from the 10th District). We’ll also vote on endorsing Carl Wasco, who is running for state representative from the 68th District – that’s in the Rockford area.

Also, we’ll be voting on endorsing the President. Wait, you say – Mr. Obama has not spoken to the members, how can we vote on him? Yes, but we also recognize that he’s a little busy right now. Here’s where we ask you to do a bit of homework: Mr. Obama is speaking on national television this week, so you can take that speech as his speech to NDFA as it is to the rest of America. If you haven’t made up your mind yet, you can take a look at any of a number of speeches on line: there are plenty out there. We’re also asking folks to send us your reasons for voting for or against NDFA’s endorsement of the President – it’s going to be a busy meeting, and we’re going to present the arguments then hold the vote, rather than have an extended discussion. So send me your comments by replying to this email, and we’ll make sure your voice is heard.

Finally, if our members decide they are extremely enthusiastic about any of the speakers that we hear from that night, they may decide to suspend the by-laws for that evening to take a vote on endorsing right away instead of our normal procedure of voting the following month.

How do you get to be a voting member you ask? Well, you attend three meetings within one year, and you do three campaign-related activities for one of our endorsed or adopted candidates – that’s what it takes to be a voting member. We believe that the people who are willing to do the work are the ones who get to make the decisions about who we work for.

So please come and join us: it should be a fun and interesting meeting. Where and when? As always, we’ll be meeting on the second Tuesday of the month, which this month is on September 11. We meet at the Lincoln Restaurant, 4008 N. Lincoln (2 blocks from the Brown Line, parking in the rear off of Irving Park). We’ll start the meeting proper at 7:00 pm, but feel free to join us for dinner/social hour at 6:00 pm – there’s always plenty to talk about.