Paint It Red: My Half-Assed Charmingly Quixotic Attempt At An Online GOTV Project To Be Live... Wednesday

Over at Freedom Works, they're working on the website; meanwhile, "George Orwell" of Pudding Skull Quenchy fame is preparing a short animation for the splash page, and CAC is providing him with the maps for that.

But we're all behind. Well, I'm behind. I think Freedom Works will be a go tomorrow but I can't get them that splash page animation.

So, what it's going to be is this, basically:

I am asking bloggers and twitterers with an online presence to adopt a district, and essentially "host" a day or more of GOTV on the weekends, and for readers and activists and citizens and patriots to come out to join them.

My idea was threefold: First, I can't just sit here saying "go do GOTV, call the local GOP offices, make calls" without actually doing so myself; sort of... not really leading. So, to give me the right to guilt people into doing this, I'd have to do it.

Second, even though online people aren't "celebrities" or anything like it, I figure that if 100-200 bloggers or bigger twitterers signed up as hosts, then maybe ten people who read or follow them might be able to come out to where they're doing GOTV; so, hopefully, maybe we could get 1000-2000 extra ground troops out there for this.

Third, my thought was, Look, if you're not doing this already, you're probably not going to do it now; if you were inclined to do this sort of thing, you'd already be doing it. Right? Stands to reason, yeah. So I was trying to think of a way to put together a, uh, Coalition of the Willing and Yet Not Eager, people who might maybe do this sort of thing, if there were some inducement to do so. I really couldn't offer much, except try to organize so, like, if you want to come out and hang out with me or the other commenters you know and like and do some GOTV and then get some dinner and beer after, like maybe pitching it that way would help.

Look, I just want to be involved, I feel so frustrated here not actually doing something, but just typing away on a stupid moronblog, and this was the only way I could think of to try to leverage any of the site's pull into some tangible action.

Plus, I had fun at BlogCon hanging out with other conservatives, and I figure, what the hell? It's fun to hang out with conservatives. Especially when we're all in a vendetta sorta mood. I feel like doing it again.

So, maybe we put candidate signs down for 4 or 6 hours or do phone banking or knock on doors or whatever, then hang out for a bit after. Maybe meet some of the people you've only known as screennames for a while.

I have no idea if anyone will actually be interested in this. I feel kind of embarrassed even trying to get some 2000 person thing going because I'm a nobody and, plus, I have absolutely no organizational skills whatsoever. I can't organize my own life let alone a GOTV effort.

This is a problem you'll see called out on the Freedom Works sign-up sheet, where the form is specifically going to ask about people disclosing if they have an actual skill at organization and/or contacts with the local campaign or local GOP offices, to tell us , like, what the fuck we're supposed to do during this. Because, like? No idea.

But don't worry too much about that; Tabitha Hale at Freedom Works will be advising us and trying to help stupid-ass disorganized people like me figure out what to do. But seriously, if you're signing up where I'm going to be and you have half a clue, let me know.

So that's the basic idea, really. A national sign-up for online activists who really aren't activists to finally activate and do some ground-and-pound work in their areas.

I'm not certain on this, but I think I'll be going up to Sean Bielat's district to start my own GOTV stuff off on Friday/Saturday, and then back down here to NYC or, more likely, a district in NJ.

I've gotten soft commitments from other people (which I intend to treat as solemn vows) to do likewise in other parts of the country.

And one other thing: Brian Faughan is organizing some kind of DarkHorse PAC which will also go live Wednesday. Simple proposition: Collect up some money to be distributed to a bunch of dark horse candidates who right now are getting no love from nobody. Because, like, seriously? They can win. They just need some help.

Hmmmm... Britt suggests that I help out Jon Runyan in NJ-3, which stretches from Cherry Hill to Seaside Heights.

He's the guy who is running not just against the sitting Democrat Adler, but the fake Tea Party plant recurited by Adler's minions to split the vote.

It's a known thing -- and an embarrassment, but Democrats don't embarrass easily.

Anyway, I am sort of thinking that would be a good place to go for the next weekend following (that is, like the 22nd-23rd). But before I commit to that, I sort of want to know if I actually have any readers in that area who would come out to do this stuff with me.

Anyone? Let me know either in the thread or by email.

posted by Ace at 11:41 PM

| Access Comments