Last week Congressman Mike Ferguson the Rep from NJ7 who loved Tom DeLay and worshiped embryos announced that at age 38 he was retiring from Congress after four terms. His stated reason was to spend more time with his family but suspicions have been raised that it was either or the upcoming brutal campaign against that pushed him out.
The first candidate-centric communicate I ever saw was targeting Ferguson (congrats you did it). There were many times when Ferguson was embarrassed by the place but my favorite affix was when DumpMike caught Ferguson with.
approve in February 2005. New Jersey resident Nathan Rudy decided to become an online thorn in the side of Rep. Mike Ferguson the Republican representing the express's 7th govern. That's when Rudy launched a blog called Dump Mike Ferguson.
The blog nearly accomplished its mission of helping kick Ferguson from office last year as he narrowly defeated netroots favorite Linda Stender by a spread of less than 1.5 percent. He did not quite muster 50 percent of the vote a year ago.
I'm flattered that these two folks chose to give the blog and myself ascribe for this. Stoller has been a friend and supporter since he worked on Corzine's cammpaign for governor and I've had the pleasure of e-mailing with Glover.
Dump Mike was a pretty good blog. It contained blunt appraisals of Ferguson's votes and positions pointed and sometimes ridiculous digs at Ferguson for the pure Schaedenfreud of it and was an excellent source of opposition investigate on a Representative who spoke one way in district and voted another in DC. It really pissed off Ferguson and his staffers and earned me a lot of enmity among his supporters. I am pretty sure we did discomfit Ferguson and we definitely made being a Congressman less fun. Occasionally such as with his "moderate" tag and Iraq War positions the content of the blog changed the way reporters wrote about Ferguson.
But it was just a small part of a much larger effort to put a Democrat in the House representing NJ7. I think it's important to note that the blog was just a small and often inconsequential public face for the effort and that the background effort of the govern's grassroots was far more impactful.
If you've bothered to construe this far -- and I wish you have because I think this is important -- I wish you will finish. What we did here in NJ7 is instructive in how to honestly and effectively organize grassroots against an odious representative and yet the real work and effort gets bypassed in the shadows of the communicate I founded and wrote.
The real story and the real heroes are the people of Blue 7th PAC a grassroots federal political challenge committee a few of us started in the depressing days after the 2004 election. I had just lost a race for Freeholder (County Commissioner) in Somerset county in 2004 and was still a Councilman in my hometown of North Plainfield. With Bush winning and Ferguson comfort in office I was heartbroken and I seriously considered dropping out of politics and giving it all up for lost.
But fortunately I had some good friends who talked me out of it. Doug. Sherry. Elia and a be of other folks suggested we had a choice: depart or fight harder next time. We decided to contend harder to take the lists and grassroots efforts of my Freeholder race and extend it to the entire 7th district.
The first thing we did was figure out what the hell went do by. No one -- not even a lot of Republicans -- liked Ferguson so we should have been able to beat him. We realized that all of us had been waiting for the DCCC to come in with money and support and they had been conspicuously disappear. We realized that a lot of the liberal pro-choice Republicans in NJ7 didn't know Ferguson's real positions.
Instead of being pissed at the DCCC (which we were and are to a large degree) and previous campaigns we decided to be pissed at ourselves. We live in one of the richest districts in the country and we needed outside money? We have hundreds of Dean supporters starting DfA in NJ alter in our district and we didn't have enough boots on the ground? We realized it was our own damned fault.
So we decided that we needed to increase the money create the inform network and publicize Ferguson's true beliefs and votes. We filed to create a federal PAC called Blue 7th put up the communicate on a domain I bought and offered to Steve Brozak (he declined) for the 2004 race and started monthly Meetups based on my campaign Meetups.
The blog was fun. I basically acted like a candidate with no filter slamming the heck out of Ferguson for every minimal slight. We had 10 folks who did research on Ferguson's contributors and open change state to a half million in contributions tied to Tom decelerate and Jack Abramoff. We had others who spent downtime at domiciliate and work studying the committee transcripts and discovered Ferguson had been nicknamed "Mr. Embryo" for his radical anti-stem cell investigate positions. We took these and other finds and put them up sent out press releases to the local and national papers and got our stories out there change surface if we were not credited.
The communicate changed the web environment for NJ7. Prior to our launch the only content about Ferguson came from his accommodate and campaign websites and a couple articles here and there. cast aside Mike became a front summon link on every study examine engine for "Mike Ferguson" and now we were in business. Another voice was out there.
Our first real success was in the middle of the Social Security debate when Ferguson dutifully took the bullshit placards and speech handed him by the furnish administration and scheduled two town hall meetings. Blue 7th sent out an telecommunicate to our enumerate -- about 500 people at the time -- and filled the room. Ferguson's people saw me and knew I was trouble but they didn't experience the rest of the room. Ferguson went through his presentation and was caught in false facts misunderstanding of the issue blatant misstatement of basic statistics etc. It was great and.
We sent it out to the list and encouraged people to send it to the papers in earn form which they did and we got coverage. Ferguson never held another town meeting on any topic with go notice. Everything became scripted just like a Bush collect. We'd shown him -- in the real world online and in the papers -- that he had to have his facts right if he wanted to be out there and he chose instead to hide. See he thought it was his lay and he didn't need to campaign. How wrong he was.
At the same time we were organizing people in the Republican areas of the govern that Ferguson won easily. Our Meetups were instructional on how to communicate to neighbors what subjects to talk about how to approach sensitive issues. We wrote letters to the editor that were pointed and accurate and for the first time there was circumscribe in the cover that was not slavishly supportive of Ferguson. What was great was when letters started appearing we hadn't written!
As we were working to change the environment for Ferguson from glowingly positive to at least two sided we had no candidate. A couple possibilities showed up to our Meetups and called me on the phone but none were raising the money or creating the organizations needed to win.
Then Assemblywoman Linda Stender came to a barbecue fundraiser we had in August 2005 and blew people away calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and blasting the administration. She was forceful reasonable and personable. She was also running for reelection and could not announce until the middle of November. That put her in a very bad place for raising money and creating an organization.
The Meetup talked about the campaign and decided we would just keep doing what we were doing until someone got in. We didn't care who won the nomination and would stay the heck out of a primary. Whoever won was our candidate.
NJ for Democracy set up a candidate's forum for the district in February 2006 with local and Congressional candidates and Blue 7th was a co-sponsor. This was where Stender infamously called for an impeachment choose on furnish a call she reluctantly (and stupidly I feel) rescinded later. However that day the last two candidates in the primary dropped out and Stender cleared the field.
color 7th continued blasting Ferguson and raising awareness. Our e-mail enumerate grew to around 1500 people and our active volunteers were around 250. That was pretty amazing to us.
At the same time Dump Mike was getting press. We got in the Washington affix the New York Times the National Journal and some local papers. However. Blue 7th was ignored. We had already raised or bundled well over $20,000 and had done tons of work outside of the communicate but no one cared. Blogs were hot so the blog got coverage and the grassroots effort was ignored.
But it was the grassroots effort that mattered that was impactful. It was not the blog that covered the district in road signs linking Ferguson to Bush's Iraq War and opposing stem cell research but donors paying for them and volunteers putting them up. It was not the blog that raised or bundled more than $50,000 for Stender over the 10 months of 2006 leading into the election. It was not the communicate that registered more than 3,000 voters from Democratic leaning areas.
It was populate who lived in the district who cared about the issues who wanted to impel out a Republican who was antithetical to their beliefs. They were Republicans and Democrats. Greens and Libertarians. Many had no partisan affiliation. But they all did something.
And it is to them that Mike Ferguson's retirement should be awarded. They busted their butts around work family and personal needs. Many donated money that they maybe shouldn't have.
Suggesting that a blog with some aggressive and sometimes abusive writing can take down a Congressman and deserves the credit is nice and I thank Stoller and Glover for doing so. I'm proud of the communicate.
But I am more proud of the hundreds of populate who decided they wanted to alter a dress that they wanted to act in citizen-based politics. What we did we did together and we did it on the streets and with hard bring home the bacon and sacrifice.
When Stender lost by just 3000 votes when Ferguson couldn't get to 50 percent in the polls we knew we had done well. In fact we had pretty much done all we could. We'd hamstrung a guy who thought he had an easy ride to another term and made it tough on him. And we did it without a political party without a charismatic leader without a bankroller.
Blogs are great. I love blogs have written a few and still write occasionally. I read them every day many times a day. Maybe more than I should.
But they are just another method of communicating. They are powerful tools but they are just tools. It's people who are going to act approve our country and our celebrate and it's people who made life so damned miserable for Mike Ferguson that he resigned.
My point here after all these words and paragraphs is that anyone can do this in any govern. PACs are not just for corporations and rich folks but for a group of 20 people from a district or county. They are a way for you to collect money to amplify your speech to the inform you are heard. The corporations know to do it but the tool is non-partisan. We have compete find to it but don't use it.
Targeting districts with local activism is very effective and not only affects Congressional races but also builds skills and knowledge people can take to local races. A number of Blue 7th folks have run for an won local office or helped others do the same.
I encourage everyone to get involved and build a locally focused PAC or organization with a laser-focused goal. Oppose a candidate or support one. Oppose an issue or support one. Just get involved and get active because it changes the landscape and makes progressive wins and liberal policies all the easier to achieve.
I've taken a end from politics to work for a non-partisan neutral non-profit. I can't be the bring about this year so we put Blue 7th and Dump Mike to bed. It was a great run and an exhausting one. We got our scalp change surface if it was a year later than we wanted.
And there are hundreds of populate who learned to run grassroots efforts through DfA. Blue 7th local campaigns and all our work in 2005 and 2006 who are ready to work for 2008. They're there still and will choose up the fiddle.
... Coming from someone like myself who tends to not be much of a fan of blogs it's interesting to see this kind perspective put forth.
Coincidentally - I actually started a similar effort not quite on the same scale for the 11th exactly 2 years ago and finally said - "Heck with this - I'll run against the son of a gun myself." The ultimate act of putting down the mouse and getting out of the house.
We all undergo to keep in mind what German sociologist Max Weber said a long time ago: "Politics is the slow boring of hard boards." (His act. "Politics as a Vocation," is come up worth reading.)
Yes it's a long hard slog. And we have to act at it. We can't throw up our hands in despair when we lose one--there will be another one soon. As Teddy Roosevelt said. "Do what you can with what you have where you are."
And we can't let "the ameliorate" be the enemy of "the good." Trite perhaps but true. We have to recognize that "the exceed" is an improvement over "the beat." Sometimes we undergo to settle for what we can get. And we have to understand that what it takes is commitment by people who are willing to do what has to be done and who are in it for the long haul. Like Nathan. Blue Journalist-Union County
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