Danny Glover at the National Journal's Beltway Blogger made a similar connection in linking to Stoller's post: Back 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 state's 7th District. That's when Rudy launched a blog called Dump Mike Ferguson.
The blog nearly accomplished its mission of helping boot 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 credit 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.
There's only one problem: Dump Mike didn't dump Mike.
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 research 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 embarrass 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 district's grassroots was far more impactful.
If you've bothered to read this far -- and I hope you have because I think this is important -- I hope 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 blog I founded and wrote.
The real story, and the real heroes, are the people of Blue 7th PAC, a grassroots federal political action 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 still 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 number of other folks suggested we had a choice: quit or fight harder next time. We decided to fight harder, to take the lists and grassroots efforts of my Freeholder campaign and extend it to the entire 7th district.
The first thing we did was figure out what the hell went wrong. 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 absent. 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 right 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 raise the money, build the volunteer network and publicize Ferguson's true beliefs and votes. We filed to create a federal PAC called Blue 7th, put up the blog on a domain I bought and offered to Steve Brozak (he declined) for the 2004 campaign, 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 found close to a half million in contributions tied to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. We had others who spent downtime at home and work studying the committee transcripts and discovered Ferguson had been nicknamed "Mr. Embryo" for his radical anti-stem cell research 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 even if we were not credited.
The blog changed the web environment for NJ7. Prior to our launch the only content about Ferguson came from his House and campaign websites and a couple articles here and there. Dump Mike became a front page link on every major search 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 Bush administration and scheduled two town hall meetings. Blue 7th sent out an e-mail to our list -- about 500 people at the time -- and filled the room. Ferguson's people saw me and knew I was trouble, but they didn't know 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 wrote a long post on it on Dump Mike.
We sent it out to the list and encouraged people to send it to the papers in letter form, which they did and we got coverage. Ferguson never held another town meeting on any topic with advance notice. Everything became scripted just like a Bush rally. 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 seat 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 district that Ferguson won easily. Our Meetups were instructional on how to talk 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 content in the paper 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 vote on Bush, 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.
Blue 7th continued blasting Ferguson and raising awareness. Our e-mail list 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 Post, 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 blog, 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 blog that registered more than 3,000 voters from Democratic leaning areas.
It was people who lived in the district, who cared about the issues, who wanted to kick 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 blog.
But I am more proud of the hundreds of people who decided they wanted to make a change, that they wanted to participate in citizen-based politics. What we did we did together, and we did it on the streets and with hard work 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 take back our country and our party, 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 district. 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 point you are heard. The corporations know to do it, but the tool is non-partisan. We have equal access 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 break from politics to work for a non-partisan, neutral non-profit. I can't be the lead 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, even if it was a year later than we wanted.
And there are hundreds of people 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 pick up the slack.
Give them the applause, not their tools. I do.
Crossposted on Daily Kos |
