Why Florida Democrats Lose Elections
I got an email from grassroots@fladems.com inviting me to a $150 dinner with Nancy Pelosi in Hollywood, Florida, a 3.6 hour drive away from my home in Bradenton. $150? Isn’t that a little much for “grassroots” Democrats? And note that this event is being held in a hotel with a minimum room charge — after event discount — of $168, in a town full of $50 and $60 motels. I guess budget-strapped working and retired people don’t qualify to be “grassroots” Florida Democrats. But that’s not all. If you want to see some serious Republican-type big-biz screwing, take a look at the fine print behind the Florida Democratic Party MasterCard.
A Great Credit Card Deal (not)!
- 2.9% Introductory APR on Purchases and Balance Transfers*
- Platinum MasterCard Benefits
- 100% Fraud Protection
- Support the Democratic party with every purchase**
That’s the big, bold come-on. To see what’s really going on with this credit card, you need to go to the terms and conditions page and read it v-e-r-y carefully.
Did you see the “Default APR?” It’s “Up to 28.24% variable.†”
Even the lesser interest rates mentioned after the introductory 9-month period are scary-high, as in w-a-y higher than I pay on a plain-jane Bank of America Visa card.
Note, too, the additional fees on balance transfers and cash advances. Not to mention late fees…
This credit card is a crummy deal. Worse, it doesn’t look like the Democratic Party gets a lot of money out of it, either. Down at the bottom of a separate Terms and Conditions page, it talks about the Party getting “2,000 to 5,500 points depending on the APR for which you qualify.” A “point” seems to be worth one penny, or as the card issuer puts it, “points in my account will be converted and contributed monthly to the Florida Democratic Party at the rate of one dollar for every one hundred points earned.” Either way, this means the Party gets a commission of between $20 and $55 for each sucker they drag in, which is not a whole lot.
My first question was, “Does the Democratic Party get more money for bringing in people with good credit, who pay the lower interest rate; or for bringing in people with shaky credit, who pay a higher interest rate?”
This question is not answered anywhere I could find on either Terms and Conditions page, nor does either one mention — so far as I can see — the relationship between “points” earned and the amount you spend with this card each month.
It’s almost certainly a better deal for both you and the Democratic Party to get a more reasonable bank-issued credit card and write a $100 check to the Party (or better yet, to a local candidate you like) than to sign up for this turkey.
Grassroots? Bullshit!
If you’re going to send me email from grassroots@fladems.com, I want to see messages from grassroots people, not solicitations from former Congresswoman Karen L. Thurman, the current Florida Democratic Party chairbeing. To me “grassroots” communications should be words from a truckdriver in Pensacola who is replying to a note from a nurse in Miami, who shared a concern with a handicapped retiree from Sarasota. “Grassroots,” to me, implies a level of egalitarianism and openness that is apparently totally alien to Florida Democratic leaders, who have no place on their website where an ordinary working citizen can post a message, and don’t have any visible way to sign up for any kind of email group or other discussion forum.
If you are a Democrat in Florida, the Party talks to you, and all you are supposed to do is volunteer to work for the Party or — better yet — send money.
This is true on the local level, too. I looked at the list of County Democratic Party organizations on the Florida Democrats site, and of the dozen+ I checked among those that had websites (not all do), not one mentioned any kind of grassroots forum or offered an opportunity to sign up for an interactive email list or any other kind of group that gave ordinary citizens a voice.
This is the way things worked in the old Soviet Union, comrades. And the modern U.S. Republican Party has the same attitude.
Democrats shouldn’t follow that path. It’s bad enough when one major political party does. When both of the main parties are run as top-down organizations, our country is in big trouble.
What Should We Do?
I’ve pretty much given up on the Florida version of the Democratic Party in its present form. Being a working person on a tight budget, I am not going to go to “grassroots” gatherings that would cost me a day’s driving time round-trip and $400 for the event itself and a room and a couple of other meals. And I am not going to take a political party seriously that thinks the “grassroots” should not have a public voice on its websites and other online facilities.
So I’ve re-registered as an Independent — the fastest-growing party affiliation in Florida. I’m going to let the top-downers in both parties choose their candidates, then I’ll vote against the worst ones in the general election.
Along the way, I may send a little money to, and do a little work for, a candidate or two I feel would do a good job if elected, but I’ll do it directly rather than through either party hierarchy.
This seems to be the only sensible course for a “grassroots” citizen until or unless one of the major parties decides to get its act together and starts listening to citizens instead of forcing its agenda down our throats.
Or perhaps a new, responsive, more-or-less centrist party will come along that’s worth our time and effort. I think an awful lot of us are hoping for something like this to happen.
June 3rd, 2007 at 6:09 am
My last comment here was humor. This one is serious.
Some of us in the Open Source community down here in Tejas are working on things like a Transparent Federal Budget and choosing, as you seem to have from this Blog post, to vote on merit rather than party affiliation. If more tech-savvy people get involved in the process (and the keyword here is *involvement*) we might just be able to be a counter-balance to the moneyed interests.
I know, maybe I’m dreaming.
What I do believe is that they can’t live without our savvy. We’re the courtiers. Maybe we should have just a bit more say in how the money is spent. Last I knew, it was still our country.
RA
June 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 am
Yeah, you’ll never counteract the money interests. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have an influence.
That said, your best chance of influence is probably party involvement. That’s where your best chance is to catch someone’s ear. I became active in my county’s GOP in 2004, and now I’m the district chair, and I know most of the movers and shakers, and the candidates listen to me when I pick up the phone (and sometimes they call me themselves). I don’t really care about that sort of thing much, but if you do, maybe that’s a way you can go about it.
That said, as to grassroots and expensive dinners, we’ve had those. I saw Dick Cheney for $250. McCain for about the same. That was about what I was planning to donate for the year for the two candidates they were campaigning for, so I put it into the dinners; I suspect for many it was only a fraction of what they would give for the year. Still, a lot of people can’t afford that much, of course: and we had ways for them to get in for free, mostly by volunteering to work on preparing for the dinners and so on. For the Cheney event (pictures here!), if you went outside and counterprotested the protestors, you got in for free.
Also, our county party is pretty much entirely grassroots. Sure we have a few rich businesspeople here and there, but they don’t dominate the process any more than anyone else. Our county chair is a former schoolteacher, our grassroots chair is a retired-cop-turned-farmer, and so on. And our county is powerful in the state party (not as powerful as King County, but at the top of the second tier). We open up the platform committee to all comers, we post things on the county party web site from anyone who wants to post something relevant.
Maybe we’re Republicans, but no one can accuse us of being elitist. There’s the big dinners, but that’s the one thing, and we still worked to make sure if someone really wanted to come and couldn’t pay, they could.
Indeed, if anything, it’s the Democrats who are elitist. Maybe has something to do with party domination: I’ve almost always lived in states (not necessarily counties: my current county is about 50-50 these days) dominated by Democrats, and it’s always been the Democrats who are the most elitist, my entire life: in Massachusetts, in California, in Washington.
And as best I can tell it’s always been this way. Sure, you can want it to change, but it’s always been this way. Our entire lives, anyway.