Wampum

Last fall, Eric, Dwight, Deb and I sat in their shiny new sunroom plotting the overthrow of the universe. Alright, just the Republican hegemony over the US political system. And despite my long term affection for former Senator John Edwards, I let first Dwight, then Eric, convince me that in a post-Bush world, tottering on the brink of economic, environmental and moral disaster, Democrats, no, all Americans, would need a leader with a depth of experience combined with great insight and strength of character few leaders in America possess today.

Al Gore, Jr., they both said, he was the man who fit that criterion to a "T".

At that point, even less so than today, when one can see a few positive signs that Mr. Gore might just put at least a big toe in the water, the chance of a Gore run for the 2008 Democratic nomination seemed the longest of long-shots. However, we all agreed that there was truly no downside for developing a volunteer-based distributed campaign model for a Draft Gore movement, particularly if we strove to make it flexible enough to either fold into an official campaign, should we attain our goal and Al Gore run, or, if we should fail in that regard, still be used for other grassroots campaigns.

So this morning, I finally bit the bullet and purchased DraftGore2008.org. The site is now up and running (no www necessary, though Eric said he'd map them in if I want, for the w-dependent), though still very, very basic. We're using Drupal, and will fine tune the "look" once we get the feel for the new release (4.7.)

This DraftGore site may differ from other current ones as our single-minded goal is basic mechanics, not message. How do we get the number of necessary delegate, through state caucuses, primaries and wooing PLEOs or "superdelegates"? That is why we're using the distributed campaign model, as it may be possible to run a national volunteer effort by divvying up common tasks and "distributing" the parts to the grassroots, to be completed and returned to the whole, so that the next step can be tackled in a similar manner. The reason an open-source program like Drupal is a good fit with a distributed campaign is that it allows multiple layers of access, so that as volunteers increase their involvement and responsibility, they take more ownership of over keys aspects of the campaign. While a "trusted user" on Kos gets to troll rate someone, the same status on a distributed campaign allows one to develop content, determine agenda items, divvy up tasks, etc.

I'll probably be buried over there for the next week or so, trying to get up to speed, so unless Norton, Griles or Norquist are indicted (!!!) I'll be MIA on Wampum for much of that time.

So if you have the time or inclination, come on over and join the cheer, run, Al, run!