Saving President Amy…
Being a Minnesotan and a progressive, Amy was an easy first choice for me. So I signed onto the campaign and waited for marching orders, hopefully in the direction of Iowa. And waited… While my inbox filled with daily and then some fundraising appeals, I got not a single “were having a campaign event” notice. Then I looked at the polls and saw Amy barely registering in the very low single digits. So I regretfully switched my support to my second choice, Elizabeth Warren. While Liz’s flavor of progressive was short on practicality, she has the best ground operation going in Iowa and they excel at doing events.
Meanwhile, Amy’s campaign was sputtering- While they bussed in supporters to put on a good show at the big events, there were still disconnects, like the Liberty and Justice event bit over a week ago with volunteers not getting home ’til 4:30 am. So I followed the campaign through northwest Iowa on Friday, and the campaign comedy continued…
For a start, the campaign on just a couple days notice decided to do a swing through northern Iowa. This resulted in conflicting itineraries on the campaign website, the DM Register website, and over at Iowa Starting Line’s site. Local media notice of the events was missing, due to the short notice. So no surprise that a 3pm Friday event in Pocohontas produced a scant 40 attendees in a county of 7000. At 6 pm in Sioux Center maybe a hundred turned out in a county of 33,000, a few days before Mayor Pete turned out at least 400 in slightly less populous Spencer in Clay county. It gets worse- trying to make the crowd look bigger, the Amy staffers in front of god, the media, and everybody shooed attendees up from the back seats and put those chairs away. And may be a good thing the crowds were small, as Amy wasn’t exactly firing ‘em up anyway.
Yet despite these mistakes, Amy’s moving up in the polls and at least in Iowa has made the top 5 and nationally has qualified for the December debate. Even an incompetent campaign can’t totally keep the best candidate down- Amy is the practical progressive with the best combination of policies that can actually pass the senate and the swing state appeal that will make her president.
Amy deserves better, and we owe her… So I’m dropping out of the non existent out here Warren campaign and goin‘ all in for Amy! There’s dozens, hundreds, and literally thousands of us Minnesotans that organized and door knocked Paul Wellstone to the Senate and Barack to the White House. It’s time for us all to put everything we’ve learned in those campaigns and our boundless energy into the greatest campaign Minnesota AND Iowa has ever seen to send Amy to the White House.
It ain’t gonna be easy, but it can be done- Show Amy some video of Pete’s stump speech so she can see how a moderate can excite a crowd. Capture the data and get it working, we need a 3D view of Amy’s supporters, confirmed and potential, so we can track and guide them to the caucuses. We need an exciting campaign event road show starring Amy that would do a rock band proud while performing right on schedule in an Iowa blizzard. We need an all singing, all dancing social media campaign that spreads like a turbocharged virus and develops and drives Amy supporters to the caucuses and primaries.
And most of all, we need you- Please join me in going all in for President Amy!
Sassy Democrat 