Hello fellow Dems!
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a diary about Frederick Blue, a grassroots effort to build a new Democratic infrastructure for Frederick County, Maryland. Well, I thought I’d provide a little more background and a progress report.
We’ve taken many paths to arrive at our organization. I was involved with the Howard Dean campaign around these parts (which was my first-ever direct involvement in any political effort); eventually I worked with Frederick for Kerry, where our little network got bigger. We’ve got a couple of people who’ve been involved in local Frederick politics for a long time, and a few newcomers to the scene. We all share the same goal — bringing our nation back to sanity by acting locally. George W. Bush has made activists of us all.
Some of us got involved in last year’s Frederick City election, supporting the mayoral and aldermanic campiagns. The results were a mixed bag; though the Dems failed to hold onto the mayorship (it’s a complicated story; suffice it to say that the Dem incumbent got defeated in the primary by a former mayor, which scrambled the equation), we were able to gain a 3-2 majority on the Board of Aldermen.
Reading Crashing the Gate, I was struck by the parallels between the netroots’ leaders’ struggle to get through to a sclerotic national Democratic Party and our own efforts to get heard by the local Democratic powers-that-be. That said, most of the local Democratic “elders” are supportive of our project; they’re going to give us a chance to show them.
And show them we will. We have fundraising going now full-throttle, the fruits of which will be primarily invested in local publicity. We’ve got a name for our online publication, the Frederick Blueprint, and we’ve recruited seven writers, with more to come. We are developing a strong, muscular website that will be the talk of the Frederick netizen community. We’ve even got a logo!
We’re still on target for a May rollout. I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with an update.
Good night and good luck…
