Using the TEAM/Votec and VAN System
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dunning letter is characteristic of how the statewide voter roll will be
used, lawfully but misleadingly, by political fund-raisers and consultants, in
this case, the RNC.
Most junk-mail fundraising letters I get (age/race/income
specific) from the DNC/DSCC/DCCC and so on are designed to look like some sort
of official poll survey. Most solicitations I get from the GOP are much more expensive
and carefully designed for “high net worth individuals” or the “executive-professional”
market segments. Still, they are even more manipulative/deceptive.
This stuff works well enough to fund large-scale political
operations. But, it is wholly destructive of real parties and demoralizing for
popular parties – all of them, left to right and in-between.
Notice how the GOP base is increasingly alienated and
Trans-Texas Corridor and mythical NAFTA Superhighway/North American Union.
There will be more and more so over the economy generally and the war, which is
now unpopular on the right.
The Seven Laws of Identity and technologies like InfoCard
are a much better way to build real value in political participation by issuing
uniformly strong, trusted political credentials to party members, then adding
value to political participation, treating volunteer work and monetary donation
comparably. I call this the Bright Line and the Strong Party Agenda,
respectively.
Right now, we suppress political participation by the young
and suck value out of political memories of the elderly by aping obsolete,
discriminatory, and overly centralized GOP database/marketing technology. We squander
this money on media-centric campaigning that benefits … the media
monopolies. Duh!
The “net-roots” approach to fund raising is
already generally superior to the (DEAN) consultants’ “webified”
direct-mail and robo-call concessions like the VAN. These are optimized for “likely
voters” and essentially irrelevant to both the demography and strategy
of, for instance, the Harris County “sweep” campaign. They cannot
and are not being used to support the sustaining membership program. But,
the anti-DEAN (Harold Ickes/Mikal Watts) DSCC/DCCC consultants’ alternative
is no better.
In fact, as long as blow-hard lawyers and mercenary pimp-consultants
from either wing of the party establishment are filtering and making technology
decisions and plans, they will probably be wrong.
InfoCard technology as implemented by the actual
computer industry (not the same thing as the computer lobby) is a good
long-term technology strategy for our caucus and party. Short-term CiviCRM
is the best politically-oriented “citizen relationship management”
technology available.
I think the County Party will need direct read/write access
to the TEAM/Votec system in order to discharge their statutory responsibility
to credential delegates exclusively and to counter vote suppression. This is a
matter this caucus and this task force should raise and press with the County
Chairman.
I think this caucus can and should use access VAN and CiviCRM
access to mobilize convention delegates.
We know all we are going to about voting machines: The machines
are exquisitely vulnerable and mitigation protocols in Texas and Harris County
are inadequate. But, as long has they have the Hart brand, the Vichy and Enron Democrats
– I guess we can call them the GONZALES Democrats now -- are not going to
raise a peep.
But, the government (police-state) and party (segmented
marketing) database technologies are the most important today. And, we –
this caucus – are out front of the clueless, cringing-liberal party
establishment in these matters. We have a chance to enlist Glen MAXEY. He is
running for Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector and fancies himself something
of a geek. He is an Aggie. And, he should look at the example of Debra BOWEN who,
though just another damn lawyer, plays the role of an engineer in California. It
works!
::JRBehrman
