Once upon a time the Democratic Party had structure, there were wards and bosses and goto folks. Now

[CK_John]

it's a loose collection of shared interests, one step removed from facebook. This is not quiet a plan for success but a plan for self destruction.

So how long will it take to be replaced and what will be the replacement???

[KG]

1. that was before they started feeding at corporate trough like the other guys....

[sibelian]

2. Well, we could start here.

But that would mean losing the grandstanding, posts that consist of little more than "that's your opinion dumbass", attributions of personality flaws....

I'm beginning to think that the Internet is becoming an extremely poor way of coordinating political movements or developing political thinking. Which is a pity, because it used to be a lot less like that.

[hfojvt]

7. not sure we could start here

but the people who post here

as has been suggested in the past

could seek out their own LOCAL party which would no doubt love to have more volunteers.

But that does take some time, and there are often clashes of personalities in real life too. Groups of people often know how to bicker and fight and develop cliques and enemies lists.

[sibelian]

9. I can't actually do the bickering any more.

It's just wasting my time.

I'm off, anyway! I need to go and talk Scottish independence in Scotland!

byzee, take care

[sibelian]

3. K&R, btw.

[5X]

4. We still have that structure in parts of Oklahoma, and it is not a good thing.

Some of the party bosses only make sure repubs get elected or any dems are right wingers.

[PATRICK]

5. Dean was building

infrastructure where there had been none. Which meant new people not controlled by the old in safe territories. That kind of structure may easily be conceived as a threat to personal power and the minimalist uber strategy and philosophy of the national party planners. So, calcified or accommodating structure or progressive structure.

The GOP has no such luxury of choice. Without an actual base to suppress they went to the nuts and even bigger money nuts to reinvent themselves after wider Reagan conservatism mostly ran its enthusiasm into the ground. Now they have plenty of ground level fanatics, lots of fire and money at odds with the big program.

So one party hardly tries anything, even rebuilding. The other lunges insanely, savagely,after everything so long as it steers in the Right direction. In a contest, who wins?

[hfojvt]

6. we still have wards and precinct people

at least here in Kansas. The difficulty we have had, since I became one in 2004 - is finding people to fill the positions. If we don't have precinct people, then we can't have ward captains (somebody who is above the precinct people).

In my fairly large county (for Kansas) we have about seventy precinct positions, but we only have about fifteen of them filled. And it has been that way for a decade.

When I first joined with them in the fall of 2004, the whole system kinda vanished after the election. We did nothing. Following some other counties, I helped to promote and establish monthly breakfast meetings all year long.

One of which I have skipped this morning.

That has not been a winning strategy in my mind. In fact, after 2010, I sorta wanted to go in a different direction. In order to bring more people in, I think, we should be - doing fun stuff.

I mean, dammit, there are about 11,000 Democratic voters in this county. So why can we NOT get 200 people to an event? That's only 2%. But I am not sure what kind of event would bring in 200 people. The Republicans, on the other hand had about 150 at their annual Lincoln Day dinner, and that's like a $25 ticket.

[oldandhappy]

8. Our local club has built a GO team and

it has expanded to county wide. We cannot change the country but we can change our part of it and we are trying hard to do that. It takes all of us. Please volunteer as a precinct worker. We can do this!