''What’s new at the DNC?''

"On a conference call with DNC members today, Dean made note of several things.
Dean has been to 18 states since mid-February, helping raise over $800K for state parties. The DNC will, of course, be ramping up its own fundraising in the coming weeks ahead of the June 30 reporting deadline.

The DNC funding for state parties is proceeding and people are being hired. New states to receive funding include Mississippi, Nevada, Nebraska, and Wyoming. A team continues to visit all states and evaluate the parties to determine what they need most.

He talked about the Cornell Belcher poll, which evaluated why people voted the way they did. According to Dean, Democrats must address people’s fears about raising their children in a difficult social environment. Children get sold a culture that often seems to be mostly about sex, materialism, and violence; it scares the hell out of parents (me included). Democrats need to acknowledge the difficulty because people are voting family interests rather than ecomonic interests.

Dean wants to share communications lists, but not fundraising lists (”that would burn out donors”) with the state parties. He wants Democrats to be on the offensive about moral values: feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, treating your neighbors well. He said that people have a hard time understanding why the filibuster is important, but that they get it when

Dean took several questions from the members. One that stood out for me was the woman who said that she is often told that the Democrats aren’t hitting hard enough on every issue. Dean said that responding to everything dilutes our message and that Dems have to pick issues. He pointed out the consistent work on Social Security as a success story. Another question was asked about organizing veterans. He said that a project had started to identify DNC members who are veterans and asked the questioner if he was willing to work on that effort and told him who to contact.

He also gave us some tasks to do. This is great! As a new DNC member, I’m not sure what DNC members did before, but I get the feeling not much was expected. I’ve also heard that conference calls under the previous regime weren’t exactly interactive, and that most of the “questions” consisted of fawning tributes to McAuliffe."-from the post Monday on The American Street.