Susan Turnbull, a candidate for DNC Vice Chair and a friend of mine, has asked me to cross-post this MyDD post by her . She does not have diary posting privileges at Daily Kos yet. This is a great opportunity for us to tell the party our ideas, so please recommend this diary.
Hello, my name is Susie Turnbull. I'm running for DNC Vice Chair, and I am a Democrat through and through.
I know that netroots support and enthusiasm is essential to our party's success in the twenty-first century. The DNC has a tremendous opportunity to make use of this resource in order to put the Democratic Party back on the path to victory. Online support should be valuable to the party not only for party fundraising efforts, but as a source of ideas.
I'd like to begin by letting all of you know a little bit about myself and my campaign for vice-chair. Like you, I come from a grassroots background. Starting in 1982 I began volunteering as an activist on behalf of various civic and Democratic Party causes locally in my home of Montgomery County, MD. I worked my way up to Montgomery County Chair, DNC member, state chair of the Gore campaign, and most recently one of the DNC Deputy Chairs. During my time at the DNC I have served as Chair of the DNC Women's Caucus, National Chair of the Women's Leadership Forum, and co-founder of the Women's Vote Center. If elected Vice Chair I hope to continue this work, which would enable me to extend our outreach to even bigger goals, such as helping develop programs within our states to recruit and train candidates for all elective offices and build a stronger media presence for women surrogates.
My campaign for party vice-chair is going very well and I now have DNC members supporting me from all 50 states. I'm very optimistic about my chances of winning the post; however, I know that winning the election on February 12th is only the beginning. I believe that the more the party can communicate with the netroots, the more likely we are to find some of the ideas that are out there but have just never made there way to DNC HQ. From your view at the grassroots level, what is working and what is not? What new ideas could the party implement in order to improve our performance? These are the important questions we need to be asking, and I look forward to doing so after the election this week.
Just to let you know, I may not be able to reply to all your comments for the next few days. I promise I will get back to you as soon as I can after the election, but for now I have to focus on continuing to contact DNC members for their support. Thank you for your continued activism and dedication on behalf of the party - I look forward to working with you.