There's an ill wind comin' thanks to Senator Brrrr and Dems' lack of GOTV

but in Buncombe, the local OFA organizer did an amazing job.

There's only so much the grassroots can do when our elected officials (I'm looking at you, Congressional Dems) repeatedly drop the ball.

I can only speak from my viewpoint in Raleigh and in the state capital city. As I said, the folks at the Goodwin House who give the OFA its marching orders are simply too inexperienced and they are incompetent.

Look at the election returns map. Buncombe is the only county in the West that went blue. The ONLY one.

I can only speak as an individual here -- one who Unaffiliated earlier this year -- but I believe the North Carolina Democratic Party has to own a good part of the general Assembly defeats. They have seen their members suffer one ethical scandal after another -- all of them tracing back to the need for huge amounts of money to win office and the quid pro quid system that creates -- and the NCDP has done nothing to aggressively strengthen its ethics stand, combat that pay-to-play system or even acknowledge that there is a problem. Worse, they have allowed fraud and ethical violations to flourish on a smaller scale in local parties, even when reported to them, and repeatedly done nothing about them. This tarnishes the party affiliation. You cannot have one Democratic name after another appear in the headlines and not expect it to have an impact.

I personally believe this happens to all parties who have been in power a long time but, please: if you keep looking the other way, don't be surprised when it turns out you didn't see it coming.

I called Senators and begged them to support ethics and campaign finance reforms in the last legislative session. Ironically, the only one who would talk to me was Neal Hunt (R) of Raleigh. He put me in touch with the Minority Leader's office.

Basnight's office would not take my calls.

Voters are moving away from both the parties in droves and sitting out elections due to their disgust with the political process. It's not just about issues; it's about lack of transparency and lack of responsiveness to voters.

But I saw this coming before the 2008 General Election when Obama For America was taking over the Democratic Party at the national and state level. OFA canceled "Constructing Victory" in June 2008 so that the Party volunteers wouldn't be the ones out there making contact with 20 voters three times before the election, and building the party with new folks.

Then of course there is the old business (still unsettled in my mind) about volunteer lists we were promised. But OFA stiffed us on that promise.

Then there were the 4 big races that OFA either didn't get involved in and/or blew:

1. December 2008 GA Senate runoff - which would have given Obama his 60th Senator MONTHS earlier
2. 2009 NJ and VA gubernatorial races - blown because the Democratic Party wasn't being built up after the 2008 election
3. 2010 Mass Senate special election - where OFA staffers down here bragged that they didn't get involved until too late - and then their efforts helped Coakley lose by a smaller margin than had they not gotten involved.

So I am ready to repeat Howard Dean's mantra: we can't take back our country until we first take back our party. In 2004, Dean meant take it back from the DLC/DINO Dems. In 2010, we gotta take our party back from the same DLC DINO Dems - and their hit squad also known as Organizing For America. Their Obama-centric focus has been deadly for our party and candidates.

Here in Wake County, this emphasis on phone banking to get voters to turn out at the polls was driving me and others crazy. Some people report not getting any calls to ask them to vote, and some people got 20 calls. The people that got 20 calls meant that too many folks got none.

And what happened to those people who got calls to show up to vote? When they got to their polling place, was there anyone who could hand them a voter guide and explain how to navigate our ballot? I told folks to vote a straight party ballot, then vote for the judges, then vote for soil and water candidates, then I pissed away an unbelievable amount of time explaining IRV to folks. Many complained that it took them twice as long to vote to figure this out. We had a record number of spoiled ballots - the poll workers said that all but a few were for the IRV race. Our voters had 4 overvotes for every other race on the entire ballot - and 28 for the IRV race.

We had record turnout at my precinct - 61% factoring in all the early and absentee votes. And although we are outnumbered by a 3 to 1 ration, Democratic candidates only lose by a 2-1 ratio. If I can keep those ratios at that level, our candidates usually do well enough elsewhere to win. I kept my ratios on track, but we lost big with a few exceptions.

I feel the biggest problem with the lost seats and the minority status was the last-minute, hyper-manic, permanent campaign mode that doesn't give a damn about party building. And not working "slow and steady" - because that requires too much advance planning.

Ever since I read it in the "Great Santini" by Pat Conroy, I've always told this story about young bulls vs the old bulls as an example of my personal philosophy: "slow and steady gets the job done":

A young bull and an old bull walk of the barn and see a field of cows. The young bull looks over at the old bull and says: "let's run down there real fast and impregnate one of those cows!" The old bull looks over at him and says: "nah! let's walk down there real slow and impregnate ALL of THEM!"

But after this election, I have decided to change my story to reflect my disgust at some of the silly, wasteful, hyper-manic, campaign-mode bullshit that I have been asked to do this year - especially after much of that stuff was a big part of why we lost and lost big-time this election:

5 young bulls and 5 old bulls went to the barn door, looked out and saw a field of 30 cows. The young bulls ran down to the field real fast and grabbed the first five cows they saw, and began to impregnate the same 5 cows, one after the other. The old bulls walked down real slow, went past the 5 young bulls, and they divided up the remaining 25 cows and impregnated 5 different cows per old bull.

The young bulls and the old bulls each impregnated 5 cows, but the old bulls got more work done! But only the young bulls got an e-mail link to a youtube message from David Plouffe thanking them for all their hard work! ;-)