Saturday, August 08, 2009

A lively meeting...

This past Thursday's meeting was quite lively, and aside from primary-mission business, we discussed working on a health care event in September, and of course the Progressive coalition activities list vote. We had some new people come and sit in with us, and there was a lively open discussion period after the meeting. We actually closed the IHOP down. (As in, we stayed until they closed at their normal time.)

We also discussed the one thing George Bush got right - which you can read about HERE.

Dan

Friday, August 07, 2009

Re-focussing PDI...

A determination has been made over the past couple of months to re-focus PDI back onto its original primary mission: helping to get more Progressives elected to office as Democrats, within the State of Illinois.

PDI is intended to be a State-level organization, not a national-level organization. This is not to say that we do not care about national-level issues, we do very much. However, most politicians who wind up in national offices start in one of the 50 states first. It is also helpful for Progressive national-level politicians to have a lot of Progressive support at the local level to support them to their home constituencies through achieving progressive goals in national legislation.

To the end of electing more truly Progressive Democrats within Illinois, we will begin with creating a "candidate database" that ranks candidates for office within Illinois against an array of the ten highest-priority Progressive platform issues, and possibly State or local-specific issues as needed.

Our second goal is to find methods to establish who such candidates are while the elections are still in the petition-signature gather phase of the Primary election cycle. It does no good to identify a truly Progressive candidate running as a Democrat if it is too late to file petition signatures to get them on the ballot in Illinois.

Once we have such a database fairly well established, we will begin posting candidate rankings by issue online for the general public to see.

If you are a progressive candidate for office within the State of Illinois and willing to run as a candidate, please contact us at info@illinoisprogressives.org .

Regards,

Dan Stafford
Co-Chair, PDI
www.illinoisprogressives.org