Last Post for Lent, Apart maybe from Sundays in Cases of Immense Blessing!

I had a very good conversation during a plane flight back to MN this past thursday with a conservative catholic business executive named Joe who works for Bank of America. I think he was Joe Price, their Chief Financial Officer, he was flying to MN his 2nd home for some r&r and to detox from the stress of his job, go figure... He really liked my idea: Project Democratic Renewal(PDR) for using PR in state hous... and enabling the proliferation of local third parties that would keep either of the two main parties from gaining a permanent majority and mentioned (once briefly) that he'd like to help me out financially. We talked about a number of things and even though he's a conservative, he is simply tired of the elitism in both of the main parties and is a big supporter of locally-oriented activism. I gave him my email address, since he didn't have his business cards on him and he thanked me sincerely for the conversation.

I haven't heard back from him yet and who knows, maybe for whatever reason, he might not get back to me or follow thru, but I believe he was sincere, which shows that the idea has appeal across party lines, at least among those who care about the greater common good. It also spurred me to think strategically how I'd pitch the idea. I decided I could use some seed seed capital to use in advance of Google's 10 to the 100th contest in Mid-March, where I'm sure it'll be among the contenders to make sure it gets sufficient early support to be among the top ideas in its category so it'll have a chance to win and at least get plenty of exposure for the idea.

The next step was going to be to get autonomous yet dialoguing single-issue campaigns going in four strategically-chosen states(MN, ME, CA, WA), with the idea of emulating Obama's primary campaign as much as possible to get the idea out and raise additional needed funds and to aim to make the odds of it passing in at least one of the 4 states, like 50-50. The hope was that this would be high enough odds of success to land some big-fish supporters, which in turn would get it to pass sooner and spread to help start similar movements in other US states.

My conversation w. Joe and the introduction of the Maldonaldo "Top Two" initiative in CA seemed
auspicious as it directs much attention to the idea of state-level election reform. I like the idea of "top two", which is basically a two-stage election with the first stage selecting the top two among all of the competing candidates to proceed on to the general election. I think that it would work better if there were maybe a limit on the total no. of primary candidates, like 8 per seat, based on number of distinct signatures gathered by primary candidate-wannabes, with incumbents, of course, getting a free-pass. Then, if voters could have the right to endorse up to three of the candidates, it would make the dynamics of the primary harder for the party to determine or dominate. It would also get voters to shop around and set up an incentive for the candidates to demonstrate their fitness as a candidate, rather than simply talking down their opponents.

So if those two features: "Top Two" and "Endorse Up To Three" were combined and used for the majority of state elections, excepting municipal elections and state house of reps where a PDR-system wd be used in the general elections, then the number of possible options for voters with 8 candidates in the open primary would go up more than ten-fold and it would definitively redirect local third party activism to local elections. And, as a third party aficionado/true-believer/advocate for "a new kind of third party", I honestly think that this effective exclusion of third parties from most elections would be a blessing in disguise since third party's could then decentralize, reducing their intraparty rivalry, and make better use of their limited political capital. The use of "Top Two" could paradoxically help the local third parties gain even more influence, since if the "Top Two" candidates are closer in terms of their fitness as candidates then the general elections would be closer,so strategically-voting local third parties could have a significant amount of pull in quite a few state elections.

So even if I don't get any money from Joe and have to focus initially on maybe just two states, it seems my idea continues to evolve and become more fit. The three reforms together would truly and paradoxically bolster both centrism and inclusivism, stability and change, civility and accountability. (It's amazing how that number three keeps popping up all over, but maybe that's just me....) What I basically need is to look into legit ways(I'm sure the Google people are eventually going to read this email...) to get some momentum going in Google's contest early on. If you'd like to help in some way or know others who would, I just might have some working capital to spread around soon.
dlw