Run for Office, Dammit! Yes, I'm Talking to You

In 2012, Kentuckians will elect 100 members of the state House and 19 of the 38 members of the state Senate, plus local officials in all 120 counties and more than 200 cities and towns. That's fiscal court magistrates, county executives, city council members, mayors, sheriffs, jailers, constables, county clerks, circuit court clerks and some District and Circuit Court Judges.

Pretty much everybody who has the power to make your life easier or a living hell.

In Kentucky, you have until January 31 to file as a candidate for any of those offices (circuit court clerk and judge positions require qualifications or a test.) Filing fee for House seats is $500, but local races are commensurately lower.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, that is the only money the law requires you to spend to run for office. If all you want to do is prevent somebody from walking into office unchallenged, you do not have to do one single fucking thing after you pay your filing fee. Your name is on the ballot, your point is made, you're done.

If your goal is to win, of course, then you'd be smart to beg people for contributions, buy advertising and spend your free time knocking on doors and begging people to vote for you.

And you won't be alone.

Kenneth Quinnell at Crooks and Liars:

Progressive training organization New Organizing Institute launched a new program "2,012 for 2012," designed to recruit 2,012 new candidates to run for local offices in the 2012 elections. NOI's efforts have been so successful leading up to the official launch of the campaign, with 2020 pledges as of Friday morning, that they have already revised their goal upward to now target 5,000 new progressives running for local offices in next year's election.

Across America there are more than half a million local elected offices -- that's more than 500,000 ways to influence whether government serves the 99% or just the 1%. We need progressive voices at every table where decisions are made that impact our families, from state legislatures to utility commissions.

2,012 for 2012 is a non-partisan initiative to recruit a new generation of progressive candidates for local office. The initiative is a movement-wide effort driven by some of the most effective and creative progressive non-profits in the country, and hosted by the Candidate Project (a program of the New Organizing Institute).

Early partners in the campaign include: Progressive Majority, Emerge America, the American Dream Movement, Credo Mobile, Democracy for America, Color of Change, Living Liberally, the Women's Campaign Fund and America Votes.

But what if your heart is with the Occupy protests, and you don't think electoral politics has any chance of curing what ails this country?

Here's David Atkins, thereisnospoon, at Hullabaloo to explain why you should get involved anyway:

No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries and no matter how successful the revolution, at the end of the day organizational power will step in to win the day. It always does. That organizational power can be a force for good or for ill. But especially in democratic societies, the ability to leverage organized support toward specific ends will always trump anarchic mass sentiment. There's a reason that feel-good stories like the original Star Wars trilogy end with the death of the Emperor and the destruction of the Imperial regime; good storytellers spare us the ugly aftermath of the fractious rebuilding process because the results are rarely pretty.

It's easy to understand the sentiments of those who seek anti-organizational and apolitical solutions to America's problems, and who see the system as so hopelessly corrupted that it's barely worth voting much less becoming organizationally involved. But unfortunately, those who either refuse to or fall behind in participation in the process, like the liberals and secularists in Egypt, will find themselves at the mercy of those who do.

SNIP

Similar lessons will apply for the Occupy movement. No matter how successful the movement may become in terms of shaking the foundations of the financial elite, power will ultimately be leveraged at the ballot box or not at all. As in Egypt, those who ignore or are unable to leverage the power of organization will be condemned to be subject to those who do have that power.

As we approach 2012, Occupiers will face of a myriad of choices regarding how and to what extent to engage in electoral politics. If they choose not to engage at all, the movement will ultimately fizzle and/or be co-opted. If they choose to engage simply on behalf of (mostly Democratic) candidates who support justice for the 99% against the 1%, all that will be accomplished is opening up the gap for Democratic victories in the endless electoral pendulum, without extracting necessary concessions from Democratic politicians in terms of governance on behalf of the 99%. If they choose to engage on behalf of some third party, they will ultimately be ground into the dust like every other third party movement in recent history.

My advice: Occupy the Democratic Party. If Occupiers want to make a real difference over the long-term, they will do what the secularists in Egypt would have had to do from nearly the beginning: organize, organize, organize. In the American two-party system, that means taking the Democratic Party over from the inside just as movement conservatives took the GOP over starting in the 1960s and 1970s, when the hippie revolution gave way to Richard Nixon, then Jimmy Carter, then Ronald Reagan.

If Occupiers can bend the Democratic Party to their will now and over the long haul, they will have made a lasting accomplishment that cannot be co-opted. If they eschew organizational power and electoral processes as unclean and beneath their lofty goals, they will suffer the same fate as young liberal Egyptians have at the hands of the conservative religious parties.