Vote For TOD* (The Other Dude)
How Bad Is It?
.
Well, this sleeping giant, the American people, are now fully awake to the antics of this congress, and, boy are we pissed! We are also born with an inalienable right that is more powerful than any sword to do something about it. Yet it is something that the Congress of the
It is the VOTE!
can understand all the complaining illegals. The following is a short refresher.
There are 435 congressional districts (CDs) in the
But…. What If?
What if your opponent had only an 11% approval rating?
Could this candidate win?
First, we must sell the idea that the ONLY way to bring about meaningful change in this country is to, ideally, elect an entirely new congress[5]. Secondly, we must rely totally on the internet to get this message out there and keep it out there. We must rely on the bloggers to insure that every voter in this country knows what is coming down and why this is necessary for the future of our country. Then we must get enough voters to buy into it to pull it off. The basic premise is very simple.
On November 4, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents must all agree to vote for only the candidate who is not the incumbent in all 435 House of Representative races and 33 Senate races throughout the entire country. This means that Republicans might be required to vote for Democrats, and Democrats might be required to vote for Republicans. This may be a little easier on Independents because they don’t necessarily have a political affiliation; however, the Independent vote is extremely critical to the success of this plan for that same reason. There will be a lot of hard-core party members who will not buy into this plan at all. There is a cadre of politically astute citizens in every county and congressional district in the country who work hard to support their respective party. Each party has a virtual army of like-minded partisan citizens who serve as precinct captains and who hold fundraisers, and who attend state presidential conventions and, if they are well enough connected politically,show up as delegates and alternate delegates to their respective party’s national convention every four years, all on their own nickel, I might add. I know about these tireless believers because I am one of these tireless believers. I have worked the precincts and the polls at election time, I have attended the state and national conventions, I have run for national office under my party’s banner, I have worked in the trenches during the infamous hanging chad hand count in Florida following the 2000 General Election, and I have never voted for a candidate from the opposition party in over fifty years. Nor will I cross the line on November 4th in the presidential race. I will vote for my party’s nomination for president, and I will work on their behalf throughout the election cycle, just as I am working to support my choice in my state’s primary election, and who might not necessarily be my party’s nominee for the office of president.
That doesn’t matter. We are demanding change. All of the presidential candidates have promised to give us change. I haven’t heard one voice from our congress promising that they will give us the change we demand, and frankly should I hear such a voice I would not believe it, such is their dismal 11% record for even attempting to change the direction in which our country is heading. That is what this movement is all about. If only 25% of the party members from each party agree to cross party lines for the good of the country in the congressional races only, those votes and the votes of the independent voters will in all likelihood be sufficient to get the job done.
Third Party voters, such as the Reform Party also have a special role in this plan, perhaps even the most difficult role. It will be very tempting for the third parties to run their own candidates in some of the races. Injecting a third candidate would give an incumbent a better chance of retaining that seat, and it would lessen the chance of making the kind of meaningful impact on the entire effort. Most readers should agree that if the best that a two-party system can produce is a congress with an 11% approval rating, then the time might be about right to seriously entertain a third party in our political process. If there is indeed a “pony in there somewhere” it might have a third party’s name on it. Just so that the “pony” does not turn out to be of the "one trick” variety, it is appropriate to touch on a few other nuances of this potential movement.
It is suggested that if this plan is even mildly successful it will be repeated in subsequent election cycles until there is sufficient purging of the long-standing congressional membership that a third party would be more viable, or even welcomed. It is also a distinct possibility that some of the newest members, especially of the House, might be inclined to change their party affiliation to the newly established Third Party, even sooner rather than later. This possibility would be greatly enhanced with a Third Party looked upon as a coalition builder, rather that as a “spoiler”, as has often been the case under the current status quo.
Finally, it is speculated that, other than the sitting Members of Congress, the other biggest opponents of this plan would be the two primary parties themselves. These entities, or more likely the county executive committees who oversee all 435 congressional districts, might be reluctant to recruit, or sponsor new candidates in an attempt to limit non-incumbent candidates. That would seem very shortsighted, but strange things happen in politics. It is rather speculated that if this movement gains traction throughout the country, these executive committees will strive even harder to field a challenger for every single race just to stay even. This movement might just turn out to be the best game in town.
Time will tell. This document will enter the cyber-world, and time is very compressed in this new world, perhaps as much as word of mouth to the tenth power. I predicted in a book I wrote ten years ago[6] that the internet would make it possible to run a political campaign from the comfort of ones own home without ever even getting dressed except to attend a candidate forum every now and then. Little did I know.
Is it possible that bloggers, given as simple, or as complex a concept as “change” can compete quite effectively with the power of the national media for the attention of Americans thirsty for the elusive product know as “truth”. My contribution has been to merely recognize that change is at hand, identify the obstacle that must be overcome to grasp it, and define the mechanics of pulling it off. It comes down to “how bad do you want it”?
Jim Jacobs
All Rights Reserved January 2008
[1] The ex-TV anchor in the 1976 movie Network, played by Peter Finch
[2] In reality, once the illegals get the right to vote, they will vote other new citizens like themselves into office with the very real possibility of taking over this country without ever firing a shot.
[3] The congresswoman in my district only got $19.6 million of the total, or about two-thirds of her “share”. But, not to worry; she spent another $200,000 on a newsletter mail-out to her constituents boasting of this bit of statesmanship.
[4] The presidential candidates spent a total of $50 million in the Iowa Caucus, a small state with only 7 electoral votes. This madness is another reason for campaign finance reform.
[5] Actually, this can’t quite be accomplished this year because two-thirds of the senate, or about 65 senators are not even up for re-election . The entire House of Representatives is up for re=election every two years.
[6] The Golden Goose Ate All The Grassroots, available at Amazon.com and all leading booksellers.
RE-FORMING A MORE PERFECT
Part I Introduced the potential electorate to a treatise on The Justification For, and a Plan To Replace the
Election Cycle
By: Jim Jacobs
(Written March 2008)
There has indeed been sufficient positive response to the subject submittal to warrant a follow-up on our original notion that the biggest “change” needed in this election cycle is to change out the entire United States Congress. The only exposure this idea has had that we know of has been that generated by Bill Bason’s growing blog of several hundred friends, ex-shipmates and referrals who all share a common trait; we all love this country and most of us are angry and growing more so day by day. This is understandable because not a day goes by that congress doesn’t re-validate their sub-critical 11% approval rating with hourly regularity. Things like holding lengthy photo op-rich hearings on steroid use by MLB players when the president is begging for the renewal of the expanded surveillance powers bill, the centerpiece of the Protect America Act which expired the day after congress began their extended recess. However, this dead horse has been sufficiently beaten and the feedback we are getting on our proposal to conduct a thorough housecleaning on the Hill is that it’s a dandy idea, but where do we go from here. The purpose of Part II is to lay out a cogent plan of execution.
At first blush, the thought of firing the 535 Members of Congress would seem to be a daunting task, to say the least. It really isn’t. We have two things going for us that have never been brought to bear in the history of this country. We have the internet and we are madder than we have ever been at our leadership since the signing of the Declaration of Independence precipitated the Revolutionary War. The not so subtle difference is that as a result of the Revolutionary War we now have a Constitution that has bestowed upon us, among other things the inalienable right of the VOTE. We no longer need to rise up and overthrow our oppressor; we band together and VOTE to change it. The right of the vote is the authority that we need; the internet is the means that we have to execute the plan.
PuttingThe Plan Into Perspective
The first thing we need to do is give ourselves a name, or at least an identifier. It needs to be something that will transcend borders, be recognizable throughout the entire country, be relevant to every congressional race, while at the same time, be generic and simple. Voila!
Vote For TOD*
* The Other Dude
I wanted something simple and catchy and something that would fit on a bumper sticker or handouts. I will try to create a persona for ‘Tod”, and perhaps a caricature logo. With any luck at all, perhaps we can make Tod a buzzword or a folk hero. Who knows where this might lead. I DO know that the nation is ready for something like this. Let’s give it a whirl.
We have also opened a non-partisan new domain under which this movement will be conducted. That is domain is voteforTOD.org. A web site will follow under this domain and will be known as www.voteforTOD.org. My e-mail address is theconn@voteforTOD.org . Anyone who becomes a major contributor or a principal in the operation will be similarly listed and reachable. This will identify us and will give us some sort of “unit cohesion”.
He second thing we need to do is all take a deep breath……and divide by 50. OK, now from 535 we are down to ten or so. Every state is a separate opportunity and every state will have its own activist leaders. We haven’t worked out the relationship between TOD and the states or various candidates at this time, but if there is to be a connection the various campaigns domains will be required to maintain some reference to “TOD” as their identifier. Each state will have only two senate races every six years. This is very manageable. For the congressional races that will occur every other year, every state will have anywhere from one (1) in
Candidates
The next question we have heard most often is, “Where do we get the candidates”? The answer is straightforward. We don’t. We are not recruiting candidates. First of all, there is no time. A few states have already closed their filing deadlines for ballot inclusion for the state primaries. We are simply selling a mindset and we hope to offer a movement of ever increasing angry supporters who are intent on sweeping out the old and ushering in the new. This is TOD’s contribution to “change”. I defy the presidential candidates to define what they mean by “change”. They all have a tiger by the tail and the whole country has bought into it, and they can’t even define it for us! Never mind. We know what change is. TOD is change!
Vote ForTOD is merely going to leverage the reach and the speed of the internet, the level of absolute disgust of the electorate as it pertains to the crippling effect of the partisan politics of the congress, the rank incompetence of a large majority of the Members that is causing this country to slip right down the tubes, and finally a resounding call for “change” from the masses, and let it all come together into the “perfect storm” to cleanse and replace the legislative branch of our government. If we miss this window, I’m not sure there will be another opportunity. As Washington Redskin coach George Allen liked to say, “The future is now”!
Having said all that, many states have later filing deadlines for congressional candidates, some as late as September. If TOD gains national traction, it is entirely possible that the existence of this movement may well entice candidates to join the fray.
Plan of Attack
We have a home, a domain, VoteforTOD.org. We are copyrighted and protected in our identity. We will get a site up and running. I will contact as many search engines as I can find and release Parts I and II of Re-Forming A More Perfect
The minute this site is on the Web, my next step will be to get it included on the top 25 search engines in the country.
Other than that, the only further suggestion I might make is to grab your hats; it might be one hell of a ride.
Jim Jacobs
Note: Click on amplifier to left to kill the music.
Not too long ago, I started thinking about what could be done about a totally non-responsive Congress. Actually, I have come full circle in the past 16 years from 1994 when I first started thinking about running for congress , through 1996 when I scratched the itch by doing do.....and losing, but having a wonderful time so doing, and into 1997 wherein I wrote a book about the experience, until 2001 or so when it was published. Incidentally, there were no sour grapes crushed between those covers, and if you decide to pick up a copy, you will see what fun I had. I was even a very active member of one of those County Executive Committees of which i speak in this section. I recently resigned from that post after serving 14 years because my job was to get people elected to congress, and now my job with this blog is to get people unelected, and as we have seen, I'm not just talking some of 'em, I'm talking about ALL OF 'EM.
I know how ambitious this sounds, but frankly, I don't think we have any choice in the matter. This country is on a certain road to, at worst case, total destruction from within, and at best case, without intervention, ceasing to be a meaningful power in the world in which we live and the world in which we have ruled as the major, and I might add, benevolent super-power ssince World War II and arguably even before that.
Congress has the power to reverse the course in which the Obama administration has charted for us, but they have refused to act. In fact, the current sitting congress has exacerbated the problem by seemingly endorsing a course of action that, if left unchecked, will lead us into becoming a socialist nation, shreading the very core of the Constitution on which this country was founded. If The United States Congress is our only hope, and they refuse to act, our course becomes very clear. They work for us, and We The People must fire 'em all.
In this section I will lay out precisely how thc congress is structured and explain why it is so difficult to fire any of their members. Then I will outline a very simple strategy that I can guarantee will render them all gone, and then I will validate the strategy mathematically using real numbers. Furthermore, we're going to pull all this off at the ballot box using aa guy named TOD (The Other Dude) that we're all going to vote for in November. ED.
WHY IS IT SO TOUGH TO UNSEAT A MEMBER OF CONGRESS?
Part I of a Three Part Series
Before we get into the matter of unseating Members of Congress, we must first understand why the re-election rate for the entire congress hovers around the 90% mark, even with an approval rate hovering at the other end of the spectrum at around 10%.
First of all, have you ever heard of a Member of Congress resigning their seat simply to go and do something else? I think not. The 10% attrition rate results from retirements due to age, albeit usually because of senility, incontinence, or both, Indictments resulting in incarceration, profound embarrassment from some scandal of their own making, or a severe illness that renders them unable to perform even the most menial of tasks in keeping with their congressional job description.
Serving the nation as a Member of Congress as our Founding Fathers envisioned it usually entailed that a recognized statesman, a prominent attorney or member of the judiciary, a retired governor or highly decorated military leader agree to serve his country for a term or two in congress helping to shape our nation’s future in the brave new world, a most noble calling, and then to return to their homes and pursue whatever interests they might have had. Serving in congress was never meant to be a career. However, in the roughly two hundred and two score years since that standard was established the congress has elevated the matter of seniority to somewhat of an art form. In short, they have gone to great lengths to insulate themselves from anything so debilitating as losing an election to anyone with the audacity to challenge them. If we are going to use the TOD™ method to defeat incumbents, we first must understand WHY other means will not work.
Money is King! To have any shot at all at a seat in the House of Representatives requires having a minimum of a half million dollars in ones campaign fund. People contribute money to campaign funds in order to have access to that person when he gets into office. Regular heavy contributors give 90% of their available money to incumbents because they know that the incumbent’s odds on winning his or her individual election is about 98 to 1 (this differs from the 90% advantage cited earlier because the fact that the individual is actually running for re-election precludes him from being severely ill, being under indictment, being at the center of a scandal, being in jail, being too old, or just wanting to retire). The first thing a new Member of Congress learns when he makes it to “the show” is that his first duty to his party is to build his re-election campaign fund. This is Job One. A new member will be having fundraisers within his first month of going to Similarly, challengers, no matter how well qualified, find raising money from friends and family to be woefully inadequate in mounting an effective campaign against an incumbent. The media, upon whose favor all politicians must court, equate the seriousness of a candidate’s campaign with the amount of money he or she has been able to raise. Even aspirants with large amounts of personal wealth who can afford to finance their own campaigns are rarely taken seriously by the media because, although money is king, ones own money is not of the proper “color”, and the media doesn’t count it as an indication that the candidate is worthy of their support, as in news reports about the particular candidate or campaign. Such support is known as “earned media” and it is very important in getting ones “message out”. It is also “free”, as opposed to “purchased media” such as print and TV ads and commercials, which is also very expensive.
Lastly, there is the matter of voter affiliation. This is simple and straightforward. In this country we have essentially a two-party system comprised of democrats and republicans. There are also “independents” or NPAs of “no party affiliation”. Democrats tend to vote for the democratic candidate and republican voters tend to vote for the republican candidate. Independents tend to “vote for the person”. As it turns out, independents tend to cancel each outer out. Each congressional district in the country is typically either a democratic district or a republican district depending on the voter registration count. However, there is a dirty little secret at play here because these partisan districts don’t just “happen”, but rather they are very carefully “engineered”. Such shenanigans are called “gerrymandering”. The Congress of the Jim Jacobs, Editor Part II of a Three Part Series
Do you remember the movie “Network” staring Faye Dunaway and William Holden that debuted back in the 1970s? In it I recalled actor Peter Finch, portraying newscaster Howard Beale, who vowed to kill himself on-air because he was “mad as hell” at the antics of the government and he “wasn’t going to take it anymore”. Well, now along with millions of American citizens I’m mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore, either. Earlier when I first conceived the idea for TOD, although I hadn’t yet conceived that particular acronym, I thought of old Harry Beale and I rented a DVD of the movie and watched it again. At this point I think it is highly appropriate to review a clip from Network that I found on you Tube because I think you will agree that not a whole lot has changed in congress in the past 33 years. So, click here and sit back and enjoy this short clip. It is important to what I am going to lay out in the next several pages. Powerful, huh? In the movie, it seems that everybody wanted CHANGE! Now, 33 years later, thanks to the disastrous 2008 election, we have CHANGE, but not the kind of change that the Kool-Aid drinkers, ne’er-do-wells, and even some well-meaning citizens thought they were voting for, but rather a change being brought about by a Marxist administration that is hell-bent on bankrupting this country, enslaving its citizens, and delivering it, broken and bankrupt to the New World Order governed by the UN and existing only as another failed socialistic state. This kidnapping of our republic is being accomplished in broad daylight with the full cooperation and facilitation of the Democratic Party and with only token opposition by the Republican Party. The only thing standing between the people and the illegal shredding of our constitutional rights by the rouge government that has been shoe horned into power by the Obama administration, and the only entity with the power and the charter to challenge this absolute corruption of four freedom is the United States Congress, which, consumed by the single mindedness of preserving their sorry asses have been reduced to constant partisan bickering, filibustering, demagouging, walk-outs and everything short of actual fisticuffs, have ground the halls of congress to a complete partisan gridlock. . .As I have tried to point out in Part I of this dialogue, congress has gone to great lengths to isolate themselves from any meaningful challenge at the polls. Instead of working for the past thirty-three years to give the citizens of this country what they want and desperately need, congress has used the past thirty-three years not just to maintain the status quo, but to harden membership in the congress, both the House and the Senate, to render them almost impregnable to challenge. . Accordingly, the approval rating of congress has plummeted from a dismal 12% to 7%, depending on which poll you are reading. The result of this strategy might have insulated from take-over the 535 individual seats that make up the congress, but it has lain wide open the congress itself to a massive onslaught by the citizens of this country who are mad as hell and who are not going to take it anymore! Thus by building this impregnable fortress on the Hill known as the Congress with all of the fortifications and wickets such as million-dollar war chest requirements, name-recognition, partisan sponsorship, gerrymandering, party politics, earmarks, quid pro quo favoritism, and secret handshakes they overlooked one critical little detail. They left the back gate standing wide open for The Other Dude to simply walk right through. If you don’t remember another thing that has been written in this article, in this section, or in this entire bog, remember this. Congressional elections in this country are a closed shop. All of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are pretty much “safe seats” for the person occupying them. This is because each of the 435 congressional districts in this country is either heavily republican or heavily democratic districts. This means that the majority of the voters in each county are either registered as republicans or democrats. There is a big difference between a voter and a person who is registered to vote. The “voter” tends to go to the polls each election and VOTE. People who are merely “registered to vote” often stay home. There are also, as we have discussed, people that are registered as “independents”, who don’t tend to vote along party lines, but who are proud to say they “vote for the person”. The problem is, most ‘independents” are either “liberal-leaning” or “conservative-leaning”. What is NOT a problem, however, is that independents tend to be better informed voters. Thus, essentially what we have in any given congressional district is an incumbent, the party of who reflects the majority of the registered voters in that district, and who will emerge from the election still unscathed as the incumbent because he has more “wired” voters and because the independent votes tend to cancel out. Another very important factor, at least in the House races, is that the incumbent will emerge victorious because he or she will not even be opposed by a challenger and thus will not even be required to stand for election. The reason for this “free ride” is that no opposing party or its candidate wants to risk a million dollars to bet he can beat the incumbent on his own turf, especially with the media coverage, party support, both local and national, name recognition, and a host of other factors heavily favoring the incumbent. This is the sorry state to which political system at the national has dissolved since Howard Beale took to the window and shouted out into the night. But, not any more! . Many, but not all republican voters and many, but not all democratic voters will find it awkward, if not downright difficult to vote for a candidate from the “opposition” party. That is entirely natural, but it is also entirely natural that the American people must break this chokehold that the congress has on the American electorate and now it the time to step up to the plate and cast a bi-partisan vote for the greater good. Independents, on the other hand should have no such sense of party unity. Leanings do not translate to loyalty, and if any one element is essential to the success of TOD, it is the independent voter. To you, I say Let TOD Be Your Party for the 2010 election. Ideally, our voters won’t care who is running against whom in the congressional races near the top of the ballot because they are just there to vote against the incumbent and FOR The Other Dude, the challenger. In fact, the TOD voters might even need to spend a little effort determining precisely who the incumbent is, since some states don’t make that affiliation clear on the ballot itself. If this sounds inordinately impersonal, it is. But I must remind you what happens when you vote along party lines, or “for the person”; you re-elect the incumbent. That is exactly what congress has designed the system to have you do, and when you do that, you vote for the guy with the 93% disapproval rating who is not doing his job, and who never will. That is precisely How TOD Can Clean House in the Congress Congress just simply cannot build a system that can defend against a large number of voters who are mad as hell that they are being forced by convention to vote for a politician who is wrong 93% of the time any more than I can build you a system that can identify the 7% who are doing a good job. So, just go with the flow and fire ‘me all. Perhaps history will sort out the good ones, and then maybe TOD can let ‘me back in Herein lays our charter for the next several months until the November election. TOD must mobilize and become operational as fast as a word-of-mouth driven internet will allow. If we can attract the major search engines, that will make it easier and faster. Hits on this site are the key to attracting the major search engines to lead voters to the site. You, the voter must hit this site everyday or so to accelerate our count. We need to team with and link with other like-meaning blogs and sites to grow our message. We need to link with and support the Tea Party groups in each state and show them how we can support each other. This is a ground-up effort! We must search out, identify and encourage qualified, aspiring, business leaders, patriots, veterans, especially veterans, and citizen thinkers and activists who would like to go to Washington and contribute something to this nation, and who will willingly give us such needed legislation as term limits, closed borders, spending reform, balanced budgets, tax reform, campaign reform, and a host of other things that the taxpayers of this nation are demanding and which have been denied by the sitting Congress of the United States. We must ensure that every single one of the 435 seats that are up for grabs in November of this year have a qualified candidate to run against the sitting incumbent. We must convince these candidates that challengers that if they are The Other Dude in their respective race that they don’t need a lot of money to win. All they must do is get on the ballot. With the independents and the party of their affiliation on their side, and using the principles of TOD that is all it will take to win. If we can meet this reachable challenge, we can say to these willing aspirants with absolute certainty, “You go out and file and survive the primaries in your congressional district and TOD will bring our full voting bloc to your support, and TOD will put you in congress. The last time I checked, I recall the words penned, I think by Thomas Jefferson that if at any time the People became dissatisfied with the manner in which government, either the administration or the congress was doing their job, and that the People had not only the RIGHT but the DUTY t to change it, or words to that effect. This we will do with the vote!!! In case anyone out there is still skeptical that something so simpleminded as TOD can be employed to bring the entire United States Congress to its knees and toss every one of those malingering clowns out on their butts in the middle of Constitution Avenue at rush hour, let’s just come at this whole thing from a different direction. Let’s take an actual congressional race and apply actual numbers taken from actual records of that particular race and submit it to an analysis. In other words, let’s do the arithmetic to determine just how much “help” TOD might need to contribute to turn a loss on election day into a win on election day. Let’s take an actual congressional race for which all the necessary data is available to reconstruct the race. Let’s ramp this hypothesis up even another notch and select an absolute worst case scenario with the deck stacked about as much as it could possibly be in favor of the incumbent. Next, let’s trump even that by picking a race that was held in….. shudder…shudder FLOR…I….DUH. Everybody knows what happens to elections in that place. Now let’s pick a county down there that is known throughout the free world for its election lore as the Home of the hanging chad; where else but The congressional race we are going to analyze occurred in 1996 and it was for the 20th Congressional District of Florida. He 20th CD is a gerrymandered district that runs from western The demographics of FL-20CD were comprised of 380,451 registered voters of which 191,863 (50%) were democrats, 136,959 (36%) were republicans, and 51,629 (14%) were independents, or NPAs (No Party Affiliation). Rounding out this mismatch was the fact that I had never stood for election to anything in my life, while Peter was the consummate politician, earning a seat in the Florida State Legislature while he was still in Yale law school. Accordingly, he was part of the redistricting team that re-drew (gerrymandered) the 20th CD the year before he quit the To get the total, un-cut version of this election campaign, you’ll have to read my book, but the relevant part of the story is, I lost the election by an almost 2 to 1 margin. Peter received 65% of the vote against my 35%. But we are here to conduct an analysis, so let’s look at the numbers. Voter turnout in this race was about 65% of all registered voters, which is about average for a House race in a presidential election year. Of the 380,000 plus voters in the 20th CD, the vote count totaled 245,033 votes, with Deutsch getting 159,256 votes to my 85,777 votes. Thus, I lost by a margin of 73,479 votes. Next, let’s look at what TOD would have had to do to reverse the outcome of this election. Remember that although I lost by 73479 votes, I would only have needed to move half of that number, or 36,740 votes from his column into mine. Here is the actual breakdown by percentage (rounded) Deutsch received 98% of the DEM Vote for 121100 votes 20% of the REP Vote for 17642 votes 61% of the NPA Vote for 20284 votes Total 159025 v I Received 2% of the DEM Vote for 2471 votes 80% of the REP Vote for 70568 votes 39% of the NPA Vote for 12968 votes Total 86008 votes According to the party analysts, it was clearly the overwhelming number of opposing party votes that did me in, but my lack of name recognition easily cost me at least 15% of the votes from my own party and the same is true for the NPA vote. However, even if I had run the table with my own party vote and had gotten half the NPA vote, I would still have fallen short. Now, supposing the TOD movement had been in play in 1996 and everybody was mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore, and let’s examine how my election might have had a vastly different outcome. Remember, I needed to move 36,740 votes from Deutsch to myself, and I would have needed 122,517 votes to win. The tally could easily have looked like this: I would likely have received at least 14% of the DEM vote for 17300 votes because TOD voters will vote against the incumbent even if it is against their own party. I would likely have received at least 95% of the REP vote for 83799 votes Because I was not the incumbent, and even voters that didn’t know anything about me would have voted for me for that reason and I would likely have received 65% of the NPA vote for 21614 votes because there would be enough TOD voters among the independents, who are expected to be the biggest TOD supporters, to move their vote well above the 50% median to at least 65% of the total. These very conservative scenarios would have resulted in a vote total 122,714 votes, well above the 122,517 votes necessary to carry the election. Stated another way, if we can agree that the NPAs would tend to be the biggest supporters of the TOD concept because of their inherent lack of any obligation to either party, fielding enough TOD voters to move my numbers from the actual 12968 NPA votes I actually received to the 21614 theoretical NPA votes I would have needed to win, a difference of 8646 votes, would have only required that 26% of the NPA votes in play in that election in 1996 to have been TOD supporters. That almost sounds like a slam dunk in the realm of feasibility that the TOD concept is not merely a valid method to breach the firewall that congress has created to ensure their own longevity, it is the only method capable of eventually firing ‘em all. Jim Jacobs, Editor February9, 2010 Dear Independent Voter: If you have found your way this far into the guts of this blog, then you must already have an idea of what TOD™ is all about. All I have heard for the part year is how this country must unite and all I am going to hear next week is more of the same. While the message is clear, it is being misdirected inward to the two political parties rather that to the source of the problem: the problem being the Congress of the Our congress has lost its way and has been wandering in the wilderness for the past thirty-five years and they have become dysfunctional from every possible perspective, so much so that is impossible to turn them around. In fact, the Democratic Party has become a criminal enterprise, and while the Republican Party has stopped short of that, they still have no clue They must be eliminated as a group and a new congress put in their place. I have tried to show elsewhere in this blog that what is coming to be known as the TOD method is the ONLY process of indiscriminately voting every incumbent out of office as soon as they stand for re-election. I hear everyday from members of both of the major parties that we should “throw all of the bums out”. This comes from friends and acquaintances who I know to be “mad as hell” and who vow “not to take it anymore”, but I know in my heart of hearts that when it comes time to go in that booth and vote against their own party, most will waiver and some will abort. That is why the independent voters will play such a major role in the next two general elections if TOD has any chance of succeeding. As an independent voter you have left that problem in your wake at some point in the past. As an independent voter, if you buy into TOD then you will follow through on election day. Accordingly, you are the only ones who can make or break what is the only chance to restore congress to a functioning entity that is again capable of providing for the safety and welfare of the American people. Therein lays a potential sticking point. As I pointed out in a previous article How TOD Can Clean House in Congress ….where everything else has failed I pointed out how congress had bullet-proofed the sitting Members from the possibility of being defeated while standing for re-election. However, I also pointed out that they had left the back gate open for a method involving wide-spread indiscriminate mass voting against all incumbents, as employed by TOD. Unfortunately, most plans have an Achilles Heel somewhere. Independent voters can be TOD’s Achilles Heel. I said can be, I didn’t say it is. Injecting an independent candidate into any congressional race in the 2010 General Election would lessen the chance of TOD helping a challenger defeat his or her incumbent opponent. I am aware that the formation of a viable third party is a goal of many independent voters. I, for one, think that the time has come for the formation of a strong, viable third party, especially when viewed against a backdrop of what the two-party system has spawned. In fact, I’ll even go a step further and say that the two-party system of politics in this country is dead! Previous attempts to launch a serious third party assault have sputtered and then failed. The last attempt that had any credibility at all occurred during the 1994 election cycle when Ross Perot’s Reform Party made a move to establish a third party. Then Perot dropped out, and then he dropped back in, and then he accused the FBI of sabotaging his daughter’s wedding, and then he ran Adm. James Stockdale as his running mate, and the movement mercifully just rolled over and died. Allow me to toss one out there for you guys to chew on. I do not think TOD can totally succeed in our goal of significantly cleaning house in congress without the enthusiastic participation of the independent voters. Nor do I think that you guys can succeed in being known, as a group, as anything other than spoilers anytime in the near future. George Nader and Bob Barr are just not doing it for you. But I am absolutely convinced that we are both poised to become an inevitable “perfect storm” of congressional reform if we can combine forces and set a common goal. I am not advocating a quid pro quo, but rather a phased build-up of a powerful voting bloc to replace a congress that has lost its way trying to ensure their own political longevity on the backs of the American people. We need congress to do our bidding rather than their bidding. We have a bunch of things going for us with less than nine months (and counting) to the 2010 election. First, the people in this country are mad as hell, more so than at any time in our history except just before the first shot was fired at Then, in the 2012 election cycle, with two years to organize and staff a fifty-state operation, we would again seek to replace republicans and democrats with more of the same, but this time we would be in a position to actually recruit challengers to go after seats that had been previously unopposed, some for years. The attraction for the would-be challengers would be that rather than raising tons of money to butt their heads against 50 to 1 odds of unseating an incumbent, they would only need to win a primary on their own before TOD and the TOD BLOC of mostly independent voters would take it from there. The only difference between 2008 and 2010 would be that our realistic goal could be 200 or 300 seats. The pay-off for the third party would come in 2012, the presidential election year, when the TOD BLOC would run Third Party challengers and we would give the first-term Members that we put into office in 2010 the chance to run as third party candidates or face a very short congressional career. By January 2013, there could well be enough Third Party candidates seated in congress that would suggest that we come up with a name for our party. The Freedom Party has a nice ring. This is an “open letter” to you guys, and this is a very ambitious plan. Kick it around and communicate back with me and let’s look at the next card. However, bear one thing in mind. A year ago, who would have thought that a moose-hunting ex-beauty queen from Sincerely, Jim Jacobs, Ed.
All Rights Reserved
August 24, 2008
HOW TOD™ CAN CLEAN HOUSE IN CONGRESS …….where everything else has failed
Jim Jacobs, Editor
All Rights Reserved
February 8, 2010
ANATOMY OF A WIN
All Rights Reserved
February 8, 2010
AN OPEN LETTER TO INDEPENDENT VOTERS
www.theconn@voteforTOD.org
,
