During the convention season, the party elects its leadership. It’s a time to reflect on the past and learn from it to make informed decisions regarding leadership and future direction.

Currently, the party has it wrong. It focuses on increasing membership during the convention season resulting in poorly informed decisions.

This questionable strategy amounts to our 18 year-old sons and daughters electing our president and legislature.

It’s become a popular strategy because it allows style to trump substance and to allow past misdeeds to go unnoticed, but it results in leadership chosen by those without experience and newcomers to the convention season that disappear by the election season.

Many claims will be made during this convention season regarding past experience with “growing the grassroots” – and they call for careful examination.

The standard by which success should be judged should not be the number of “newcomers” rounded up for the current convention, but by the number of newcomers to prior conventions that stuck around to become old-timers.

Effective party building occurs when old is mixed with new, when old strategies are enhanced with new ideas. This doesn’t happen by starting with bare ground with every change in leadership.

This entry was posted by Craig Kootsillas, on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Rumors and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.