Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's campaigners

I am so impressed with Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's campaigners.

Yesterday I attended a post-campaign event so I could attempt to explain to Mr. Nelson-Pallmeyer the source of my frustration.
(Click to read the details.)

I'm mathematical and calculating enough that I can't stomach the idea of putting my time and labor into preaching to the choir. I joined his campaign when it seemed like it was going to be a chance to get thousands of mainstream Americans who don't read "liberal fringe magazines" exposed to sound policy proposals that use phrases like "militarized empire."
(Something Mr. Nelson-Pallmeyer slipped into a sentence yesterday without thinking, bless his heart.)

Mainstream Americans will show up and listen to such talk if what they're doing is "learning a political candidate's views before voting." They won't show up to places where policy and action proposals include that kind of language under any old circumstances.

That's what makes them not "the choir."

I told Mr. Nelson-Pallmeyer that I needed guidance towards other arenas--arenas besides campaigns for public office--where I could direct my labor if I was going to feel my heart calling me towards his proposed "citizen movement."

Since I didn't have the heart to stick with the part of hte movement that's reaching, at best, 1 new mainstream person a week by waving "No Blood for Oil" signs, I asked him if through his mailing list or his next book he could provide guidance for people like me.


He said he was searching for answers to such a question and would continue to do so so--and address them as he figured out how to.


But it turns out I didn't need to worry about Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer campaigners turning his message's mainstream momentum into a bunch of choir-preaching.

A large chunk of Nelson-Pallmeyer's contact structure in CD 1 has turned into an opposition movement to construction of a corn ethanol plant.

Let me reemphasize that.

JNP campaigners are keeping one of his "liberal fringe magazine" messages--that almost all biofuels do more harm than good--in the mainstream down there.

Wow.

What the heck was I worried about?




(Click here and scroll to the end of the post to read a wonderful University Ave. light rail fight story, too.)




Beyond that, the "Hopeful Thursdays" meeting in someone's back yard that I rolled my eyes at when I first heard about it...

...is pretty much a mirror image of the meetings in the same person's back yard out of which SPRUNG this candidacy (which I do not roll my eyes at).

After that news, I'm excited to hear what people come up with at "Hopeful Thursdays" meetings.



And, last but not least, a Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer supporter or two really touched me yesterday by surprising me with support for my University Avenue activities I hadn't asked for:

Attached to my clipboard, on top of the flyers, flapping in the wind, were two dollar bills.

What confidence in people's "do good" projects exists in the Nelson-Pallmeyer world. Running both ways.