ACT, one of the new 527s, heads back to grass roots

[question everything]

startribune.com

Lori Sturdevant
Published August 15, 2004

What would make 30-year-old attorney Kari Krogseng leave her up-and-coming position at a San Francisco law firm to go to work for a fledgling grass-roots organization in St. Paul? It's the same thing that got 44-year-old New York City elementary teacher John Allgood to spend his summer pounding the pavement and the computer keyboard in Minnesota. And 46-year-old Jackie Masson to take a leave of absence from her emergency room support job at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids. And 39-year-old Brendan Obern of Hopkins to interrupt his pursuit of an education degree at Hamline University. They're all working for America Coming Together, in hopes of defeating President George W. Bush on Nov. 2.

(snip)

But America Coming Together goes out -- way out -- of its way to make the point that it is neither the John Kerry campaign nor the Democratic Party. It's one of the new so-called 527 groups, so dubbed because of their tax code designation, formed to skirt the new campaign finance law's clampdown on unrestricted "soft money" donations to political parties. To keep that designation, they must operate independent of parties and campaigns.

(snip)

They weren't just carrying clipboards. Each canvasser checked out a Palm Pilot, loaded with names and previously obtained voting information for each of the addresses to be visited that night.

Their mission: Get more information -- voting intentions, issues of interest, e-mail addresses and the like. Then bring that data back to headquarters, for feeding into a master data base and use to recruit workers, solicit donations and turn out left-of-center voters on Nov. 2. One might say that America Coming Together has set out to create the grass-roots network of Paul Wellstone's dreams -- had the late senator's dreams included multimillion-dollar donations from tycoons like George Soros and Peter Lewis. Their deep pockets provided ACT's seed money, though it now claims support from more than 200,000 donors.

More..

http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/4926888.html

[swag]

1. Have met ACT people in Portland downtown, on the bus, etc.

They're canvassing, registering, doing what they can.

Good organization and great workers.