On Sunday Governor Blagojevich unveiled his new proposal to work towards universal health care in Illinois. The plan is called Illinois Covered, you can view the press release here and the informational website here. Also read coverage of the proposal from the Sun-Times.

Welcome to the new web site and blog home for the Champaign County Democrats.

While our illustrious webmaster, Ben Grosser, has already crafted an excellent welcoming post, I wanted to take a moment to 1) thank him for the great job he did creating this site, and 2) say how excited I am to see the local Democratic party embracing the internet in such an interactive way. People are welcome to comment here, regardless of political affiliation (or lack thereof), and lively, respectful discussion is encouraged.

Please, feel free to explore the site, learn more about the local Democratic party, check-out upcoming political events, read the blog posts, and leave comments and/or suggestions. The site will only be as strong as the people who read and contribute to it. Thanks for stopping by.

You can’t view your sample ballot yet, but on the County Clerk’s website you can check out what offices and referenda will be on the ballot in the April 17th Consolidated Election.

I live in Urbana and after glancing over the candidates for various offices I realized that I only get to vote in one contested race (Urbana Park District Commissioner)! My school board member, Cope Cumpston, is not up for election and actually only District 7 has a contested race; incumbent John Dimit faces two challengers. Races for Parkland Community College Board and Champaign-Ford Regional Board of Trustees have the same number of candidates running as there are seats available.

Why don’t more candidates run for these offices? I think the main reason is that most people don’t even know that a lot of these elected positions even exist. Quick, name one member of the Urbana Park District Board……………couldn’t do it could you? Another reason is the length of some of these terms of service. Parkland Board and Urbana Park District members both serve 6 year terms; many qualified potential candidates aren’t willing to commit for that long.

There may not be any exciting races on the ballot (unless you live in Champaign, we’ll discuss that in another post), but I hope all of you still remember to vote on April 17th!

Should Illinois move its primary up to February 5th in 2008? Illinois House Speaker (and Democratic Party Chair) Mike Madigan has introduced legislation to do just that, claiming that an earlier primary would boost the fledgling campaign of our very own favorite son, Sen. Barack Obama.

With Senate President Emil Jones and Governor Blagojevich both favorable to the idea, the earlier primary looks likely to happen, but I’m still not sure if I support this. I certainly favor giving Illinois voters (both Democratic & Republican) a say in who our next president is. I think it would have been smarter for Speaker Madigan to sell this as the reason for the date change, not helping Obama. Also as president of the College Democrats, I favor anything that gets our members hooked in and busy early; having to circulate ballot petitions as early as mid August would certainly do the trick.

What are some of the drawbacks of this plan? Well for starters, have you ever gone door to door in January and February? As someone who has, I can tell you it ain’t much fun. County Clerk Mark Shelden was correct (I can’t believe I said that) when he pointed out that if there had been a primary this year on Feb. 5th, voters would have had to battle a blizzard to get to the polls. Besides the obvious weather issues, I think a very early primary unfairly favors incumbents and wealthy self-funded candidates, who don’t have to rely on going to door to build name recognition as much as challengers and grassroots candidates.

What do you think?

Welcome to the new web home of the Champaign County Democratic Party! I must say that I’m happy to be here. As many of you are probably aware, we’ve been in need of an overhaul for a long time. Last summer Tony Fabri asked me to take this project on, and, after working quite a few nights and weekends in my spare time, we finally have a site.

My intention throughout the site design has been to establish a base infrastructure that can be used to power grassroots politics. For those of you who have worked on campaigns, you know that computer resources play a large role in their success. I hope this site will make a substantive addition to the various resources that people like Al Klein and Kevin Sandefur have built for the party over the years. I know the party also appreciates the web-based efforts of Brendan McGinty over the last several years.

Why Include a Blog?

One of the first things you’ve probably noticed is that our front page is a blog. After introducing the site at a recent Central Committee meeting, I found that this aspect was the most controversial. Some think it makes sense, while others think blog comments in particular will open up the party website to defacement and slander. I understand these concerns, and cannot honestly suggest that they have no merit. Anytime you open up a space to public discussion, you’re bound to hear things you don’t like. And in a space that allows unverified anonymous commenting, you’re practically guaranteed to attract some words you’d prefer not be here at all.

So given this potential, why have a blog? Quite simply, blogs are the new media of the 21st century. Gone are the days when the establishment media hold sole control over the information landscape. Blog posts, and web publishing in general, have rapidly become primary source material on a number of important issues of the day. Many in my generation and older are regularly using blogs as essential news sources. For those who are younger than myself, I doubt they bother to make a distinction between blogs and establishment media anymore.

Most importantly, I believe that the Champaign County Democrats should have a voice within this new media landscape, and a blog right here on the front page is a medium for it. Could we disallow comments and avoid the potential problems altogether? Sure. But one of the most important tools for creating new ideas is rigorous debate. This is an element that is sadly too often missing from our legislative processes these days, and look at how well they work. If there’s anything that I think Democrats stand for it’s a diversity of opinion and thought, and I think this core value should be embodied here.

As such, the blog will provide a forum for a large group of authors to share their thought-provoking opinions about local, state, and national issues. This group will include both elected officials and party activists. I’m still trying to round up interested individuals for this, so if you want to talk about it, let me know.

Joining the Discussion

For those interested in participating in the discussion, we have decided to require registration before commenting. This doesn’t preclude you from being anonymous, and only takes a few seconds—but we hope you might choose to use your real name. Our authors will, and the discussions might be most productive if everyone is on even terms in that regard. We also have a comment and privacy policy that will hopefully address some of the concerns I’ve heard. I encourage you to read it.

Other Site Features

As for other site features, I’ve made a point of tying into a number of “Web 2.0″ services in the hopes of improving usability. The site is built on WordPress, a great blogging and overall content management platform. It supports a number of features, including RSS feeds, comments, etc. Calendaring is run through Google Calendar, enabling anyone to subscribe to our events with any iCal-compatible calendar. Photos are handled with Flickr, which means volunteers can upload albums from events, and every photo used on the blog can be commented on. Secure monetary donations are supported via PayPal (w/o registration) and spreadsheets are automatically generated for our treasurer.

But even more than these gee-whiz features, I’ve put the bulk of my effort into crafting the site so that it can be managed and updated by people with a variety of technical backgrounds. Any page on the site can be edited without HTML experience, and new pages can be just as easily created. My hope is that the site will be an enabling resource for the Democrats, and that it will outlast my own direct participation.

Despite all of these great things, however, there is still a lot to do. I’ll be continuing to add new content over the next few months, and will be training others to do the same. I also know that there will be a number of bumps along the way, as I figure out how things work under load and tune the site accordingly. I ask you to be patient in the first few months while these kinks are worked out.

Finally, while the overall look and feel is largely worked out for now (until it’s time for a fresh look), I am very interested in hearing about the features and content you’d like to see here. There are number of different constituencies for this site, and your needs are all unique. As I hear and learn more, I’ll be discussing various site features in detail in future posts. Feel free to comment on this post, wait for those, or you can send me mail directly anytime.