Build your own GOTW campaign

Here's the deal. Your local Republican candidate needs your support to get out the vote. Statistics from the 2004 vote indicated that voters who were contacted by Republicans were more that twice as likely to know the person calling them from the phone bank. That is powerful!

Don't shy away. Go and volunteer at your local GOP headquarters. But even you can run your own phone bank!

Here's what you do.

1. Gather together the names, emails and phone numbers of people you know will likely vote Republican (or even those who might be persuaded to do so).
2. Next, put together an contact campaign with specific dates and actions (see below)
3. Put it into action
4. Then go volunteer at your local GOP phone bank
   

My own action table:

Action	Date
Send out intro email and issue #1 (Iraq)	10/26
Send out issue # 2 (The Family) email	10/28
Send out issue # 3 (The Pocketbook) email	11/3
Send out GOTV Reminder	11/3
Call to remind them to vote	11/6
Send an email and call and make sure they vote	11/7

Just to make things easier... here's an email I drafted for my friends and family:

Dear Friends and Family,

No doubt your mailbox, email and eardrums are filling up with political literature and pleadings. This is one of those

pleadings. But instead of coming from a faceless politician it's coming from someone you know (and hopefully trust).

The election is less than two weeks away and both parties and gearing up to get out the vote. The ballot you cast on

November 7th has deep implications for your family, your local community and the United States as well.

I'm contacting you as a friend to give you my two cents on the issues facing our country at this point in time. But first

you should know:

1) I may be contacting you over the next two weeks via phone and email to remind you to vote and
2) I hope that you will do the same with your extended circle of friends and family.

With that said, I want to point out with all seriousness that ANY vote for ANY Democrat is a vote for vulnerability. I hope you will join me in supporting the Republican candidate in your repective districts and states.

Yes, it is a serious charge. But when you look at the facts -- the election comes down to this: Republicans are serious about the war on Terror, the war on our Families and the war on our pocketbooks... Democrats are not. Read on!

ISSUES

Of course, one of the top issues of the day is the war in Iraq:

Democrats have three main complaints:

In this email I will tackle one point on Iraq:

* Democracts say that President Bush misled and lied us into war.

Democrats will frequently cite this quote from President Bush as a lie to push us to war:

“It is the duty of any president, in the final analysis, to defend this nation and dispel the security threat. Saddam Hussein

has brought military action upon himself by refusing for 12 years to comply with the mandates of the United Nations. The brave and capable men and women of our armed forces and those who are with us will quickly, I know, remove him once and for all as a threat to his neighbors, to the world, and to his own people, and I support their doing so."

Oh, wait... that wasn't President Bush... that was John Kerry in 2003. It was this quote that they use:

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed."

Oh wait... that was Ted Kennedy.

You get the point. Both Senators signed a bill in 2002 granting the President to use force not just to get rid of WMDs but for 21 other reasons as well. As historian Victor Davis Hansen surmises:

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: That given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

In short, the Senate Democrats had the relatively the same intelligence that President Bush had going to war. Today, however, they choose to ignore this fact and accuse the President of lying to get us to war.

Almost every intelligence agency in the world felt that Saddam had WMDs.

Regardless of how you feel on the matter... the truth is this: Democrats are not serious about the war on Terror.

I will address other points as our conversation continues.

If you do not with me to email you. Just let me know. I won't be offended.

Best to you and yours,
Justin