What is Soul of the Party?

I have entitled this Substack “Soul of the Party” because I believe passionately that the Democratic Party will never consistently win elections until it returns to its roots as the party of working people. The soul of our party should be the mission to lift working people up, to improve their lives, and to fight the big money forces that want to take advantage of working folks and keep them in their place.

I am an old soul who has been around the political world a long time now. I started my political organizing career doing farm, labor, and community organizing in my home state of Nebraska and then in Iowa in the 1980s. Being in Iowa connected me to presidential politics, and I worked on my first presidential campaign in 1984. In the 1988 cycle, I worked for the first Joe Biden presidential campaign, as well as for Paul Simon when Joe got out of the race. In 1992 I ended up going down to Little Rock to work on the Bill Clinton campaign, and when we won I moved to the DC area to work in the Clinton White House.

I have been here ever since, doing political consulting, writing a couple of books, doing a lot of blogging, picking fights with corrupt corporations, working to elect Democrats but also fighting with certain party leaders when I thought they were losing their focus on helping working people.

This Substack is about how Democrats can and must become the party of working people again.

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