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Today, I announce my candidacy for a full term as America's Advancement Party's Party President. I had not planned to seek the Party Presidency; a Congressional career seemed more attractive to me. However, I inherited the job last month. I found a party with a large membership that was almost completely inactive. We had few volunteers, and our leadership was fairly inactive. Knowing that the task of reviving the party would be time consuming, I resigned my candidacy for Congress to devote myself completely to Party affairs. I choose to run again for PP and not for Congress to continue this essential work.


The March Congressional elections were somewhat disorganized on our part because I inherited the preparations for them only three days before election day. Immediately thereafter, however, with the cooperation of the AAP Council, I went to work to reconstitute the party. This is a time consuming, unglamorous task. It does not generate publicity, so it lends itself to accusations of being a "do-nothing" figurehead. Nothing could be farther from the truth.


Having been in the leadership of the AAP for nearly a year, I was in a good position to assess the areas that needed improvement. What I saw during the past several months was Party Presidents who took office promising to change the party's organizational structure. Their first act was to announce the creation of several departments and to appoint directors for each department. Then little happened for the remainder of the month. There may have been some recruiting, and the Committee that vetted Congressional candidates was active. Beyond that, little happened.


When I took responsibility for the party, I asked myself why we did not have active recruitment, mentoring, education, etc. activities. The answer that made sense to me was that we lacked the volunteer staff necessary to carry them out. A PP can appoint a director of a department, but with no volunteers to do the department's work, nothing will happen. I also realized that recreating a fully functional, vibrant party would take a long time, certainly more than a single PP term. So we had to set priorities.


With the advice and consent of the executive council, I established two immediate goals for the party: to recruit as many volunteers as possible, and to place most of our initial resources into recruiting enough blockers for the next congressional election to prevent any potential PTOers from running under the AAP label. This is a national security goal that overrides all other Party concerns.

At the same time, volunteers will be recruiting more volunteers. As we find enough active volunteers, we will open the departments that have not functioned for several months: recruitment, and member services (mentoring, direct support for party members experiencing temporary difficulties, gift exchanges, education, etc). In fact, we are currently in the process of reopening the recruiting department.


We have also established some rewards to help motivate active volunteers. They will have an exclusive board on our party forum and an exclusive IRC channel where they can mingle with party leadership. Since they are the probable future party leaders, this seems appropriate.


So, we have a long road ahead of us before we will have a reconstituted and vibrant party. But we are on our way. We have a body of volunteers who will be put to work next week. And we have an active leadership again.


Before concluding, I want to explain one decision for which some have criticized me. The AAP has a proud tradition of holding a primary among all its members to determine its Presidential endorsement. On the request of two Executive Council members and after unaninous agreement of the members then serving on the Council, I decided to entrust our endorsement to a vote of our Council and active volunteers. This was not an effort to end democracy in our party. We made the decision because party members were inactive enough that less than 40 of them voted in the previous primary. Such a small participation made it possible for any candidate to organize a relatively small number of citizens to vote in the primary and receive the AAP endorsement. We wanted to prevent an undesirable candidate from achieving this. As soon as our party is sufficiently revitalized that we can again get several hundred participants in our primary, I plan to hold an open primary again.

I have written too much, perhaps. But it seemed to me that I owed party members a progress report on my Presidency. I hope you have enough confidence in my leadership to vote for me and allow me to continue it for another month.

seeker1
AAP Party President