Let’s Rebuild- Transcript of my video

Hi everybody, Sally Boynton Brown here. And Tom Tom, one of our family cats decided he wanted to be in the shot.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking over the course of the last six weeks and there’s been a lot of talk of rebuilding, cleaning house, all sorts of different analogies around houses. So I decided we should take that one step further and make a visualization of what rebuilding the house means to me. One of the things I’ve been really clear about is that we are up here tinkering with the windows in the roof of the house, and we need to come back down to the foundation. The conversation we need to be having is not whether we are liberal or moderate but It needs to be returning to our core values and what core values we have as a community. So the foundation always comes down to core values, here’s mine. Our values haven’t gone anywhere.

We do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater is another thing that people have been saying. We are doing lots of things really really well and one of the things that drives everything we do is our core values, however what we’ve seen over the course of the last year is there are some areas where our actions and words aren’t aligned. Alignment is something that is really personally important to me so I’m going to share some of my core values down here of the reasons why I am a Democrat and what the Party represents for me and why it is such a good fit for me. So one of the major tenets of my life is community. Another one, so building strong communities where people feel safe and protected is important but another core value that’s related to community is inclusivity.

Inclusivity the Democratic Party does really well in some ways and in some ways I think that we really need to be looking at how we can be more inclusive. One of the things I’ve been talking about is old power versus new power, and we still have a lot of leaders at the top making decisions in closed rooms and then expecting workers to follow through with those actions and decisions but I believe we need to be able to lift people up from the grassroots so that they are part of the decision-making process and we all work together and that comes from the core values in community and inclusivity so again. So total alignment with what I believe my values are and my words and actions.

You’ve seen that obviously in my campaign so far from doing the survey to these videos to making sure that I’m reaching out to everybody around the country through Facebook to include you in this, even though you are not a voter. There are 447 people who have been elected to be that electorate, it’s important that we include everybody in this pivotal moment in history in the party and make sure we are all moving forward together and there is no disconnect

One of the other things that is really important to me is integrity. Another word for the party might be transparency making sure everybody knows exactly what we are doing it with a game plan is. Let’s see, a few other ones for me being kind. One of the things I’m known for here in Idaho is being able to address even ornery people and still be kind. Because I think human dignity is something worth lifting up and we need to respect all individuals no matter where they fall on the continuum and ultimately that means republicans as well. There is a way to fight power with power without being unkind.

The very last one would be responsiveness. I’m trying to make sure I spell everything right on the whiteboard. So responsiveness was the number one thing when I got in politics that I decided I wanted to take on. It was the number one thing that irked me, i would try to call people and I wouldn’t get return calls I would try to email them and wouldn’t get return emails. So responsiveness was the number one thing as a service organization we have a 48 hour response time and we work on getting back to every single person that contacts us with a type of question.

We have a lot of people that I’m sure any of you that work in the service industry a lot of people just leave their opinions on the phone we don’t necessarily go out of our way to listen to those opinions again.

Those are my core values I encourage you to think about what your core values are and the reason why you became a Democrat in the first place or why you vote for Democratic candidates what those values are I think by having that conversation as a community we are going to be able to stop all of this in-fighting and really remember why we are part of the Democratic Party together.

One of the things we included in our survey is not only what your core values are but what do you think the values of the DNC chair need to be and I am really excited about more people filling that out. We have a few hundred responses and would like a great deal more than that so if you haven’t had a chance it’s on the website wetheDNC.org and we would love to hear some of your ideas about what belongs in his foundation as well as what belongs in the pillars. I’m going to tell you what I think but I also want to make sure that we are in alignment.

I’m going to attempt to draw my pillars. My daughter is going to be an architect I probably should have had her build my house for me, but I will give it a go. So we have the back pillar which is going to be partnership. One of the things that’s really important is that the DNC is a strong partner. We have a lot of progressive organization is doing a lot of good work trying to fight the good fight and elect a Democrat across the country and make sure we have better policies and that includes our 50 states seven territories and democrats abroad and it’s really important that we again stop dictating from the top or even just providing money from the top and then walking away, we at the DNC need to be full partners with our 50 states territories and the Democrats abroad to really talk to them about what programs they need to run. The reality is there is not a single one of us that have a state like the other. We work really hard to find similarities but each of our state is different in the only people that really know that they are the folks who work in the state in order for the DNC to be a good service organization we need to be able to work alongside people and make sure the resources and support not only are provided but are also in alignment with what the plan needs to be and what they are trying to accomplish so being a good partner is making sure you were having this conversation it’s also being very collaborative so making sure that again we are not dictating but that we are doing a good job of asking the right questions and then listening.

So another pillar and I kind of alluded to it is culture. So culture is something I believe is a leader’s greatest asset and greatest responsibility. The culture has to be established by the leader you choose at the top and then the leader needs to make sure that they are selecting a team of people that are in alignment with the culture so I have already talked about the fact I believe the DNC needs to be a service organization and that everybody that works for the DNC amf with the DNC really needs to be focused on how we help how we support and how we are good people one of the other things that belongs in culture is the transparency so integrity/transparency, making sure that we are being forthright and we are communicating clearly to people what the principles and procedures are. There are a lot of things that I’m sure fit under culture but it’s having a Democratic Party we trust to implement the processes and procedures they need to. And that we know we can count on the people not only in that building but affiliated with the organization it’s really important to return trust to our party.

Coming over to this corner. Let’s see, so infrastructure. Infrastructure is really looking at all of the things that we put in place to make sure that the DNC is operating the way it needs to so some of the things as chair that I would like to see done based on really what I’ve seen happen over the course of the last years is to make sure that we are aggressively looking at all of the policies and procedures that we have in place and making sure that those policies and procedures are in alignment with our core values. Are we really including people? Are we creating a community? Do we have a type of responsiveness? So infrastructure is really important and one of the things that you will see when we get to the top is that a lot of the tactics that we use are going to fit into multiple of these categories and that’s how you know ultimately that you have a strong house when you have tactics together and it fits the pillars you have you know you have you got a super strong structure.

And then the very last one on my structure is of course there’s always one when you do four things there’s always one I forget, it’s purpose. And I already talked about this one because it kind of ties into everything else so for years and years and years the Democratic National Committee has been around so it can help elect and support the president of United States and that is an amazing important goal that we need to be doing I’m not saying that we should stop that, we need to get the presidency back, but we also need to have a broader purpose than that. The reality we are working with is different than 30 or 40 years ago and we need to adapt so I believe the DNC needs to be a service organization it needs to be looking at what are the services that they can provide to make the people out in the field that are doing the work- their lives easier. And how do we do that in a way that the structure is so strong that four years from now when we have a presidential candidate in the presidential primary that we have a successful primary that we have an amazing candidate and that that candidate is also invested in this whole entire structure so that we don’t have the cycle that we’ve been going through which is when you have someone in the White House it’s awesome because they are doing great work but then state parties and around the country suffer because we are not continuing to push down into the grassroots level and build that bench up. So we have an opportunity to do that and I’m really excited about seizing the opportunity and making sure that we do good work.

So we got our structure what’s left is where we have been spending the majority of our time talking and that is the roof. And rather than try to do a fancy roof I’m going to do the umbrella roof, we talk about being the big tent and everybody being our umbrella so the roof is made up of all of the tiles of the house those individual shingles that go into creating the roof and that’s really where we like to spend a lot of time most of the time that we spend talking we are talking about individual tactics whether they work whether they don’t work and kind of getting into these squabbled arguments about how they were or how they don’t work. And I would argue there are a lot of valuable things to do work there until we get down and actually have a conversation about the core values in about the pillars are we are never really going to be able to get solutions at the top that get the job done and fix some of the big problems that we have.

So I talk about big problems a lot right? And some of the issues that I think we need to be able to address and find tactics you know roof shingles to deal with are first of all fake news, because that is clearly an issue it is absolutely unacceptable we have got to find out how are we going to address that how are we going to address the fact that there are organizations popping up all the time providing fake information to voters and that they are basing votes off of that. One of the big things I talk about is 50% of the voters didn’t vote in this election so we can continue to have a conversation about who would have won or what that looks like, why we lost, but we need to focus on the 50% of voters who did not vote that’s the majority, the majority of people in our country did not vote for a Republican or Democrat and we need a group of people coming together to figure out why that is. Be asking that question then figuring out how the Democratic Party responds to that.

One of the other things that kind of goes along with that or at least the hypothesis I have is that there is a group of people in that 50 percent that don’t want to be labeled they are tired of the partisan bickering they are tired of the partisan divide they don’t consider themselves Democrat or Republican and they have no reason to go out and vote we see people turning 18 every single day that don’t want to be labeled so how do we deal with that how do we deal with an electorate that doesn’t consider themselves a Democrat? It’s something that needs to be talked about we can’t wait to talk about it sometime in the future because it’s impacting us now so we can win elections during the midterm into years we might be able to win the election in four years but in six years 10 years 20 years we are going to address that issue if we are going to be a powerful relevant forced to be reckoned with.

One of the other things that’s really important and kind of near and dear to my heart there is not a lot of issues that I grasp a hold of but campaign-finance reform is something that is drastically needed and has been especially with the final decision around Citizens United and where we are at in this country we have got to bring people together and talk about a comprehensive campaign finance reform not something that fixes the roof but something that takes the way we do politics in our country down to the foundation and talks about how we do electoral politics in the 21st-century in a way that actually works and makes sense and campaign-finance reform is one of the biggest issues facing our country right now in our democracy we have to restore trust so we need that money balance in politics in order to do that.

Those are some of the big issues I think we need to find shingles for there is some stuff we are doing that works really really well and it’s important when we are doing this reassessment that we don’t start over brand-new. We have things that work and we need to continue to do those things for instance one of many shingles that’s up here at the top is our 50 states, seven territories, and Democrats abroad, so that’s 58 shingles at the top that are working really hard with the resources they have and are having various results based on the electorate they had. We walk out of this election cycle we lost the presidency, with the electoral vote, but we had many states celebrating wins. We picked up House and Senate seats and that’s really exciting. In this whole conversation, we cannot afford to forget the things that we are doing well and we need to be talking and being good partners with these groups to figure out what programs they are doing that work really really well and we need to build those programs out so those are some shingles that are working really well the state partnership program that we currently have at the DNC we are grateful to have we need to continue to have a conversation about how we revamp that. One of the things I feel strongly about going back to the fact that none of our states are he same is really having a DNC leader that goes out and gets in the sausage making process with the people and the people in our party are doing the work and the DNC chair should not be off in DC or at fancy fundraisers they should be amongst people hearing what they have to say. We need to make sure that we get out and we talk to all of the states and we help in making sure that they build a strategic plan that addresses this very specific need and goals in their own state. That SPP program by the time we are looking at giving resources to states, actually matches up with how they’re going to spend that money. Throwing money at a problem is not the solution. There are a ton of states that by getting the money can do great things with that but one of the things I know being executive director and president of the executive directors is that turn over in our country is really high but when you have somebody who has only been doing their job for six months or year it’s important that they have the support to be able to go forward and create a good plan and implement so one of the shingles is SPP the state partnership program all the acronyms in politics is always fun. One of the other things that I think is important and this goes back to the 50% of voters who didn’t vote is voter protection. I think the DNC needs to be doing a much better job working with states at voter protection especially around litigation in the state parties do not have the money to properly litigate the issues that are happening so what we see is republican laws being put in place the infringe on the freedoms of Americans and we need to have stronger protection programs that is greatly enhanced to take that on and make sure that any voter in our country has the right to vote and if that’s taken away we go after it in the courts and we sue them and we win. One of the things we have that is working really well for us as we have amazing leaders in our Party. We have 147 DNC members plus a host of elected officials all the way down to the municipal level for doing a great work in accomplishing amazing things and we need to make sure that we are in touch with all of those great leaders that were using all of their skill sets we are bringing them to the table and making sure that we know what different policies they are working on with different things they’re doing to support the structure in their states and bringing the brightest of the brightest ideas together and implementing them. One of the other things that we need to recognize is that there are leaders outside of politics doing really good work there are business leaders academic leaders there is a ton of great people in this country and when we are trying to take on and saw these big problem is I believe we need to be bringing all of those brings to the table so when I talk about having a diverse group of people coming together I am obviously talking about cultural diversity and how that exist in our country but I’m also talking about making sure that we have intellectual diversity at the table to take on and find some solutions to these issues.

Insurgency is the last one I’m going to talk about for anyone that’s still with me I really appreciate you hanging in there this is obviously a huge task that we have in front of us the fact that I am going to explain it in less than 30 minutes I think it’s pretty amazing and I will be rolling out more details about all of the stuff over the course of the next few weeks as well one of the few things I’ve been talking about is insurgency Republicans have control of every level of government right now and Donald Trump is the most dangerous president that I have definitely had in my lifetime and for those of you that are older than me I think that you have had in your life time we need to make sure that we build an army that can take him on and makes sure that the American people do not lose any of their civil liberties not a single one we need to be prepared to do that we can afford to wait any longer he’s going to be in office unfortunately in less than a month and we need to be ready to confront him from day one and be the strong insurgency against keeping from happening it’s going to take all of us focused and acting together on the same page we cannot afford to be fighting each other so my plea to you is please if you are on Facebook having conversations if you are talking to people in a grocery store or to your family please stop and come back to our core values whatever your values are I asked you at the beginning of this video to write those down make sure that when you were having conversations that’s where you were coming from in your conversations we are at a time when people desperately need to be listened to and need to feel heard and that doesn’t matter if it’s Democrats having that conversation or if you’re having that conversation with people who are voting or yes even a Republican on the other side if we don’t listen to them we are never going to be prepared to fight them and we’re never going to be prepared to be able to take back the Statehouses and different offices especially in red states so I encourage you as you move through this next two months really keep your ears wide open your hearts wide open and make sure that we are trying to find the commonalities that we can come together around the things that we can agree on so that we can move seamlessly forward to fight the battle that’s ahead of us thank you so much for joining me tonight I really appreciate it I will be super excited to hear your feedback again don’t forget the survey because that’s how you can share your thoughts with me you can also leave them on our page you can always message me my email is sally@wetheDNC.org. I hope you have an awesome night, happy holidays, take care and thanks for joining!