Who says liberals aren't patriots?

I scored 100% on MSNBC's civics quiz based on the actual U.S. citizenship test.

Methinks I'm not the only one who may have had a negative reaction to yesterday's e-mail from Arizona Democratic Party Chairman David Waid.

This evening, in another fundraising appeal, the state Party's "Non-Traditional Campaigns Director", Tony Cani, sent another e-mail. This is the relevant part:

We have more information available about the candidates who have filed. Here is a quick snapshot of our numbers statewide; in parenthesis are the numbers from 2004. As you can see, 2006 has the potential to be a groundbreaking year for Arizona Democrats.

Total Number of Democratic Candidates: 92 (82)
Total Number of Offices Contested : 76 (67)
Total Number of Legislative Seats Contested: 69 (64)

In other great news every single Arizona Democrat, whether they live in Tucson, Gilbert, Tempe, or Kingman, has at least one Democratic candidate running for the Legislature in their district that they can support. This has not been the case in years.

Emphasis his.

This is certainly a better picture than was presented last night. It's still a little misleading; "at least one Democratic candidate" in every district is still saying only at least a third of all seats are being contested. Still, kudos for contesting 69 out of 90 legislative seats. That's a nearly 77% rate, much better than the 43% rate we were led to believe last night. This latest e-mail is a much more effective framing of the Party's success.

I'm curious to see how much support we'll receive from the DLCC. This will be a good year to motivate Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents to get to the polls. The DNC should be sending some resources here too.

I'm still waiting to see what the level of the Governor's involvement in the Legislative races will be before I donate any money.

So I just received an e-mail from the Arizona Democratic Party with the subject line, "More Democratic Candidates in a Decade," touting the number of Democratic candidates who filed for legislative or Constitutional offices at the state level.

From the e-mail:

Arizona Democrats are launching their biggest challenge in more than a decade. We are poised to contest Republicans in 59 state races.
...
Democrats have fielded candidates for 26 state Senate seats, 26 state House seats and 7 state constitutional offices.

I want to focus on the legislative seats for a moment. There are 30 legislative districts in Arizona that have been pretty well gerrymandered to guarantee that one party will control all the seats in that district (only a handful have representation split between the two major parties). There are 2 House seats in every district and 1 Senate seat, for a total of 90 seats overall.

I'm thrilled that there are 26 Democrats running for 30 seats in the Senate. Of course, at least two of those will be running against each other in a contested primary (Ted is running for Senate against Paula, right?), which means Democrats are challenging about 83% of state Senate seats. Not perfect, but definitely not bad either.

The House is another story. The same number of candidates for twice the number of seats. That works out to Democrats running for just 43% of the available seats. Even if they won every single one of those races, it still would not be enough to claim the majority in the House.

The only thing I find worse than the disingenuous cheerfulness of this e-mail is the fact that this largely unimpressive number is actually a ten-year record.

Now, I could be proactive and become a precinct-person and try to encourage the state party to adopt a strategy akin to the national party's 50-state strategy. But I have a lot of shit going on in my life right now that needs to take priority. Stupid survival.

I also know that the state party has undergone a lot of transition in the past year or so (Go Jim! Go Harry!). Before I consider giving money to the state party, I'd like to hear more about what the strategy is and how much effort was put into candidate recruitment. Winning elections has to start with fielding compelling candidates. Heck, even warm bodies would do in some districts where Dems have no chance this cycle. It's about building the party in every corner of the desert and under every pine tree.

While I'm on the subject of what I'd like to know, I'd also like to know how much campaigning the Governor will be doing for legislative candidates who are sharing the ticket with her. Kansas Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius has been in the news a bit lately because of her seemingly singlehanded rejuvenation of her state party, particularly by converting a lot of Republicans into Democrats (including her current Lieutenant Governor, who is retiring at the end of this term, and her handpicked replacement for him). Don't get me wrong, I genuinely like the Governor and approve of the job she's doing keeping this regressive legislature in check. I would appreciate her even more if she took a visible and active approach to changing the makeup of the legislature to one that wouldn't be asking for so many vetoes of awful legislation.

We shouldn't be celebrating 43% as some remarkable achievement. If this is better than we've done in a while, great. Reveling in this, however, just makes the party look silly. Voters are not stupid. Independents can do the math. If our standards are so low that 43% is considered an accomplishment, why should they vote for our team?

I was recently asked by one of my faithful readers (one of three!) to post something new since it's been awhile and she thought I was neglecting her.

Well, I was very pleased to read just now that the Governor signed a bill today that allows wine shipments from out of state.

I'm one step closer now to being able to receive shipments of my favorite wine, Lucas Blues, from upstate New York without somebody having to go visit there and bring a bottle or two back with them.

It's the little things...