Charter

DC Carrots and Sticks
Charter and Statement of Principles

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
-Frederick Douglass


During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama, said of this generation, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

We’re tired of waiting. In the wake of the historic 2008 election, a group of Washington, D.C. area activists has convened in response to President Obama’s call to mobilize and help bring change to our nation. We appreciate his vision and desire to keep the energy of the campaign alive, and wish to aid him in his quest to navigate a meaningful change agenda through the fierce headwinds of Beltway institutional inertia.

But we also feel President Obama’s ascension to the role of Democratic Party leader limits the possibility for his organization to function as an independent grassroots entity. We at Carrots & Sticks are primarily interested in speaking truth to power as opposed to serving a mere campaign apparatus. Rather than waiting to receive our marching orders or to be issued call lists of our already burdened neighbors, we have decided to blaze our own trail.

Like many of our progressive allies, we recognize the need to create an environment where bold, principled leadership is rewarded while the tranquilizing drug of moderation for comity’s sake is rejected. While many good efforts in this direction have been made, few of these have aimed at the policy process directly, and even fewer aimed at planting authentic grassroots seeds directly in the rarified marble halls of Congress.

Our aim is to prove that ordinary citizens have the capacity to be powerful independent agents of change, not just cogs in an electoral campaign. Our two big-picture goals are sustainable prosperity nationally, and District of Columbia sovereignty locally.

To achieve these aims, we will be actively supporting the President and his allies when warranted, and holding their feet to the fire when necessary. In other words, we will use both Carrots and Sticks.

We believe we can be successful by:

1)Identifying key leverage points in the political system. This will require an intimate understanding of the legislative process and the true distribution of power, to a degree generally reserved for paid lobbyists and advocates.

2) Leveraging social networks and emerging technology in the model of past online organizing to amass strength in numbers.

3) Engaging in a Beltway-oriented brand of people powered politics, using our advantage as D.C.-area citizens to personally visit the offices of targeted policymakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch whenever possible.

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Hi, everybody, this is Carrots and Sticks' new blog. We are still in the process of getting our technical ducks in a row, so bear with us....