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Stand Up for Liberty!

The Clean Slate Action Program for the Libertarian Party National Committee

• A Clean Slate
• The Clean Slate Action Program for the Libertarian Party National Committee
• The Clean Slate Action Program

The Purpose of a Political Party is

• to Advance Its Agenda,
• to Run Candidates and Win Elections, and
• to Use Electoral Victory to Put Its Program into Effect.

The goal of the Clean Slate Action Program is to change the Libertarian Party so we can achieve political victory in our lifetimes.

Executive Summary---The Clean Slate Action Program

Ultimate Objective---political victory.

Means---Local Organization.

Methods

• Foster activists, organize locally, and elect lots of Libertarians.
• Build a strong Libertarian voter base.
• Direct Party finances at real objectives.
• Party growth through product quality.
• Alliances with other Libertarian groups, e.g., Cato, Reason, ISIL, FFF, within constraints of election laws.
• Libertarian National Committee - Supports local and state parties.
• Advanced Technical Means.
• Members own the Party.
• Fiscal transparency.

Remarks

How Will We Reach Our Objective?

Local Organization is the best path to Libertarian victory. Local Organization is the best path to develop our main resource, our people. Local Organization is best path to build a strong Libertarian voter base. Local Organization is the best path to elect lots of Libertarians. The main task of the national Party should be to support the activists and local groups who will build a strong Libertarian Party and Elect Libertarians!

Goals for the National Committee

On the road to total political victory, we will

• Foster activism: have more people contribute their time and energy to the Libertarian movement.
• Develop Local Organization and Local Activity: increase the number of local and special-interest groups; promote a spirit of healthy positive competition between them.
• Build a strong Libertarian voter base.
• Greatly increase the number of elected Libertarians. ``Elected Libertarians" are office-holders who do Libertarian deeds and tell the public and the press that they are Libertarians.
• Create a Party that grows because we offer product quality.

Concrete Steps

The LNC should see that the following happen:

• 50-State ballot access for our Presidential Candidates.
• A Libertarian (in fact if not in name) on every ballot in every Federal election.
• ``Libertarians Rule the Internet"
• Support Federal and high-opportunity candidates. Create or support a Libertarian Congressional PAC to support Federal candidates. Create or support a nationwide Libertarian non-Federal PAC to support local candidates.
• Activist Training and Support Material. Educate activists via traditional and advanced technical means.
• Lobby Washington for Libertarian ideas.
• Strategic alliances between the Libertarian Party and national Libertarian groups, e.g., Cato.
• Outreach within the Beltway.
• Launch independent pro-Libertarian special-interest groups, e.g., Veterans for Liberty---Libertarian Veteran Organization.
• Invest in constructive goals: activism, local organization, voter base enhancement, and *electing Libertarians*.

This is not everything we need, but it's a start.

Libertarians Rule the Net!

If the Internet elected the President, Harry Browne would be running for re-election. Credit for our victory on the net goes to a volunteer E- Mail list.

Let's exploit our greatest single advantage. The Internet will not win elections by itself, but it is a powerful tool. Internet objectives should include

• www.lp.org should become the world's best political web site.
• World Wide Web propaganda campaigns ahead of the curve.
• Libertarian moderation of a talk.politics news group.

Governance

The Libertarian Party should be a democratic organization, not the private fiefdom of political insiders. The Clean Slate Action Program stands for

• The Members are our owner-stockholders.
• State and local Libertarian groups are allies that the LNC actively supports, not competitors that it hinders.
• The National Convention is the ultimate authority within the Party. It elects officers and sets the platform, which may include strategy issues.
• The National Committee carries out the will of the National Convention, and sets operating policies to such depth as it sees fit.
• The National Committee Chair as Chief Executive Officer executes and amplifies on the policies he receives, taking an active, ethically- correct leadership role.
• The paid employees are the technical staff hired to carry out the policies and programs set by their employers, the Libertarian National Committee.
• Independent Libertarian groups such as the Cato Institute are friends with whom we actively collaborate, not hostile forces that we resist or ignore.

A Larger Party Can Be a Stronger Party

LPUS Members are prime candidates for activation: They may Stand Up for Liberty! and become activists. A Party with lots of members could become the Party that creates lots of activists. To increase membership, we will emphasize offering a better Libertarian Party. We transmute members into activists by emphasizing internal outreach and active campaigns.

The National Newsletter

• LP News is how LPUS gets Libertarian news to members. The LP News needs even more Internal Outreach than it has now:
• More inspiration encouraging activism
• More education on how to be an activist
• More temperate debate on policy and strategy

Open governance requires that the LP News Editor have reasonable editorial independence, as could for example be attained by having an elected Editor and a hired Publisher.

Transparency

The Clean Slate Action Program stands for Open Book Management. The Libertarian Party should make financial decisions through rational analysis, not through an old boy network. Payments to LNC members, staffers, and their relatives and significant others should be clearly identified as such and reported to the membership. Nepotism and favoritism are tools of the duopoly parties, where ``running for President'' is a hereditary prerogative.

Effective Investment of Financial Resources

• The National Committee has stewardship over the LNC's funds. It invests them by following its strategic program. This policy requires having a strategy, preferably one that makes sense. The National Committee should invest to reinforce success, not to recycle past failures.
• Services needed on a regular basis are done in-house or announced and put out to bid, allowing competitive selection of the best product after getting advice from knowledgeable Libertarians outside the National Committee and staff.
• Consultants are hired to deal with unique or complex issues, not to perform routine operations. Temporary employees are brought on board to meet unexpected or short-term situations, such as petitioning deadlines.
• Most Americans respond to appeals to the heart, references to love of country and our historical heritage, or promises of opportunity and freedom of choice, not to orotund rational demonstrations. Our marketing methods should match our audience, all 270 million of them.
• Marketing is based on established advertising methods. To establish positive name recognition and to increase the miniscule fraction of people who open thick envelopes, targeted publication ads or postcard teasers precede direct mail letters as recommended by Libertarian marketing executives not in the party leadership. Besides, repetitive targeted-media ads (e.g, in computer magazines) do something that targeted mail will not. Media advertising improves our image among voters, opening them to Libertarian candidates. Activities that build the Party in multiple ways are critical for success, but stifled by a fixation on recruiting members.
• The Libertarian Party calls for a Washington Bureaucracy and a Federal Budget proportionate to the government's Constitutional functions. Correspondingly, the Clean Slate Action Program calls for a Libertarian National Committee whose spending is commensurate with the party's other activities.
• In 1998, we spent 30 times as much on the National Committee as on running candidates for the House of Representatives. In 1999, a single Operation Archimedes mailing cost roughly 5 times as much the campaigns of all our U.S. Senate candidates the previous year. National Committee spending should be brought into balance with spending on real objectives likely to advance the Party.

Policy from Open Debate

The Clean Slate Action Program requires Strategic Planning. Alternatives should be clearly proposed and openly debated. Goals should be set in advance, so success or failure can be judged. You can't tell if you won when never decided what you were trying to do. Not all members care about strategy. They'd rather be doing something positive to advance the Libertarian Party. We need an independently- published Libertarian Strategy Gazette.

It's Time for a Change!

Our core mission is electing a Libertarian majority.

• Recruiting members for the sake of having members is a winning strategy for a membership club. It's not a winning strategy for a political party.
• Recruiting members because they become donors is a winning strategy for a charity. It's not a winning strategy for a political party.
• Recruiting members because they become activists could be a winning strategy, but only if you also have a strategy to activate them. That strategy is Local Organization.
• Success comes from turning members into activists and candidates. We focus on membership activation, because we are confident Americans will join and support the Libertarian Party when the Party has enough to offer.

We focus on Local Organization, because it is only through the Local Organization strategy that we will gain the specialists and activists, the campaign staffs, volunteers, candidates, and voters, that we need to create a Libertarian electoral majority.

It's time for a change.

It's time for the Clean Slate Action Program.

To endorse the Clean Slate Action Program, sign one of the following endorsements and forward it to George Phillies:

EMail ( phillies@4liberty.net ) or papermail (George Phillies, 87-6 Park Avenue, Worcester MA 01605)

#1 ``While I may or may not agree with every objective or detail of the Clean Slate Action Program for the Libertarian Party, I endorse the Clean Slate Action Program as the best currently available course of action for the Libertarian Party of the United States''

#2 ``While I may or may not agree with every objective or detail of the Clean Slate Action Program for the Libertarian Party, I endorse the Clean Slate Action Program as the best currently available course of action for the Libertarian Party of the United States,

AND --- within the limit of my other commitments---I commit myself, my time, my resources, my energy, and most important my good name to realizing the promise of the Clean Slate Action Program.''

About the Authors

Professor George Phillies is a long-time resident of Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1996-1997, Phillies was Executive Director of the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts. In 1996, he was the Libertarian nominee for United States Senate from Massachusetts; the Libertarian movement was unable to achieve ballot access for him. In 1998, Phillies was the Libertarian candidate for United States Congress from the Massachusetts Third District. Phillies ran one of the six best-funded Libertarian Congressional campaigns of 1998. He had a dozen debates and joint appearances with his Republican and Democratic opponents. One debate was carried coast-to-coast on CSPAN II, going out 7PM EST the Thursday before the election. WJAR-TV reported that Phillies was the surprise winner of the Attleborough Sun-Chronicle debate. In the end, Phillies more than doubled the vote percentage attained in his District by the Libertarian Party's 1996 Presidential candidate.

Phillies is presently Chair of the Worcester County Libertarian Association, Secretary of the Pioneer Valley Libertarian Association, and a member of the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts State Committee.

In 2005, Phillies joined with Libertarians around Massachusetts to form Liberty for Massachusetts, so that Massachusetts would have a statewide group interested in performing political action, a role that the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts has abandoned.

Born in 1947 in Buffalo, New York, Phillies earned Bachelor, Master, and Doctor of Science degrees in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has since worked at the Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology Program, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan. He is now Professor of Physics at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Phillies is the author of more than 120 professional papers on complex fluids and related topics. His textbook "Elementary Lectures in Statistical Mechanics" is being published by Springer-Verlag.

The Clean Slate Action Program Committee contains many of the country's leading Libertarian activists and supporters of the Local Organization strategy for Libertarian Victory. To avoid the politics of personality that have sometimes intruded into Libertarian politics, and to focus discussion on the merits of Local Organization as the strategy for Libertarian Victory, the Clean Slate Action Program Committee speaks through its Chair, Professor George Phillies.

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