Posted a first draft of my stump speech at flemmingforgovernor.org.

My thinking is this: I'm going after the anger vote. If no major Democrat enters the race, there will be nobody for the anti-recall voters to choose on the second part of the ballot who truly reflects their feelings. In fact, the current Democratic plan is specifically to leave these voters abandoned on purpose. That's my constituency.

I could never win 51% of the vote in any election. I'm too weird. But in this election someone may win with 10% or 15% of the vote. And if, say, 45% of the voters vote against the recall (and therefore Davis is nonetheless kicked out), and then on the second part of the ballot there is nobody for that 45% to choose...well, that's where I come in. I might be able to get by with converting less than a third of those people to my point of view. And my platform has enormous emotional appeal.

So I am the anger candidate. Not a good strategy in a general election, but a great strategy in a win-with-15%-of-the-vote election. My job is to appeal to Democrats who are like me--so angry with the right-wing assault on democracy, not just in California but also in Florida and Texas and D.C., that they want a creative way to stick it to the extremists.

It is with this strategy in mind--to make an intense appeal to a core group rather than a broad appeal to the entire electorate--that I crafted this stump speech:

YOU DON'T BRING A FEATHER TO A GUNFIGHT

by Brian Flemming

I am not a politician. And in case that statement was unclear, let me rephrase: I am not a fucking politician.

Which makes me an unlikely candidate for governor. But I want to bring up a key fact: While I may not be a politician, this is not an election.

This is a fight.

And I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of Democrats who show up armed with a feather...at a gunfight.

I don't like using violent imagery, but there's a fact staring us in the face that you aren't responsible for and I'm not responsible for: There is a full-scale right-wing assault on our democracy taking place all over this nation.

They attacked democracy in Florida in 2000, using a puppet governor named Jeb Bush and a puppet secretary of state named Katherine Harris. When that wasn't enough they used five right-wing puppet U.S. Supreme Court justices, who turned in a decision that utterly mocked the notion that the United States is a democracy.

They're attacking democracy right now in Texas, where right-wing Republicans have decided to arbitrarily redraw district boundaries seven years ahead of schedule. I don't know about you, but when I heard that the Texas Democratic legislators had fought this ugly right-wing tactic by actually leaving the state, I almost cried with joy.

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