Every time I sit down to write something for you to read I keep coming back to empowerment. As a candidate for the Libertarian Party’s US Senate nomination, I should probably be chatting about the issues, but specific issues seem secondary right now, and a writer who isn’t writing from the heart isn’t writing, he’s typing.
So today you are reading even more on empowerment.
Our government is in our hands.
I say this every hour on the hour. It may not seem like that sometimes. Between incumbents and lobbyists and the media it sometimes seems our government is so far out of our hands we might never get it back. Nothing, however, is further from the truth. The government we want is there for the taking.
We can only blame the media, incumbents and lobbyists so much. When we sit down at our kitchen table to fill out our ballots or walk into a booth on Election Day, there isn’t the incumbent, or a vacuous baritone TV reporter or a lobbyist there to fill it out for is. We fill it out ourselves. Every election we get the government we elect.
Empowerment and the Libertarian Party must go hand in hand this election season. I was our US Senate nominee in 2014 and I talked empowerment a lot, especially towards the end of the campaign. It worked, too. We earned more than 52,000 votes, more than any third-party candidate ever in a Colorado US Senate election. Probably a bit more than half, and perhaps as many as two-thirds depending on how many Libertarians voted, came from non-Libertarians, a fairly high percentage.
Why? Non-Libertarians thought they could make difference with us. They liked our message and they liked the messenger and our goal for 2016 is clear:
We must make people believe they can make a difference and we must make them believe they can make that difference with us.
I believe, rather firmly, that we are not going to start winning elections until we start doing this. When people start believing they can make a difference and when they know they can make that difference with us, then we still start having success.
When people genuinely feel empowered, they’ll find us, because genuinely empowered voters, a voter who knows the government we want is always as close as the next election, will not vote for the status quo. An empowered voter knows a Republican or a Democrat is not going to change a thing. If they were they would have done so by now.
Friends, the voters we need to make a difference this year are out there. All we have to do is empower them.
Thank you for reading,
Gaylon
