Texas Dems Vow Unity Ticket

The leaders of the Dean, Kucinich, Edwards, and Clark campaigns met in Austin yesterday and had a conference call with the Texas desk of the Kerry national campaign.

We’ve agreed to the following concepts:
- All of us are agreed that we want a unified state convention for John Kerry in Texas. That will be achieved by all of us signing in for Kerry at State.

- Democrats who were in the campaigns of any of the nine candidates still would like to go to the National Convention and all should feel free to run for Kerry delegates or for the nine Edwards seats allocated by the primary. To do so, you will have to file an application as a Kerry or Edwards national delegate. Applications will be posted on the Texas Democratic Party website beginning late April.

- In all dealings at the State convention, no person will be prohibited or discouraged from being a party officer candidate or National Delegate because of which campaign they originally supported.

- The various campaign leaders will all have input on naming some of the At-Large delegates. There will be people who originally supported Dean (or the others) considered and elected by the Nominations Committee to be Kerry At-Large National Delegates.

On Saturday, please do whatever enables you to move through the process: You can sign in for Dean or Kerry. We urge you to support like-minded people for state delegates, so please vote for people who have been active in our efforts! Remember the basic rules, however. For instance, the more people who sign in for Dean at the door tomorrow (and if you make 15% of the County convention) the more At-Large Delegates we win to state. If you sign in for Dean, and are running for State Delegate, be sure to tell folks we are ALL going to be signing in for Kerry at the State Convention so that folks from other camps will feel free to vote for you!

From Byron - I'm amazed how eager every single Democratic Presidential candidate (with the exception of Kucinich, for now) has been to help John Kerry get elected. Howard Dean endosed Kerry and sent out an email fundraising pitch for him. Dick Gephardt is campaigning with Kerry in Missouri this weekend. Wes Clark is using his contacts and email lists to raise money for Kerry. Joe Lieberman and Bob Graham will campaign for Kerry in Florida. John Edwards has introduced John Kerry to his fundraising contacts and is raising money for Kerry himself. Even Al Sharpton has embraced John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich has promised to support John Kerry by the convention. We're united.

A lot of Deaniacs will be at state, under the Kerry banners.