Will Bower’s History of P.U.M.A…

As some of you may or may not know, Will Bower is one of the founders of this site. If you’ve watched any news clippings on P.U.M.A in the last few months, chances are you’ve seen him.

Anyway, he wrote this piece on P.U.M.A for the Huffington Post, great stuff, and here are some excerpts:

I was one of the administrators of the FaceBook group “Hillary Clinton for President.” We asked our like-minded peers in the Hillary group to change their profile photos to pictures of pumas, and to change their “Political Affiliation” to “PUMA”… and, within days, three individual FaceBook PUMA groups had already spun off from the original Hillary group.

Erika Niedowski, a journalist for “The National”, noticed all this FaceBook activity and, on June 7th, decided we were worth an introduction to the press.

Little did I know that there was already a hotbed of PUMA activity elsewhere in the blogosphere. Over at Riverdaughter’s “The Confluence” — inspired by the very same RBC ruling — a commenter known as “SM” (now “SM77″) had shouted out that very acronym, and Riverdaughter leapt into action with “The PUMA Unparty.” Soon thereafter, their fellow ‘Conflucian’, Darragh Murphy, would set “PUMA Pac” into motion.

We were soon able to come together and join forces — along with several other like-minded groups — as members of a united front. Diane Mantouvalos, co-founder of HireHeels.com, had noticed the backlash amongst disaffected Democrats within the blogosphere and, on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s suspension speech, decided to plan a conference call to unite the many disparate factions under one umbrella. It was during this call that the “Just Say NO DEAL” coalition was born.

Within 24 hours, Thuc Nguyen and I were on FOX News to announce the birth of this coalition. Granted, it was the first time either of us had ever appeared on a major news network, and we were a little bit green at it. However, we weren’t so green as to stop the movement in its tracks.

Many interviews soon followed, as did blog talk radio stations devoted to the PUMA cause, and documentaries on caucus fraud (such as GiGi Gaston’s “We Will Not Be Silenced” and Lorenda Starfelt and Brad Mays’ “The Audacity of Democracy”). An explosion of new PUMA-related web sites within the “Just Say NO DEAL” coalition emerged and within weeks, PUMA had been mentioned and/or featured on all the major networks and news networks, even getting the attention of “Meet the Press”.

Since those early days, one of our greatest successes has been to help get Hillary Clinton’s name placed into nomination at the Democratic Convention. Back in early June, Sue Castner and other brave delegates — with the help of a few non-delegate activists — launched an initiative to form the 300-delegate petition required to place a candidate’s name into nomination.

Posted by AD76