There are two parts to being inspirational. First, you gotta have the charisma; second, you gotta have the vision. Mondale, Dukakis, and McGovern lacked the charisma; the first two lacked any vision as far as I know.
I’m not saying that a traditional liberal platform is a surefire winner; I am saying that racing behind the Republican party panting and saying, "Me too!’ ain’t gonna win an election. Clinton managed his triangulation strategy in 1992 by catching the Republicans off-guard, but they’re not off-guard any more, and he only won in 1996 because of the great economy. Near as I can tell, his strategy is unrepeatable.
McGovern was charismatic. Heck, compared to Nixon, anybody was charismatic. McGovern lost because he was too far to the left, or at least because the Republicans were able to portray him as too far to the left. He had charisma and vision, it just wasn’t a vision most people shared.
Really? As with Daniel, McGovern was before my time, but most of the reports I’ve heard of his speaking ability and charisma were that he was as dull as dishwater. Tip O’Neill stated in his autobiography that while shopping around potential Democrats as speakers for local events in 1970 and 1971 the general reaction to McGovern was “That bore? We wouldn’t have him host our function if you paid us.”
Did you ever hear Nixon speak, though? It’s not like he was any sort of inspiring, himself. While McGovern wasn’t one of the great orators, he was at least as charismatic as Nixon.
Of course, Dean won a lot more key endorsements than anyone else for the 2004 Dem presidential nomination, and he still lost out to Kerry in the primaries. You never know.
I get the feeling that most people who support Dean have some misconception that the chair of the DNC is, like being President of Democrats or something. They go on and on about who Dean represents this or that, without any real consideration as to whether he’s the right guy for the job. He’s not. The position is largely one concerned with doing things behind the scenes. About the most public celebrity it has is signing its name to fundraising letters. Unlike most of the other candidates, Dean has a huge public image to manage. And for a position like this, that’s a huge handicap and waste of everyone’s time.
You’ll note that Republicans incoming chair (and their outgoing chair) is not a rock star, not a lead singer. He’s a technological and managerial innovator with a low profile that gets things done so that the REAL stable of public voices, the candidates, can actually win elections. Policy opinions don’t come from the central party: they come from the people who need to get their names and faces on Tv: the politicians. As chair, Dean is going to end up spending a lot of time putting out a lot of rhetoric that’s all going to come to naught because he’s not really running for anything.
I think Simon Rosenberg is the right guy. And I say this not as an outsider to the process, but an insider. Working on the Kerry campaign, I saw first-hand some of the real problems this party has: not just on message, but on operations. The Republicans are two generations of technology ahead. They have a huge echo-chamber network of public lobby thinktanks in order to diseminate and corraborate their party line. The Democrats need to build that if they hope to compete in the future.
Why does Dean have to worry about maintaining his public image? Even if he wants to run for president again in 2008? He could spend the next three years in Antarctica and everybody would still remember his name.
Well, Rosenberg certainly is thinking along those lines. (OTOH, I’m sure Dean can see it too.) From the website of Rosenberg’s organization, the New Democrats Network, http://www.ndnblog.org/archives/000743.html:
But, again, Dean has been the governor of a state, which is also like running a business with a huge budget. And he put together a really enormous grass-roote campaign organization, which still exists under the name of Democracy for America. Purely as an administrator and organization-builder, I see no reason why he should be inferior to Rosenberg.
The problem isn’t name recognition, it’s management of a public image with the agenda of eventually running for something in the future.
While Dean’s people had passion and I appreciate them for that, they also had a LOT of really bad ideas that they were obsessed with that unfortunately got translated over to the Kerry campaign through all the Dean hires. In fact, this “put someone in every place!!!” idea has, acutally, some serious downsides. The Republicans got such fantastic turnout in many of their strongest counties because, for the first time in a long time, we stuck organizers in those areas to make a lot of noise. Good Ole’ Boys who had forgotten that Democrats even existed ran to the polls to try and vote them out of their counties in a hurry. I don’t see from Dean or his people any appreciation that grand new ideas can sometimes be stupid and counterproductive as often (if not MORE often) than innovative.
<Nitpick> Five stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
(I’m still stuck in Step 4.)
</Nitpick>
I’m for Dean too. We need to have a party chair with some vision; he can hire the expertise of guys like Rosenberg (who wouldn’t be half bad, in many ways) to carry it out.
My attitude is, forget left and right; it’s about fight or capitulate. Even centrist Democrats presumably have clear reasons for not being Republicans, differences that clearly distinguish them from the Bushes and DeLays, even if the distance isn’t as great as if they were liberals.
The way to win is to identify those distinctives that almost all Dems can agree on, then be willing to fight for them, year in and year out, in a concerted, organized manner that gets people’s attention.
For motivational purposes, it would be more helpful for the Democrats to stay at step 1, anger, from now until November 2008. And I’m sure we will.
Note, based on my excerpts from their respective websites, Dean is the one who sees the need to “identify distinctives”; Rosenberg doesn’t even seem to perceive that this is a problem.
But how do you know that this was a reaction to the increased Dem presence and not the GOP strategy all along?
From everything I’ve read (admittedly in retrospect), Rove had been mobilising and energising “the base” for at least a year before the election. Why do you think it was a “Deaniac bad idea” that caused that? Do you have anything other than opinion to back it up?
This I agree with, and I don’t doubt that Rosenberg is on top of that. But, could you tell me more about him? I know he broke away from the DLC (or more specifically, Al From), but I’m not sure why (a lot of factional spin out there).
I don’t like Rosenberg’s comments about the war in Iraq. And I’m not sure he is much different, or the best solution to, the (IMO out-dated) strategies of the DLC.
Hope you’re right, but DLC seems to be stuck at step 3,bargaining.
Well, I do have some actual experience, seeing as I was running several of these smaller rural counties in a battleground state for the Kerry campaign.
Yes, they did a fantastic job mobilizing their base. But we played into that.
Rosenberg isn’t as hyped up about this or that issue (and to be fair, I don’t think Dean is either). He’s looking at a nuts and bolts rewriting of how the Democrats do business and fight Republicans. I think he’s definately going to be able to do a much better job at that than Dean, without a doubt. And he also understands what I fear Dean does not, which is that the DNC chair is not “President of Democrats.” Anyone that sees the position like that is just going to end up being one more head on a hydra of factions. What the DNC needs to be is the body of the hydra. People are definately correct that Dean is the most inspiring guy out there to mobilize and exite people to support Democrats and get involved and take ownership. It’s just that that sort of thing isn’t what the DNC chair actually is involved in. The DNC chair basically creates the toolkit that Democrats need to win locally. But as anyone who’s ever been involved in coordinated campaigns knows: individual candidates largely set their own positions in the end. Dean isn’t going to be in any better position to define “what we stand for” as DNC chair than he is right now. If anything, Democratic politicians tend to resent and tune out the central DNC when it starts to lecture them on this or that.
How do you distinguish and measure that, as an insider?
BTW, I’m not challenging your experience, I’m just trying to get perspective on the nuts and bolts of inside politics. (For example: When the fraud allegations were being thrown around, a lot of people pointed to the improbability that Bush increased his 2000 percentage of the African-American vote to such a degree. After I looked at it, it could be explained by the GOP’s FBIP efforts).
What you seem to be saying is that you could have mobilised your base (Dem) without alerting the opposition (GOP). Is that right? Was it a lack of sophistication on the part of the Dean people? Did the Kerry campaign have a popular vote strategy, or were they just concentrating on the battleground states?
I’ll tell you this: the reason Kerry gave up so early is that we did our own work to figure out turnout on election day in key areas, figure out how many of their people came out compared to our people. When we first saw the numbers in our core counties halfway into the day, we thought we had it in the bag. But when we had the whole picture, we knew that shenanigans or no, they had also really done their homework.
I think the major problem I have with how the Dean people think, and all the self-modeled grassroots revolutionaries, and all of this is from having talked with them and worked with them, is that they have no sense of counterfactuals. They come up with what sound like great ideas, but they don’t listen when people point out that there may be downsides (there are a whole host of dismissive terms they use: “insider” is just one of them. Yeah, like, I’m an insider, a guy who’s never in his life worked in Washington). And that’s fine insofar as insiders often ARE set in their ways, narrowminded, whatever.
But at the same time, politics is a really messy, dirty business, and by that, I don’t mean that it’s corrupt or wrong. I mean that it involves people, and human beings are a mess: emotional, irrational, switching from side to side, extremely complex to manage especially in large groups. This is especially the case when it comes to campaigns, because a gazillion people want to walk in and get hired as a speechwriter. Or they have big ideas about “what Kerry has to say to win.”
Well, these ideas and statements might seem great… until you think seriously about what the Republicans could respond with, or how easily they’d be able to counter or turn it to their advantage. In a lot of ways, politics is like fencing: amatuers think that they can just pick up a sword and start flailing: they envision some fancy move that’ll slash right into the other guy, the end, gg. The problem is, the other guy’s already got that move figured out. In fact, far from being original, it’s practically a cliche. In real pro fencing, you have to think many many moves ahead. Now I’m not saying that Kerry and his people didn’t do things wrong. But a lot of those things that seem obvious to people now are only hindsight, and they are hindsight totally uninformed of other important unseen factors that maybe constricted the campaign in other ways.
Worse, I don’t think a lot of the “revolutionaries” have a very good sense of what actually happened. They talk about needing to do more official campaign fieldwork. They seem to be under the impression that ACT was the only group out there knocking on doors (in part this was because ACT was media-hungry, while Kerry field people couldn’t talk to the press on their own initiative). Well, get a grip. Not only did the Kerry campaign call more people, knock on more doors than ACT and other such groups, we outdid the Rpeublicans in many areas too. So if your conclusion from this election is that you can solve things by doing what, essentially, already actually DID happen and WASN’T ENOUGH, then your analysis isn’t going to be very helpful.
Yes. In fieldwork, aside from canvassing and bunch of other things, there are ID calls, and message calls. ID calls are basically designed to pretend to be polls: we just want to know if you’ll be supporting Kerry or Bush. Once you’ve ID’d a voter’s level of support for Kerry, you know what to do with them on election day (if they say that they support Kerry, you get them out to vote). On message calls, however, we actually tell people that we’re for Kerry and try to get out an deliver a message. Now, there’s upsides and downsides to this. Obviously, calling pisses people off, though having it be a real person helps a lot. But message calls into areas that have a high Republican concentration can be a very, very bad thing. The whole point of having good info on voters is so that you can GOTV them: make them all excited and worked up to go out and vote. But what happens when Republicans get a bunch of Democrats ringing their phones off the hook, knocking on their doors? Especially in places where they had been comfortably isolated from ever having to think that Democrats existed or were getting uppity? You can damn sure that motivates them to get out and vote.
This is a well known phenomenon, called “stirring the pot.”
In my opinion, we should have just stuck to ID calls in these rural counties, only ever doing message calls to people that were leaning towards Kerry. Find out covertly who our guys are and then use that info on election day. Don’t pass out fucking lawn signs everywhere, don’t make tons of noise. Don’t risk trying to convert the undecided directly by phone: if they are going to come our way, the best way is to do it by door knocks and mail. Otherwise you just end up talking to too many Republicans. Let the Democrats in the area know we are there person to person, not with big flashy 'I’m proud to be a Democrat!!!" noise. Well, that’s what we did, and I think it backfired.
Look, I don’t want to blame Dean people only. The final campaign was the work of a lot of people, and in the end, I think the campaign was actually pretty well done compared to most. We got higher turnout and percentages in a lot of areas than every before in history. It’s just that they did even better.
But there were a lot of really frustrating hangups. Most of them had to do with how slow the DNC was with targeting resources. Other things had to do with the fact that our technology tools are just awful: several generations behind the Republicans. Imagine trying to compete with a guy who’s got Excel 2004 and its macros, when you have a spreadsheet program from 1995 that can barely do complex functions. And then there was the fact that we don’t have the sort of powerful network of message institutions that the Republicans have. You can see this dominance on cable: a “balanced” panel will consist of a Republican pundit, a guy from a right leaning think-tank, and an ostensibly “leftist” journalist. Who among that group do you think just does carefully couched analysis instead of just going all out to get a particular message of the day out? It’s pretty obvious that the journalist type isn’t going to do that.
You’re going to have to explain what you mean here. Obviously, the campaign wanted to appeal to everyone that it could, but with limited resources, it didn’t put tons of field operatives in Texas. It let the local Dems handle that, and raise money. That’s just the way it is. If you think Dean is going to plunk down as much DNC money in Texas as he will in Ohio in 2008, then he’s misleading you.
And the idea that we had a lot more money this, neck and neck with the Republicans, is true and its false. The reality is, how much money you have isn’t the only thing that’s important. What kind of money, and into what pot it goes, is also important and really complex (part of the reason the DNC was slow is because of the new campaign finance laws: not even the people that drafted that bullshit could explain what was permitted and what was not, so we had lawyers working fulltime for months trying to figure out what the hell we could do and what we couldn’t, and the bottom line is that those laws hurt and restrict Democrats a lot more than they do Republicans, because our money comes in from different sources)
