Domestic Policy, for a change.
By Moe Lane Posted in Democrats — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Interesting story here via RCP:
The Democratic chair plans to fight in every one of the 50 states. Is this shrewd strategy or a recipe for disaster?
One of the more precise summaries of an article that I've seen recently. Read on.
The article is mostly a nuts-and-bolts look at Dean's efforts to repair decaying Democratic State party apparati before they completely fall apart; which is, indeed, one of the two pressing problems for Democrats in Red State territory. Dean's actually right on this and Rahm Emanuel's wrong: as it stands current GOP strategy can be summed up as "What's ours is ours; what's yours is negotiable"*. This only works when the Other Side lets us do that. Which they've done, to the point where the Democrats are spending capital, not income. That doesn't work forever.
Where the difficulty arises is the other pressing problem...
...In Arizona, Democrats have candidates in every legislative district for the first time in a decade. "Successful candidates for Congress come from winning offices at the county or municipal level," says Arizona's Waid. "We build that farm team, and it enhances our chances for taking back Congress."
Cultural chasm. At least that's the theory. But in many red states, even some Democrats say their failures have as much to do with the national party's positions on cultural issues like gay rights and school prayer--which have become politically potent only in the past 25 years--as they do with ground organization. Discussing his national party's stance on hot-button issues, Mississippi state Rep. Dirk Dedeaux says, "They don't have to tinker; they have to disavow it. I'm opposed to gun control, opposed to abortion on demand."
Dedeaux says top-of-ticket Democrats can win on economic issues, particularly in poor states like his, but only by narrowing the GOP advantage on social issues. "Democrats believe government is responsible for the needs of average people, not just Big Oil and Big Tobacco," he says. "These aren't sensational issues. They're meat and potatoes."
...which is that the Democratic Party wasn't precisely nice to the people it's presently trying to woo back. All those former Democrats in Mississippi didn't switch parties on a lark**, and they aren't likely to switch again unless there's a change at the federal level of the party. Whether the activists currently controlling the federal party will let that happen has yet to be determined.
My guess? If there's a disaster for the Democrats - being defined as anything less than taking control of both Houses of Congress - Dean will get blamed for everything that went wrong and become the scapegoat. The Democratic Party will then wait four years before they quietly do everything that Dean suggested: it'll take that long to purge the last Vietnam-era activists from the party organization, and they'll fight it every step of the way. The Democratic Party gets more conservative as a result. People across the spectrum breathe a sigh of relief.
Then again, I get this stuff wrong all the time.
Moe Lane
*SM Stirling.
**They also didn't switch parties because of African-Americans, although we here at the GOP appreciate the Democrats' dilligence in spreading that particular fib. Does wonders for our recruiting when you guys go around telling everybody that Southerners are racists.
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Domestic Policy, for a change. 7 Comments (0 topical, 7 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
When Moe says "Dean will get blamed for everything that went wrong and become the scapegoat", we don't have to go too far back in history to see confirming examples.
McGovern
Mondale
Dukakis
I actually feel sad for these gentlemen. They did what their party asked and were then taken out and summarily executed (read: cast into the outer darkness) for their failure.
The practice of blaming the messenger for not communicating the message with sufficient verve or persuasiveness is a recipie for permanent minority status for the D's.
These gents did communicate the message, clearly and accurately. And as Yoda said: "That is why you failed."
For the Democrats to succeed, they must abandon all that has animated them for the longest while. Not going to be easy to abandon the last holdouts in the Democrat base.
They really need to settle on who they are trying to win over. First, that means recognizing that they are on the wrong side of a 51-48 split in the country. They will win sometimes just because of how close the split is, but they need to permanently shift some people to become a majority. Second, that means they need to find a group or two and focus their efforts on winning them over. They seem to fluctuate between wooing religious voters and wooing Western libertarian voters. I think the latter is a better bet for them but they can't successfully do both at the same time.
Let's say they become smart enough to go for small government types and oppose the religious right since most of the anger from the left seems to be focused on religious voters. Then they should make a couple major policy announcements breaking from past form on economic/small government issues and including a couple poetic lines such as "the era of big government is over." They should release a "Contract" that includes ending earmarks, balancing the budget in two years, allowing states to deal with same-sex marriage, medicinal marajuana, the drinking age, etc. Since these ideas would be new, they would get positive press as opposed to the platform Pelosi put out earlier this year which listed the same old stuff.
With this platform they could woo voters in CO, NV, AZ, NM, WY, UT, and MT well. They have had recent success in MT (took both state houses and the Governorship in 2004) and CO (Senate seat and House pickup in 2004). WY and AZ recently elected D governors for the first time in a couple decades.
The fundamental point is that Ds could win national elections without changing a lot of their social views (i.e. abortion) if they give up on evangelicals as a group. This cedes MS, AL, GA, TN, TX, and SC to the Republicans, but allows them an opportunity to win over a disenchanted part of the Republican Party.
(1) The 50-state strategy is a reasonable idea, or at least a 40-state strategy would be. Kos was getting all excited a couple days ago about some fundraising in Nebraska -- that's all well and good, but that money would be better off in Pennsylvania. Now trying to build party apparatus in Arizona -- that makes sense.
(2) I can't believe the people in the article don't see the difference between Ronnie Musgrove's 43% showing in 2003 and John Kerry's 28% showing in 2004. Shows was a moderate-to-conservative good ol' boy with a long history of elective service in Mississippi. Kerry is an effete liberal who owns a yacht named the Scaramousch with a long history of elected history in Massachusetts. If Dem think the 15% delta in Kerry and Musgrove's performance is due to organization, Republicans are in better shape than I thought.
(3) I can't really agree that African Americans had nothing to do with the re-alignment in the South -- there's a reason that Goldwater carried the deep South and Republicans elected a bunch of Congressmen from places where none had served since Reconstruction in 1964 (and yes, I know a majority of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ones elected from the South weren't exactly keen on it). That said, the meme that the Republican Re-alignment in the South was entirely or almost entirely about race does ignore the fact that the re-alignment began in the early 1950s, but didn't really take hold until the 1990s.
The Democrat party is run on a contemptible ideology. They attempt to placate the citizenry with conservative appealing platitudes while openly pursuing a radical agenda. This is a holistic and cancerous creed destined to destroy their long term elective worthiness and general value to a majority of American voters. If their platform is so popularly accepted, why do they constantly insult the public by hiding true intentions?
The major Democrat party financial contributors and supposedly intellectual policy formulators are a dishonest lot. They seek not a government of the people, by the people, but a system of socialistic, Marxist reform. This is certainly not the objective of our chosen Republic and a majority of her citizens. Accordingly, we will win the war of ideas and overcome their attempt at thought indoctrination. This is mainly because their ideas are foreign, corrupt and formulated from a dishonest and intellectually irreconcilable posture.
Our mission should continue to be exposing this blatant and unacceptable attack on our Constitution and system of government. It is with this thought in mind that victory will continue to be achieved.