Imagine.
By Moe Lane Posted in 2006 — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
We begin with a quote from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy. Our hero Simon Moon - one of them, at any rate - has just informed his equally-leftist, but much less stoned and certainly more hard-headed parents that Freedom will come through Imagination (in that very, very serious voice. You know the one). His father (Tim Moon) responds... well, read:
Dad was the first to recover. "Imagination." he said, his big red face crinkling in that grin that always drove the cops crazy when they were arresting him. "That's what comes of sending good working-class boys to rich people's colleges. Words and books get all mixed up with reality in their heads. When you were in that jail in Mississippi you imagined yourself through the walls, didn't you? How many times an hour did you imagine yourself through the walls? I can guess. The first time I was arrested, during the GE strike of thirty-three, I walked through those walls a million times. But every time I opened my eyes, the walls and the bars were still there. What got me out finally? What got you out of Biloxi finally? Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it."
- Page 63
Why am I bringing this up? Why, read on, and see.
The above quote flashed in my head this morning as I read a certain WaPo article (Democrats Scrambling To Organize Voter Turnout). Particularly this bit:
At a meeting last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) criticized Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean for not spending enough party resources on get-out-the-vote efforts in the most competitive House and Senate races, according to congressional aides who were briefed on the exchange. Pelosi -- echoing a complaint common among Democratic lawmakers and operatives -- has warned privately that Democrats are at risk of going into the November midterm elections with a voter-mobilization plan that is underfunded and inferior to the proven turnout machine run by national Republicans.
The Senate and House campaign committees are creating their own get-out-the-vote operations instead, using money that otherwise would fund television advertising and other election-year efforts. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) -- who no longer speaks to Dean because of their strategic differences -- is planning to ask lawmakers and donors to help fund a new turnout program run by House Democrats. He recruited Michael Whouley, a specialist in Democratic turnout, to help oversee it.
The Democrats have apparently now chosen to adopt two simultaneous strategies; they will at the same time attempt to both retake Congress and rebuild State Party organizations. And they apparently are going to be doing it without having the two chief implementers of said strategies talk to each other. There is a certain irony here, because if they were talking to each other they might recognize the trouble that they're in.
The main difficulty here is that the two plans are based on contradictory core assumptions about the health of the Democratic Party. Dean's core assumption is that the Democratic Party has a life-threatening problem (its steady erosion in many Red States) that must be addressed, starting now. Emanuel's core assumption is that the Democratic Party has an organizational problem (it's not running Congress) that can be addressed with enough GOTV work, and that fixing the State party structure can be addressed after the elections.
These two positions can both be argued. The problem is, they can't both be true.
If Dean is correct, then Emanuel's doing precisely the wrong thing - because if Dean is correct, the Party's going over the cliff. Every incumbent that gets knocked off is one more district or State that we evil, evil Republicans can take and keep, and at some point the trickle will become a flood as voters desert en masse. If Dean is correct, then what Emanuel should be doing is to hold the line and play it safe until resurgent Red State Democratic Party organizations can give him a margin for risk again. That means that it'll be first money for the dessicated Democratic Party State organizations, then money to ensure the retention of Democratic incumbents, then money to give to Democrats campaigning for open seats, and then - maybe, if there's any left, money to candidates trying to overturn Republican candidates*. In short, if Dean is right then Emanuel needs to, say take all the money that they're giving to Webb in VA, hand most of it to Dean to disburse to Idaho and give the rest to Murtha in PA: the latter two are the higher priority.
But if Emanuel is right then Dean is at best jumping the gun, and at worst doing the exactly the wrong thing - because if Emanuel is correct, there's no pressing need to revive Red State Party organizations in the short term. If Emanuel is correct, then more efficient targeting of Democratic voters will be sufficient to retake Congress, and the Party organizations will recover on their own. If Emanuel is correct then the money that Dean is spending has been mostly wasted, and while Emanuel thinks that the Democratis can win if they have enough money, he doesn't necessarily think that the Democrats have quite enough money to win. So if Emanuel is correct, then what Dean should be doing is to essentially stop trusting his own judgement and start trusting Emanuel's. In short, that means, say, letting Idaho slip into the Outer Darkness and using the money to boost Webb's chances against Allen in VA... and maybe raiding Murtha's coffers a little, just to be on the safe side.
What makes this as amusing as all get-out is that if you were to show the two men the above quote from Illuminatus! and asked which one they'd identify with each would pick Tim Moon. Both Dean and Emanuel is sure that he's the one being pragmatic and sensible, and it's the other guy who's being dangerously foolish. Depending on how you look at it, they both have a point - but what makes all of this doubly amusing is that Tim Moon was actually wrong. In politics, Organization only takes you so far. You need to have the Imagination to find out why you're fighting and why you want to fight - you have to discover your principles, in other words, and then you have to keep to them. And if those principles get abandoned at the first sign of personal discomfort... well, they really weren't principles in the first place.
I write this wearily secure in the knowledge that X number of people reading it later will miss everything up to this point in order to write (or say, or scream, or think) a bitter, reflexive screed against the GOP. Which is, alas, in some ways the entire point. Too much Organization, not nearly enough Imagination.
Moe Lane
*You'll notice that money to fund primary challengers to insufficently-doctrinaire Democrats isn't on the list. That'd be because there's no money in the Dean plan budgeted for luxuries.
Update [2006-8-3 5:59:24 by Moe Lane]: Lightly edited.
« When Negative Ads Backfire — Comments (4) | Guess Who Wrote This — Comments (21) »
Imagine. 4 Comments (0 topical, 4 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
I'd say Dean is probably correct. One half of the Republican equation for success certainly was charismatic candidates with new ideas, but the other half was building state parties to churn out promising governors for presidential runs and congressional candidates to start shifting districts to the GOP. This also gave the GOP its "big tent" persona - because state parties in many different regions are strong, each region's brand of conservatism gets noticed on the national stage because every region can produce strong national candidates. On the other side, Democrats let party organizations in losing states wither, which in my view has produced a more monolithic and less flexible party.
One can see this numerically by comparing GOP senators' ACU ratings (which roughly reflect how conservative the senator is) with Democrat senators' ADA ratings, which are measures of how liberal they are. The ACU and ADA base their ratings on monolithic views of what conservatism and liberalism are, in that they score senators based their voting in accordance with what each organization prescribes as the proper liberal or conservative position on a series of 20 bills. This fact lets us compare each party's "doctrinaire factor" by seeing who has lower averages for these ratings. A higher average means a more monolithic party. The results are interesting. The average Senate Democrat rating is 94.4%, while the average Senate Republican Rating is 86.3%. This difference of 6% is produced by some Republican outliers like Chafee, Snowe, and Collins, as well as some more "middle of the road" senators like Coleman. Senators of these types in the Democrat party are virtually nonexistent, and are getting rarer every year as Democrats purge moderates from their ranks (see Connecticut: Joe Lieberman). As the data show, contrary to media claims about GOP "partisanship" and "extremism," it is the Democrats who are becoming more doctrinaire. This is undoubtedly hurting the party's competitiveness while at the same time being a symptom of its very uncompetiveness. The only way out of this circular impasse is to implement Dean's strategy, with the irony that Dean's flavor of flamboyant and aggressive partisanship would actually be undermined if his plan were to succeed.
Another argument in Dean's favor is that I believe Emmanuel has grossly overestimated his party's chances this year. If the DCCC tries to put all its funding in one basket in an effort to retake the House and fails, as I think it will, its credibility will be severely undermined. The risk of this credibility is not worth the remote possibility of a great reward this cycle. Strangely enough, it would be better strategically for the Democrats to lose this year with the excuse that they are focusing on the long-term. This will placate donors and the party faithful to some extent. Of course, the risk here is that the Democrats will become too impatient and not allow enough time for the 50 State Strategy to bear fruit, a process which may take beyond 2008, before pulling the plug on Dean. Then, the party will be even more adrift than they are now. All in all, it's a difficult time to be a Democrat, and it won't be getting any easier for quite awhile. Something like a 50 State Strategy is their only way out of the hole they've dug themselves into by polarizing their party into a bicoastal elite with little in common with the states in between.
The problem is, the frozen moments in time when each was correct have passed.
It's easy to recognize holes once you are fully down into them.
But suppose it were NOT too late, that we were at that juncture where either path could prove correct if pursued. The deeper problem for Democrats is still there: they are becoming more and more a party of the left while the country gradually moves to the right, both in attitudes and in demographics.
The moonbat "nutroots" have pretty much ensured that, in the short term, ideological diversity is no longer tolerated in the Democratic Party. See for reference, Joe Lieberman. That's not a prescription for EITHER party-building or majority-retaking.
People say Karl Rove is a genius. Maybe he is, OR maybe he was just in the right place at the right time.
Any of them!
Dillinger is why Tim Moon was wrong... Organization is nice... but tell that to the Hezbollah truck drivers! Their imagination is what motiviates them to enter into organization... They imagine that their goals can be met with enough organization.
Pretty good analysis, though, Moe. I'd say Dean is less wrong, based on history --- Dean is frequently wrong about lots of little things, but Rahm is never right about anything...
is to remind people of something for which they would carry a rifle, or send their son off to carry his. In other words, it's the ideas, stupid.
Well done.