Ruy Teixeira, a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, gives him "thumbs up" in this piece on his DonkeyRising Blog: Bill Bradley Deftly Analyses Where the Dems Go Wrong . Sayest he:
Former Senator Bill Bradley has an extremely important
op-ed page piece in Wednesday's New York Times - one of the genuine "must reads" of post-2004 election strategic thinking. In it, he contrasts the Republicans very stable pyramid-shaped organizational structure with the Dems "upside-down" organizational pyramid.
Bradley concludes that:
If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.
Worthy of a read but sound?
Here are excerpts provided by Teixeira:
You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid...
...The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate...And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.
At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine....
So dear leader doesn't matter all that much? Just asking.
Bradley then turns to the Dems:
...To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.
Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. ...
...in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe...
...In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions...
So dear leader is made impotent because...?
But, but does this paradigm represent the "same old" business model of sorts. Hey, what about the horizontal approach?
Let me hasten to acknowledge, I'm no political thinker; I do think Bradley's point-of-view is worth talking about. Having said that, however, there's this: how does one "prepare" for the corruption of the process? I guess I'm having trouble with the piece in that it ignores.....
What say you?