Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong wrote a good book in 2006. In my view, and many others, they correctly diagnosed the disease of what ailed the Democratic Party.
It was a Party governed by an elite establishment consulting class that had lost all contact with real America and lost all skill at doing their jobs. A Party derailed by competing special interests, each of whom had no sense of the bigger picture and only loyalty to the special interest and not the party. And a Party led by leaders and candidates who have applied the same electoral and campaign strategy, year after year, with no success. Yet, the Party establishment, adrift in failure, claimed superiority above the rank and file. They knew better. They knew what we did not: That we have to become like the Republicans in order to beat them. That we have to play the game on their field in order to win, and not ours.
Markos and Jerome advocated common sense. If a consultant tries a failing strategy year after year, yet bills exorbitantly, you fire that loser consultant, and hire new and fresh strategists from outside the beltway, more in touch with the bread and butter issues and less expensive. And the special interests that distract the party from unity and victory (and indeed are often traitorous, i.e. NARAL's endorsement of Lincoln Chafee and the Sierra Club's endorsement of Mike Fitzgerald) should either cooperate for their greater good, since the election of Democrats nationwide benefits their individual cause, or be ignored.
Markos and Jerome described the seminal moment when the gates of power were finally crashed:
As much as bloggers and the netroots mobilized leading up to the 2004 elections, the night of November 2 was a downer for them, as it was for half the country. But in the weeks following the election, something phenomenal and new happened. While a lot of loyal Democrats went into depression and slunk away to lick their wounds, the netroots became more energized.
It's hard to believe now, but this was a time that know-nothing pundits predicted the demise of the netroots and Democratic consultants dreamed of business-as-usual. But the netroots remained motivated, engaged, and ready to clean house of the losers who gave us the 2004 debacle. This sentiment -- of fixing the problems that led us to lose the election -- was expressed in a variety of ways online, but none did it as bluntly as Eli Pariser of MoveOn PAC, who sent his now-legendary and highly controversial e-mail about the Democratic Party to the group's supporters on December 9, 2004[:]
"For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base[.] But we can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers ... In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Not it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
And we did take it back. We backed the effort to draft Howard Dean as the DNC's next chairman, succeeding the consulting class maven and corporate King Terry McAuliffe I. And eventually, Dean announced his candidacy, and with our backing, and his campaign promise of the 50-state strategy to rebuild the Democratic Party in states long forgotten by the failed former leadership; Dean won. As Markos notes, he was the first to go inside the gates after they were crashed.
Dean's chairmanship has been a resounding success in my view. The 50-state strategy brought the party back to voters thirsting for it, and it laid the groundwork so that the party could take advantage of the favorable midterm political environment in 2006 so as to regain Congress and a majority of the Governorships and state legislatures.
And now, in 2008, the Party stands at a fork in the road. One of the Democratic Party's candidates for President, Senator Barack Obama, has used Dean's 50-state strategy and the gate-crashing netroots to not only fuel his winning campaign, but also to reach out to new voters and old voters never before warm to the Democratic Party. And another one of the Party's candidates is running to rebuild the gates, by using the same losing consultant class of yesteryear, by advocating a return to the notion that the party must embrace lobbyists (because they are real people too!), special interests and corporatism, by being more Republican and neocon than the Republicans and the neocons, and by using the old campaign strategy that views certain states and unimportant and insignificant. That candidate of the failed past, railed against by Markos and Jerome in their book, is Hillary Clinton.
As an aside, one of the great mysteries of life is what in fact happened to Jerome Armstrong. He supports now what he once opposed. Did he never believe in the first place what he and Markos wrote? Has he just changed his mind and now thinks gates are good? Who knows?
But what is not a mystery is what is at stake is the Democratic Primary between Obama and Clinton. With the former, the gates stay down. With the latter, they get rebuilt.