I forget how many election campaigns I actually was a part of and how many election cycles I have been through, as an observer with election experience.
I have been a journalist, a speechwriter, a wordsmith, a consultant, a community organizer and have been in the strategy meetings. I have worked intensely at the local level in the policy formulation arena. I even defended a public policy that I had a lot to do with writing in front of a Grand Jury once. I have also been at a distance and able to contemplate what I learned from a hogan in the middle of the Navajo Nation.
At this point, it seems to me that long term thinking, and deeper thinking is really needed if the Democratic Party and progressives in general are going to rise to the situation we are really in.
The future is progressive, if you think really deeply, at the tectonic plate level that underlies the landscape.
Scanning these posts, the impression comes across that a lot of people who identify with progressivism in its largest sense and with the Democratic Party as a potential vehicle for policy that might be considered progressive, really don't have a very good handle on what politics actually is or how to think about accomplishing real goals through political action.
Republicans are actually worse at this, even though it would seem counterintuitive to say that after an election won by GOP candidates. Many people who are Republican voters are very regimented people and tend to be herded in bulk. That can win an election cycle, but the long term focus on reality is much in doubt.
The swing voters are not very committed and not very attentive beyond a certain point. I think that generalization has held up across many election cycles now, and it probably a condition of the landscape.
One thing, to me, cuts through it all, time and time again and is a central point that gets missed over and over:
The people I have seen who can really think through the superficial appearances and to the long term truth of what is actually going on, and who can think strategically, rather than emotionally, are the ones most likely to succeed in the end.
Look: Most intelligent people, whether liberal or conservative, realize that the political debate in America has been dumbed down to an absurd point.
The reason the swing voters are "swinging wild" is that there is a real reason for feeling discomfort. This is just not being articulated in any particularly intelligent way in the political arena. The reason that advertising full of nebulous and vague BS works is that it appeals to this existential sense of unease on a strictly emotional level - in the absence of more trenchant intelligent insight which might resonate as the truth. WIth the amount of money being poured into slinging formula-driven BS, it is no wonder a great many swing voters were swayed to go Republican - this time.
They are just as likely to swing Democratic next time.
Look: This could keep on happening - swing voters swinging back and forth with no real anchor anywhere.
The reality based strategy question is whether or not to simply accept that the future is a swinging electorate based on emotional appeals to the natural tendency of all humans to rise to the occasion based on the latest thing that pissed us off.
If not, then the next question is to how to lay down a long term strategy that might get beyond that.
I think there are several levels to that and I intend to think through some of those issues in a book manuscript but also to work them out here, to add to whatever thinking can really be done in a blog context. The irony of writing a book is that it may be written for people who don't read.
My hope is that there are at least a few long term thinkers online who grasp the need for getting beyond GOTV thinking and TV commercial thinking.
To me, a useful model is one I encountered in Austin, Texas for a 20 year period between 1980 and about 2000. In this timeframe a progressive coalition arose that won numerous election cycles and accomplished some real progressive policy, including the basis for national policy in alternative energy and Green Building.
There are some aspects of this unique to Austin, but there are some extractable elements that might apply nationally at this time.
The first one I think applies here. There came to be as many as 500 neighborhood and civic organizations (Sierra Club as one example) that participated in local political action. The reason for this networking was founded in a universal sense that the local daily newspaper (Austin American Statesman) and the TV stations had already betrayed the public by sometime in the late sixties or early seventies. People needed to share actually reality-based experience one on one or in small groups, which could allow a number of people to share deep education that was not dependent on the media.
Leaders emerged from this who were knowledgeable and very skilled. They did not lead from rhetoric, but from ability to negotiate progressive policy reform even without being elected. As they began to get elected, in 1981, they began to accelerate this knowledge into moving government reform through actions as elected officials. At first, this was due to being articulate and knowledgeable, then because in successive election cycles, success built on success and majorities grew.
What caused this cycle ultimately to wind down and disintegrate was a number of factors, but the prime ones were that the leaders left the groups (which forged a coalition of activists to support policy development and candidate election) to become elected or appointed, and then, the aging of the Baby Boomer cohort that was the primary muscular energy in this coalition.
The focus on government was at the cost of a focus on developing new activists and leaders.
There was a group of progressive activists who went professional. These people who were extraordinarily talented and dedicated to strategic thinking became the consultants who put together the resources that candidates needed in order to win campaigns. There was a guy who produced absolutely brilliant TV commercials. There was a couple of guys who partnered as a consulting firm that worked statewide that probably could be credited as being among those, in the mid seventies, who invented the GOTV system. There came to be something like a dozen or so people I can think of who were in this category.
I worked among the consultants, after working with a grassroots progressive coalition building effort as a wordsmith and literature developer for some years. I also wrote articles about this for the weekly "Austin Chronicle" now and then as well as some other publications.
In my considered opinion, the education most people get in High School civics or college Poli Sci courses has very little to do with the real world, especially when you consider communication.
The motivation we should feel should not be directed at winning an election in my view. I think our problem is far more profound than that.
I think our system of communication about meaningful and important concerns is so distorted that the prospect exists that most voters as well as most activists are operating from misinformation and disinformation to the extent that how to get back to reality may be a crisis concern.
Our biggest and most complex problems may be impossible to address through the political system, even as government may be the only comprehensive institution we have to face them with.
We have never needed a public debate rich enough to deal with the real world more, nor have we ever seen an environment that more prevents it.
I think that Daily Kos is, by default at this time, a place where some of this model for progressive coalition building might begin to take root. There are a lot of problems with that, not the least of which is the adolescent raspberry blowing that distracts from seriousness much of the time.
But there has to be a beginning for a long term strategic outlook. My hope is that there are others who see the need to rise to the occasion.