YK2006: How to shoot like a liberal

This is an interesting section for me to write (Part IV in my "What I learned at Yearly Kos" series) because it's one of the most profound things that I took away from the Yearly Kos conference.

I went to the conference knowing it was going to be epic.  I'm not exactly one of the big names around here, and though I'm politically aware, I'm not nearly as involved as I should be in our political process.  The reasons that I went to Vegas in June were to learn about issues, meet people, and figure out the best way to become more involved in the Democratic Party.

So, needless to say, I was stunned - I mean, really shocked, to learn how broken the infrastructure of the Party is and has been for some time.  It's in a shambles.  My search for how to get involved deteriorated quickly into trying to figure out what had happened to cause such massive problems in the Democratic Party that had controlled the government for decades.   I'd like to share with you, through several anecdotes, the results of that search.

So, I read Crashing The Gate, or most of it anyway, on the plane to Vegas.  I felt like a kid who put off their first period homework and is then forced to do it in homeroom before the bell rings.   In the book, Jerome and Markos talk for quite some time about the various factions in the party and why we can't seem to work together.  The funny thing is, I realized after a day or two at Yearly Kos, we used to.  We used to have a party that would stick together on principles and rally and fight for the greater good, more or less as one --- rather than bickering endlessly about singe-issues.  What on earth happened to that cohesiveness?

My conjecture is that it's not just that the Republicans got even better at this (though of course they did) but that we got worse.  And I think it's in many ways a success catastrophe.  We were the party in power for so long that we forgot what it takes to get there.  We are still acting like the party in power ---- when you're in power, you have the liberty to argue amongst yourselves about the best way to do things.  When you're in power, the respectable, efficient, benevolent thing to do is listen to the other side (Republicans) and compromise.  

None of which is really appropriate when you're the underdog.

In short, while we were in power, Dems in D.C. were becoming complacent and conciliatory and the liberal groups were becoming even more antagonistic with each other.  

And here's the kicker - meanwhile, the rank-and-file base of the party was atrophying.  For instance, at the Black Caucus at Yearly Kos, it was appalling to hear how bad outreach is (national black organizations that have email addresses for only something like 2% members, trying to reach people by fax, etc.) and it's well known that the so-called black leadership is disconnected from the concerns of many everyday black Americans.  It's no secret that black Americans are a huge part of our party that in general, we no longer have the means to effectively reach.  Unions have also been vital to our party's membership - but with union membership dwindling, we're losing that support too.

So, a dwindling base, and the political tactics of a long-absent golden age.  Not exactly your recipe for success.

Is it any wonder, then, given the complacency of our party at large, that our infrastructure would start to suffer?  There was a very heated panel discussion on Saturday, I believe, about winning national elections by (get this) abandoning the South. (I will come back to this.)  After a couple of days of talking to people, I started realizing that it's not just the South - it's the whole country that's been abandoned, to varying degrees.

Example: At the Pacific Northwest Regional Caucus, this came up.  You'd expect that the Pacific Northwest would be so liberal already that the Democrats worked like a well-oiled machine.  This clearly is not the region where we have problems, right?  Wrong.  

• One person related a story about calling potential voters, supposedly Democrats that hadn't voted in the last election, that turned out to be hard-right lifelong Kool-Aid drinkers because the phone number lists they had were garbage.  
  
• Another person, a Las Vegas native, said that in '04 she was canvassing her neighborhood and they ran into eight - yes, EIGHT - other Democratic groups doing the same houses, while the next neighborhood over went untouched.  So now, we've got one neighborhood that never got the message and another full of annoyed voters that had to answer the door eight times in one night.  
  

These are trivial errors - easy to fix!  Why aren't we organized enough to fix them?

But nowhere is the infrastructure worse than in the South.  I talked with a Texan woman in the audience at the aforementioned panel who praised Dean, saying that before Dean, every year they'd give money to the party and not one cent ever came back to Texas.  Which of course meant that further validation was given to people who come up with crap statistics about why we could never win the South.

I think that's absurd of course.

However, I talked with another Texan, Rick, at some length.  Myself, I've only ever lived in the bluest of blue places and never in the South, so it was hard for me to really grasp the isolation and hopelessness he described as being the dominant feelings around being a Democrat in Dixie.  He said that usually you just never talked to people about politics (other Southerners I talked to feared reprisals, in fact, in the form of vandalism or even losing their job for `coming out' as a Democrat!)  

But Rick also told me a story of a time that he did in fact speak up.

If I recall correctly, this was in the runup to the `04 election.  Rick and a Republican friend were at the shooting range and a group of four or five other guys was talking loudly, and disparagingly, about liberals.

Rick said, "Actually, I'm a liberal," ...and then proceeded to shoot the center out of his target.

The guys sort of looked dumbfounded.  Rick's friend then proceeded to shoot the center out of his target too.

The guys turned to him and said "Are you a liberal too?"

Rick's friend shrugs and says, "Nah, I just shoot like one."

At which point they all start in talking and Rick manages to convince these guys to vote for Kerry over Bush!  I love this story.  

There are two points I take away from this, and the first is that this is the kind of interaction we as a party have to support.  This is the kind of conversation it will take.  Not some blue-stater like me calling Texas from thousands of miles away, but the real empowerment of Texan Democrats.  The South isn't lost, unless we give it up.  The second point is connected to the first, and that is that we're going to win this by each of us standing up and just talking to people about who we are and why we believe what we believe.  But we have to do that.  

The red states should be purple and the blue ones should be even bluer, but you, me, everybody has to do it, and we have to have some kind of coordinated... what's the word?  Oh yeah, campaign.

There was a very real sense at the conference that... well, it reminded me of a line from Terry Pratchett's book Mort, in which Death is counseling his apprentice and he says, "There's no justice, there's just us."  This is a people-powered movement and that only works if we (the people) make it work.

So, in conclusion, I know Dean gets it - it's obvious from everything he does and says.  The 50-state strategy is about re-building an organized party, nationwide, from the ground up.  And, from everything I learned at Yearly Kos, it's sorely needed, everywhere.  But, keep in mind, Dean can't do it alone.

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The other diaries in this series can be found here:
Part I - My question for Howard Dean, on the Black Caucus
Part II - Science Friday, on this scientist's impressions about how to take back the debate about science.
Part III - How the economy works and why it won't much longer, a distilled non-economist's summary of the economy panel

This series is happening so long after the conference because I got married in July, and there wasn't time till now.  There will be one more segment, on the media's complete not-getting of what Yearly Kos was all about.
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