Earlier today, I got into a debate on kos's Howard Dean Leadership poll thread about the 50 state strategy. Everyone here seems to support it. I argued that it is clearly a case of groupthink.
Why clearly? Because increasing the number of states in which one competes clearly involves a trade-off. The pro for this strategy is that more states means more long term party building; the con is that the strategy takes resources away from pivotal states. This is a very non-obvious trade-off. So one would expect disagreement, but it seems that everyone agrees.
That's group think: when everyone agrees about something that's not obvious and not unambiguously supported by the facts.
There's more.
The argument that I got most often was: We tried it the other way. It didn't work. So now let's do it this way.
But that's a terrible argument.
Consider my 50 job strategy. I tried to get rich and successful with one job. It didn't work. So now I'll get 50 jobs!
Don't tell me to do the normal thing and get just one job. I already tried that and it didn't work! So now I will get 50 jobs and work all the time!
Usually, when something doesn't work, doing the exact opposite is not the solution. There's probably a reason you weren't doing that to begin with. If only it were so easy to solve problems.
More generally, this and the fact that there is so much consensus about the 50 state strategy, and about Dean really makes me think that there is too much group think here at Daily Kos. There's plenty of healthy debate about some things, but there are also many articles of faith.
Group think is a dangerous thing. Group think among the democratic electorate got us Kerry as the nominee once he won Iowa, and I'm sure most of us regret that now. But, probably there's at least some healthy disagreement about that.