A Twelve Point Plan for the New Democratic Party
Part Two: Taking back the Democratic Leadership.
Today, I'll take a look at each of the facets of the Democratic Party that we must seize control of well before the 2006 elections, so that we may be able to perform more effective and more powerful campaigns. I'll concentrate on the perception that the "Democratic Elite is clueless" and what we can do about it.
Part One
1) The DLC- The Democratic Leadership Council (
http://www.ndol.org/), headed by Al From, is a left-center organization who seems hell bent on weakening the knees of the Democratic Party. While after the Dean Revolution, their influence was weakened, they still hold a considerable amount of power over the message of the Democratic Party, if nothing else.
There was an interesting phenomenon that I noticed during the course of the 2004 Presidential Campaign. Every couple of weeks, Kerry would suddenly change his message- go from focusing on Iraq, the President's past, the economy, the future, or any number of other topics. This, I think, was a real big problem with the campaign. Kerry never stayed on a topic (or talked about it in the same tone) long enough for the voters to really figure out how he felt about it. So, why did Kerry keep changing his message and tone? It seemed like he would systematically seek the advice of various parties within the Democratic Party - most notably Bill Clinton and the DLC. Now, one can argue up and down the positive or negative effects of the Big Dog had on Kerry's message, and I think it was a bit of both. It's hard to marginalize the voice of the biggest legacy of the Democratic Party since Truman. However, the effect of the DLC on the message was both plainly obvious and very damaging. The DLC seeks mostly to make the Democratic Party "Republican Lite", as we have all talked about in the wake of the 2002 elections. The unhindered effect of the DLC on our message was one of the main reasons why Democrats couldn't find their backbone until Howard Dean stepped up to the plate early in the primary season.
Now, it's plainly obvious the negative effects of the DLC on the message of the Democratic Party, but how can we reduce their influence? Other than nominating candidates whose ideals are diametrically opposed to theirs, I really have no clue. It's going to be hard to marginalize the DLC without creating a rift within the party- and that's the last thing we need. But it's something that everyone needs to be thinking about coming into 2005.
2) The DNC- The DNC did a fairly good job this election cycle, a driving force behind unparalleled party unity. They did fail, however, in two very critical areas. The first being the lack of understanding and acceptance of NetRoots. While this first failure is certainly understandable, it is not acceptable. The second being their failure in understanding the language of neo-conservatism, and how to counter it. I'll talk about how to handle these issues in more detail in the third and fourth parts, respectively. But what needs to happen is we need to drive a new DNC chair to be elected who understands these two issues, as well as being capable of the traditional duties of party chairman. While Howard Dean is certainly capable of this, and would be an excellent choice, I think a better choice would be Joe Trippi. While I think he made a couple of really grave errors has head of Dean's primary campaign (misguided television advertising, inefficient usage of funds), he will most certainly have learned from these mistakes. Either way, we need a progressive party chair who understands language, message, fundraising, party unity and the NetRoots.
3) The DSCC and
4) The DCCC- I'm lumping them together because they both performed equally poorly this election cycle. For some reason, we lost almost every race they had targeted. Now I'm not necessarily blaming them for the losses, but there were several instances where they could have won a race early on by providing the funds the candidates needed right away. Several times they proved too hesitant to dump funds into a race, and it cost us some very winnable races. I do understand, however, that funds are limited, and you can't go dumping money everywhere. It just needs to be used more effectively and earlier and on candidates that really needed it. Several times they refused to jump-start a campaign with badly needed funds exactly because they had no funds. Now what kind of sense does that make? Both of these organizations need to greatly rethink their strategies, as well as come into the 21st century and start to effectively raise funds online.
In the next installment, I'll talk about Political Language, the natural Liberal disadvantage, and what we can do on a daily basis to help reinvent the way liberalism is perceived in America.