Howgroovy's front-paged diary today and
Barry Welsh's call to action last night both make a clear point of saying that we need to contest every Congressional seat, and that we need to recruit 70 people to run in those districts still lacking a Democratic challenger.
I am not an opponent of this concept: I think we need to challenge every seat, every district, every time. I support a Fifty-State Strategy.
However, we're overlooking a BIG problem within our party with this discussion--
--what caliber candidates are we putting up in these Congressional races?
It's a question that's bothered me for some time, having worked in the past for candidates that didn't know the first thing about how the game is played.
I ask this question because, like some of the great dKos posters, I lived for 19 years in one of those districts--the Georgia 6th--drawn by some of the most strategically-impaired men in Georgia's legislative history. When I was there, it was Newt Gingrich's seat (and later Johnny Isakson's: it's now held by former State Sen. Majority Leader Tom Price), and every two years someone with absolutely no governmental or policy experience would line up to lose to him.
The thing is, from millionaire Michael Coles (for whom I volunteered after the end of the school day when I was 13) to Gary "Bats" Pelphrey (how it actually appeared on the ballot), not one of those guys had any experience in elected office. Not one.
See, the GA-06 is mostly Cobb County (you might remember them from denying evolution and bashing gays), and for ages the Democratic party has not been able to get candidates to sign up to run, much less get them elected, within the 6th because of the decidedly conservative leanings of the area. As a result, there are dozens of uncontested seats for county offices, state legislature, state Senate and city races. So, every two years, the Republicans have primaries that are chock-full-o-qualified candidates with campaign experience (last year's Republican primary in the 6th, when it was an open seat, featured at least 3 state senators and a state Rep) and the Democrats decide not to contest the seat--not just because the district is drawn as to limit the chances for a Democratic victory, and not just because the Atlanta media instantly writes off any Democrats in the district as sideshows and unworthy of coverage, but because we have nobody to recruit for these races!
Or take the FL-13th, now held by Cruella DeV...I mean, Katherine Harris. In the 2002 Democratic primary, we had no elected officials running, and thus began the unfortunate misadventures of Jan Schneider, a sweet attorney with no prior campaign experience. In 2002, her inexperience led to numerous staff overhauls that in turn created disorganization and let Katherine take the seat. And that effect rippled into 2004, where Schneider's name recognition got her the nomination over three other candidates with no previous elected experience (one of them had been a State Senate candidate before, but had lost the race), and Katherine was re-elected despite numerous screw-ups in her first term. There are no Democrats in Sarasota county that serve in the state legislature, and the ones on the city commission declined to give up their seats at home to try to go to Tallahassee or DC. In fact, Sarasota just got its first Democratic State House candidate in four years, thanks to DEC vice-chair and PoliSci professor Keith Fitzgerald
There are over 100,000 elected offices in the United States, and every one of them is important and should be contested. But way, WAY too often we have Democrats that, with no prior experience or any clue as to what they need to do to effectively contest the seat, decide to make a run for Congress their first foray into electoral politics.
We need to build the base of the Party, and we need to build a stronger candidate pool for Federal and statewide offices. That's only going to happen when Democrats decide that it is important to contest the down-ticket races as well (or, as someone much older and wiser put it, when they "think globally and act locally"). Contesting these 70 seats, regardless of the outcome, is a necessary step. But unless we start filling in the gaps by running candidates in all the other races, state and local, we're never going to create the conditions necessary to sustain our incipient Congressional majority.