Democratic (Party) Direction

My first and greatest b-day!

As to your larger point, yup. I tend to find hope in events that happen outside of electoral politics anymore.

And trying to hog the center, as they've been doing for, oh, the last 2 decades is working really well.

Oh I agree completely. I just hope people remember this.

I can be over-optimistic electorally, but I think it's quite likely that Warner, for one, early and easily develops into a credible Hillary alternative (if not the dominant player on the field), and Kerry gets laughed out of town. I think Feingold has the potential to be a serious contender in the pre-primary stakes, but isn't going to go anywhere once people start voting.

anyway, there's another thread for personalities. it would be nice that if we talk about personalities here, we try to talk about them in context of the discussion, i.e. what (real, rather than imagined) message they're using

*sigh* I heard a Wisconsin woman, a party activist apparently, say on "Morning Edition" recently something like 'we can't nominate so far left as the last two in 2008.' I reached through the radio and strangled her.

Yes, OTM.
I read an article to the effect that Dean is putting most of his effort & resources into rebuilding the party at the local level, precinct level basically, which seems urgent and key. Karl Rove has prob always been a right wing ideologue but he started out doing direct mail, not working on message or on policy. I am not a huge fan of Dean whenever he opens his mouth but if he's getting stuff done at the ground level, it's about time.

-- dar1a g (dar1a_...), January 19th, 2006.

Absolutely, absolutely. OTM OTM OTM. That's why he's in that position in the first place.

And I think this is the most important part of the solution by FAR. If you build up the party at the grass roots level, you not only have local people to canvass their neighbors and get out the vote, but you have a much larger TALENT POOL from which to pick candidates and strategists. No amount of triangulation using focus groups and advanced polling software is going to replace that, especially since the Republican party will always have the same cheap tricks at their disposal.

There are now better means to get the word out than there were before. Now they just need to figure out what to say, and how know how long that will take.

The people who engineer GOP victories these days are people who are working at the top and doing pinpoint market research the way the guys in the article linked at the start of the thread are. It's about targetting these voters directly and through paid and free media. The organizational base helps only at the margin.

36 are up for grabs, 14 D, 22 R. I just wish stuff like this(i.e. states voting for governors of a differing party than president) would be incorporated into all the shit "red/blue" talk.

it would be interesting to find out what fundie voters concerned with lineage think about kerry's none-too-distant heritage.

They don't like Catholics.. I am guessing neither part of his heritage would be a plus there.

About finding new voters, the Dean campaign's big plan in the primaries was to inspire & bring out all these people who never had a reason to vote before & get them to vote Democrat. That didn't work out too well for them. Through the churches & megachurches in particular the GOP seems to have had more success in this.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), January 19th, 2006.

But that strikes me as a little like answering the question of "How do you become the most powerful country in the world?" with "By having the best weapons." Where did Republicans get the strategists who came up with these campaigns? Where and how did they get the money to do it?

No offense, but what the fuck are you on??

even I'm not that paranoid. newsflash - there's no such thing as "the Dem leadership". yes, there are Dems who worked to bring down Dean *before* the scream, some of them quite wealthy and most of them aligned with rival candidates (in particular Gephardt, who is only further to the right of Dean if you judge ideology by how they voted on the war and ignore the fact that Dean didn't need to get elected in a Red state)

to the extent the 'Dem leadership' did anything about Dean, they mostly helped rather than hurt him - the CLintons threw Clark into the mix so he could have a Veep who would reframe 'crazy' as 'crazy like a fox', then Gore endorsed him giving him some measure of legitimacy (which you can argue hurt rather than helped him)

No offense, but what the fuck are you on??

no offense, but what the fuck are you on if you don't think Kerry lost because he was perceived as too 'liberal' (i.e. too different attitudinally/identity-wise from swing voters)?

Kerry did not lose for that reason. Kerry lost (and maybe didn't lose at all) because he was a mediocre candidate running against an incumbent in time of war with a position that wasn't in any way distinctive. On foreign policy there wasn't a difference and Bush had the advantage of holding office already.

I think this comparison highlights the Democratic party's huge disadvantage. MoveOn members aren't exactly meeting every Sunday to network and soak up the latest party propaganda. Without a strong, organized union base, what social networks still exist that can bring liberals together to discuss issues and provide an organizational foundation for party politics?

This is a common error in the way the left thinks about the conservative movement; if we were to look at a 'hinge' moment, most historians are starting to see the nomination of BARRY GOLDWATER - yes, BG - as the moment in which conservative politics grabbed a foothold. Sure he lost, but he lost representing a conservatism that was essentially presumed dead, and he did it working with grassroots orgs. Despite the historical noise about the rise of the left's grassroots organizations in the early 60s, the right as we know it now was basically born in the 60s with the Goldwater campaign and the alignment of a bunch of different strands of social + economic conservative thought.

...alignment of a bunch of different strands of social + economic conservative thought powered by grassroots organizations - PTA groups, john birch society, Phyllis Schlafly, Ayn Rand. Everything came together with the parents of the baby boomers.

and also worth remembering that our culture -- as opposed to our politics -- is still largely trending liberal. the culture is globalizing and multiculturizing a lot faster than our politics. politics will catch up.