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18 Nov 2004 — More on that “consultants who repeatedly lose” thesis

Excerpted from a letter to Joshua Micah Marshall:

It’s is a depressing fact that for a candidate to become credible in Democratic politics, they have to hire from among a group of consultants who give them credibility with the fundraisers on K St… It’s the same group of consultants who have been running Dem. campaigns since the late 1980’s. If you look at the partners of the major media firms, for example, you can almost guarantee that they were players for someone in the 1988 campaign.

This creates a different problem. For those of my generation of political operatives, the searing election experience was 1994. And the animating ideas, strategy, and tactics of the Republican House majority still dominate the way the Republicans do their politics. Unfortunately, for most of the folks still at the top level of our party, the 1994 election was just one of many elections, and you win some and lose some. For example, it would have been impossible for anybody who lived through 1994 as their baptism into politics to assume that the Swift Boat Veterans attack was anything but harmful and required any reaction but a vicious and immediate counter attack. Yet, that is what the Kerry campaign did…inexplicable. But clearly a decision made by our “older” party hands—one that I believe proved decisive.

I hope that any Democrat who is contemplating a Presidential run in 2008 observes that not only do these guys have a great track record for losing elections, but anointment by “the fundraisers on K St.” is hardly the only road to riches any more. The Dean campaign screwed up in a number of ways, but it did conclusively prove that there’s a way for a candidate to raise heaps of money without going through the traditional party gatekeepers.

And if Republican meta-lobbying efforts like the K Street Project keep working, those gatekeepers won’t have much funds to raise, anyway.

16 Nov 2004 — “Insanity is continuing to do the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Nineteen November 3rd Theses on the way forward for the Democrats. Highlights:

The 2004 presidential election was not lost by John Kerry over the last several months but by the Democratic Party over the last several decades…

Renovating Democratic politics is not a question of moving to the right or talking more about G–d. It is about creating a framework that once again communicates to the core needs of the American people.

Returning the Democratic Party to majority status will require a political realignment no less sweeping than that which was accomplished by conservatives over the last 40 years.

Candidates who intend to win should no longer hire consultants who repeatedly lose…

Hell, I’ve transcribed enough; just follow the link and read the whole thing. If you agree, go to the affiliated blog and sign up.

via Harold Feld, who saw them nailedpasted to the DNC’s front door

15 Nov 2004 — The cyan and the————-

Last year, some clever folks at MassINC devised a map, based on demographic data and county-level Presidential election returns, that divided the US into ten regions of roughly equal population. The party that can win six regions can get the White House without resorting to lawsuits. (In 2000, Bush only got five.)

Every time you hear someone pontificate about how “security moms” or “NASCAR dads” or some other s are the swing voters that the Democrats simply must appeal to, meditate on this map to purify your mind.

In the 2004 election, the region that favored Bush by the closest margin, 50.13%, was Big River, the cyan area that straddles the Mississippi. Here’s the test for aspiring Democratic Party wonks: which region had the second closest margin, 51.47% for Bush?

09 Nov 2004 — The operation was a success, but the patient died

Remember how, in the second debate, Dubya refused to acknowledge that he had made any mistakes? He’s got his counterparts on the Democratic side, too. According to the New York Times, Kerry adviser Robert Shrum (a gentleman discussed before on this site) “suggested that there was little they could have done differently to change the result.” Shrum also complained, “The economy was not driving the news coverage.”

The author of this Times article neglected to mention that (a) as a recent New Yorker article makes clear, Shrum makes economic populism the focus of every campaign that he manages; (b) Kerry’s poll numbers started rising after Shrum was effectively demoted and Kerry began talking more about the mess in Iraq.

Memo to future Democratic presidential aspirants: Please, please, please don’t hire this guy!

via NDN Blog

04 Nov 2004 — Lessons learned, lessons to be taught

Suppose you’re a teacher, and you give your class a test, and they don’t do as well as you had hoped. Of course, you have to mark which answers are right and which answers are wrong. But grading is not teaching. If you take your craft seriously, you have to pay attention to your students, look beyond the raw count of right and wrong answers, and ask: “How do my students perceive the world? What part of their perception is leading them to answer the questions this way? What can I do to help them think differently?” It’s a lot easier to ask these questions if you respect your students, and treat them as people who can also be your teachers.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and all their apparatchiks have worked very, very hard to earn our disdain, and I don’t want to deprive them of this property. But if you pour out your resentment on the people who voted for them, as a class, you’re hurting yourself and your country.

We know that the vast majority of voters do not use an internally consistent political ideology to decide who to vote for. (That majority is large enough to include Democrats and Republicans, so don’t gloat.) That means, ladies and gentlemen, that 59,249,702 American adults did not walk into the voting booth and think “I’m going to vote for Bush because I want to run our deficit into the stratosphere; give tax cuts to the incredibly wealthy; send our soldiers to die, kill, and torture to prop up a puppet regime in a country whose previous ruler posed no threat to the United States; and seize on every available excuse to gut every part of the Bill of Rights except for the Second Amendment.” Yes, that’s what they’re getting, and some fraction of them probably do want what they’re getting, but not the whole 59 million.

Americans were given a multiple-choice test, and 51% of them checked off the wrong box. If we want future elections to go the other way, we need to treat those 59 million Americans as our students and teachers, and figure out where we have fallen short of our mission to teach them.

Let me quote from the man who recently became a Senator from Illinois:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

04 Nov 2004 — Four Moore years?

As many of my comrades in Blogovia have observed, the mainstream press’s obsession with “balance” has made it hard for the reality-based community to get its message across. As Brad deLong quipped, if the Republicans say the world is flat and the Democrats say it’s round, the next day’s headline will read “Opinions On Shape Of Earth Differ.”

So how do we get our message across? I regret that I cannot read the mind of the average swing-state voter. I can, however, read a graph.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was the summer movie that mainstream political journalists loved to hate. It was shamelessly partisan; it indulged in cheap shots; it insinuated all sorts of things that could not be proven. It is also the top-grossing documentary in history; it was endorsed by NASCAR champion Dale Ernhardt, Jr.; its release correlates, as you see above, with a 25-point jump in Kerry’s expected electoral votes. Moore didn’t beg the networks to give him equal time on the news, or whine about how his side was not fairly represented on the news; he created news.

I have my reservations about Moore as a journalist, but as a communications strategy for the left, the documentary looks damn promising.

(Note to self: The Hunting of the President is out on DVD now. Must see.)

I would love to see a documentary about Republican vote manipulation in 2004: how Congress established a commission to set voting-machine standards and then didn’t give it the money to do its job; how Republican front organizations conducted voter-registration drives and threw out Democrats’ registration papers; how easy it is to tamper with electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail; how challenges were used as a deliberate strategy to discourage voting in heavily Democratic districts. Heck, as a bonus, I’d like to see it mention William Rehnquist’s participation in the “Operation Eagle Eye” voter intimidation project, way back before he was a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

I don’t want a documentary that tells its audience, “Republicans stole the 2004 election.” (I don’t think that’s true, and even if it is, it’s hard to make the case without seeming like a sore loser.) I want a documentary that tells its audience, “Republicans use fraud to prevent Democrats’ votes from being counted.” I want such a documentary to tell such a compelling and unimpeachable story that the voters who believed Dubya’s promise to “bring honor and integrity back to the White House” will watch it, and think about it, and tell their friends…and when the Democrats complain of Republican dirty tricks in 2006 and 2008, those voters will think some more about which party stands for “moral values.”

I’m sure I’m not the only person with this idea, either.

03 Nov 2004 — What we are up against

Mark Kleiman, quoting TNR’s election blog:

This year, the GOP opted out of using challengers, instead installing party-affiliated poll workers at as many sites as it could. One site, deep in the west end of the city (a heavily African American area), was Shawnee High School. There, a Republican poll worker reportedly challenged a number of voters to provide credentials other than typical identification and forced them to wait in already congested lines for illogical amounts of time while he called the board of elections.

As he forced voter Alycia Underwood to stand there waiting, the worker demanded to know her party affiliation. When Underwood refused to answer, he told her she would not be allowed to vote. She said she argued the point with him for several minutes before storming out of the building frustrated and unsure of what had just transpired.

Just outside the door she explained to the two Election Protection workers what had taken place, while a group (including me) gathered to listen. The Election Protection monitors called ACLU lawyers, who worked with Underwood to eventually resolve the situation; it ended with her casting a ballot at a neighboring site.

According to Tomas Bernal, one of the poll monitors, the poll worker who questioned Underwood had done so to a number of others. The sheriff and board of elections officials were summoned twice to diffuse potentially ugly scenes. Bernal and his colleague report that at least 10 voters were deterred by the worker, most of whom said they simply didn’t have time to wait around.

That entry is datelined Louisville, Kentucky. If Republicans are pulling this kind of crap in Kentucky, which neither side ever considered a swing state, what have they been doing in Ohio and Florida?

03 Nov 2004 — What is to be done?

“The fact that today we know more than yesterday is good news about today, not bad news about yesterday.” —Ilja Preuss

Both the Democrats and Republicans had strategies for winning the 2004 Presidential election. Yesterday, we did not know which strategy would be more effective. Today, we know.

If you, in the past couple of years, have donated your time or money to a Democratic organization (a primary campaign, the DNC, MoveOn, whatever), you were part of the Democratic strategy. Now is the time for us to figure out what we did wrong, and how to do better for the 2006 midterm elections and the 2008 Presidential campaign.

I have a few ideas along those lines, but for now I’ll just point to…

• bellatrys looking at the NH returns, township by township
• Alan Abramowitz reflecting on Kerry’s defeat in the South
• Mark Schmitt on how this election may contain “the seeds of a bigger long-term change”
• Todd Gitlin and Joshua Micah Marshall on “it’s the infrastructure, stupid”

01 Nov 2004 — My party is full of wimps

For the past year, cynical Democrats have anticipated that Karl Rove, evil genius that he is, would lock up the election with an “October surprise” to push up Bush’s approval ratings and win the election. The most popular October-suprise theory predicted a conveniently-timed announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death or capture. Surely, the cynics said, that dastardly Bush Administration has Osama locked up already, waiting to be unveiled at the most dramatic possible moment.

And then, on Friday, we had our surprise: a video of a tanned, well-rested, statesmanlike fugitive declaring, “We’re at war, and because Allah has granted you an incompetent Commander-in-Chief, I’m winning. I’m Osama bin Laden and I approved this message.” This, after two other surprises that only a wing-nut could spin as good news for the Bush campaign: the flu-vaccine shortage and the vanishing al Qaaqaa explosives.

Yet Joshua Micah Marshall, a blogger who used to work for Clinton—and therefore, I assume, has plenty of connections among other Democratic wonks—reported that on the emails he received after the tape was released, “the opinions ranged the gamut, from panic to indifference…” He also bemoaned Democrats’ “tendency to fret that all is lost, almost to indulge in it, when the car hits a simple bump in the road.”

Panic? Bump in the road?!

Is there something in the DC drinking water that makes Democrats afraid of their own shadows? Sheesh!

21 Sep 2004 — New! Improved! 100% more divinity!

It’s interesting that the commandment “do not add to the thing that I have commanded you…” (Deuteronomy 4:2) comes right before Moses reminds the Israelites of how they sinned at Baal Peor. The midrash halakha explains that one violates this commandment by adding an additional text to one’s tefillin or adding an additional species to be shaken at Sukkot. But one could also see the behavior at Baal Peor, when some Jews added worship of an idol to their worship of God, to be the ultimate violation of that commandment.

21 Sep 2004 — I’m John Kerry, and because of a conflict of interest, I can’t approve this message

The September 20 issue of the New Yorker has an interesting article by Ken Auletta (not available online) about Bob Shrum, one of John Kerry’s top advisers. One paragraph in the article particularly caught my attention:

…[M]edia advisers in the Kerry camp had a financial incentive to recommend more advertising. They will divide among themselves about eight million dollars of the advertising budget—with Shrum Devine Donilon getting about five million dollars. By contrast, the Bush campaign’s [chief media adviser Mark] McKinnon says he is paid a flat salary (which he refuses to disclose), and he asked for advice from a dozen advertising executives around the country who meet weekly to propose and scrutinize ads. The Kerry campaign did not assemble an outside team, and turned down a chance to use an advertising campaign created by the filmmaker Errol Morris.

If my memory is correct, the Dean campaign had a similar deal with Trippi, McMahon & Squier (now McMahon, Squier & Associates), the firm in which Dean’s campaign manager was a partner; TMS got a commission on each ad that the campaign bought. I don’t think I spent enough time following the Dean blog and forums to really call myself a Deaniac, but from what little I did see, Dean’s grass-roots supporters were none too impressed by the advertisements that TMS produced.

Update: To be fair to Kerry, Shrum has been effectively demoted; the rising stars in the Kerry campaign are going to help him attack Bush more forcefully, focusing on the mess in Iraq.

20 Sep 2004 — Quick notes on the Killian-memo brouhaha

(For those of you who have been spending too much time engrossed in real life over the past two weeks: a couple of weeks ago, 60 Minutes released memos that were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Dubya’s commanding officer when he was in the Texas Air National Guard. If they were genuine, the memos would have proven that Bush disobeyed a direct order to attend a flight physical, and they also would have documented that friends of the Bush family were pressuring Killian to give Bush a non-negative performance review. Various members of the 101st101^st Keyboard Brigade, not to mention rival news organizations, suspected that the documents were not genuine, and CBS is now calling their broadcast a “mistake.”)

• Memo to my comrades in Blogovia: don’t do Dan Rather’s homework for him! By treating the allegations of forgery as Lies That Must Be Refuted, you just tied your own credibility to CBS’s, and look where you are now. If the memos had been genuine, CBS had as much information to refute the “fact-check their asses” crowd as you did, and a heck of a lot more.
• No, Virginia, the Killian-memo saga is not further proof of the awesome power of the blogosphere. Every hack in the Republican party had an incentive to discredit the memos; every competitor to CBS had an incentive to put egg on Dan Rather’s face. If blogs didn’t exist, you can be sure that critiques of the memos would have been pushed through the “mainstream” media.
• Given the ineffectiveness of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ad campaign, I have trouble believing that all this fuss over the Killian memos will harm Kerry’s chances of winning the election.

13 Sep 2004 — Ahem

My wife has called my attention to an article in yesterday’s Boston Globe (the link will probably be dead tomorrow) with the following headline and subhead:

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Pope, bishops discuss abuses
US leaders urged to embrace flock

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Quoth Jen, “Isn’t that what got them into trouble in the first place?”

09 Sep 2004 — Time to fire up those credit cards, folks

We are now entering the season where normal American citizens, and not just wonks like myself, pay attention to the Presidential campaign, and the latest polls have Bush and Kerry pretty much tied.

(The Time and Newsweek polls that gave Bush a double-digit lead appear to be outliers; see this summary of all the major national polls since the beginning of August, and see Donkey Rising for some commentary on poll methodology.)

Of course, these polls are in the wake of the Republican convention, and people who say they’re “undecided” close to an election are more likely to vote for the challenger than for the incumbent. So for Bush to be merely tied with Kerry at this point doesn’t look so good for him.

Still, it’s not a comfortable place for this Democrat to be, so I have found a few bucks to send to MoveOn PAC (because their “Real People” ad campaign looks like it’s sending the right message to the right demographic group) and Texans for Truth (because dang it, if Bush’s supporters are going to spread around scurrilous lies about Kerry to impugn his character, I’m not above spreading the scurrilous truth about Bush for the same purpose).

Let’s win this one for the Clenis!

19 Aug 2004 — Three o’clock, sharp

The brit milah for our new son will be held this coming Sunday, August 22, 3:00 p.m., at Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe, 133 Washington Street, Brighton, MA. Dairy refreshments will be served.

Later posts / Earlier posts