Carville's smoke-filled rooms making party decisions? Or the 50 states.

madfloridian

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Sun Feb-05-06 12:19 AM
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Carville's smoke-filled rooms making party decisions? Or the 50 states.

During the campaigns for DNC chairman last year, Carville had this to say from the article linked below:

"I think it's pathetic," says James Carville. "It's so indicative of the
Democratic Party. Now we're just playing into every stereotype: We're weak,
disorganized, flopping around. ... Somebody should have fixed this damn
thing in November. I wish someone would have taken charge and three or four
people would have gotten together in a smoke-filled room. ... They're not
running for president! They are running for party chair. This is supposed to
be a rigged deal. You think the Republicans would do it this way?"

Smoke-filled rooms like Carville wants? Or 50 state strategy and and
growing the party from the ground up?

This is what almost happened in February 05. I remember this Orlando event well. Then read about what Dean is trying to do with the 50 states build-up in the 2nd link. I saw a review of
Carville and Begala's book named "Take it Back"...(I wonder where the heck
they got that name? Hmmmm.....)The reviewer, I think it was Beinart, said the Carville and Begala were two strategists saying take the party back from other strategists..

It was not a very good review, but I am sure Carville's smoke-filled room
is waiting just around the corner. We Democrats were never very good at
getting change, or even recognizing change when we had it going for us.

From the New Republic last year, this article is called The Outsiders.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050214&s=lizza021405

You've probably never heard of Hindery, but he is one of the party
establishment's longtime moneymen. In the old soft-money days, the cable TV
baron could be counted on to write six-figure checks to the DNC. During the
last presidential race, when his friend Dick Gephardt was getting torn to
shreds by Dean, Hindery dropped $100,000 on TV ads tying the Vermont
governor to Osama bin Laden. Hindery jumped into the DNC race in early
December, noisily proclaiming the backing of Gephardt and Tom Daschle. He
soon steered his private jet toward Orlando, where Democrats were meeting to
kick off the chairmanship race. But Hindery never even made it inside the
drab hotel ballroom where DNC members grilled Dean and the other candidates.

A guerrilla squad of Democratic bloggers had already gone to work on him,
noting that he is an ex-Republican and that, even as a Democrat, he had
given money to the GOP. Meanwhile, the usually irrelevant 447 members of the
DNC--known simply as "the 447"--sensed a rare opportunity to take control of
the selection process as never before. The members are generally local party
operatives and activists elected or appointed to the DNC. Technically, they
are the Democratic Party. But institutionally, they are hostile to Beltway
Democrats, who they believe ignore them. And recently, they've been
emboldened by the renaissance of grassroots politics. In previous years they
swallowed hard and rubber-stamped a Terry McAuliffe or a Ron Brown, but the
idea that a former Republican financier had been sent down to Florida by two
defeated Democrats who had spent their last years in Washington watching the
GOP take over the town did not sit well with the 447.

Hindery's aides, after scouting the situation, gently explained to him that
he didn't have a chance. He turned his jet around and flew away. As
Hindery's spokeswoman, Democratic consultant Jennifer Bluestein, said with
more than a touch of understatement, "He recognized his best role is to
remain a party fund-raiser." That night, in Hindery's abandoned hotel suite,
a gaggle of Democratic operatives raided his mini-bar and mockingly toasted
the death of his absurd candidacy: "To Leo!"

In hindsight, the boozy requiem wasn't just for Hindery, but for an era. The
DNC chair race has exposed deep fissures within the Democratic Party. Some
of these are ideological, but the real story of the race is the diffusion of
power away from Washington and to new people and entities that have rushed
to fill the power vacuum at the top of the party.

And here is what those of us who are working to change the party are trying
to do. It is explained very well in this post at Kos last month. It is
actually changing the nature of the DNC itself if it works.

When I wrote my post here about the ones who were saying to withhold
support, I actually knew the answer. I know the groups doing it, and I
know why. They are succeeding in their attempts to convince people it is
the right way. So why do I bother?

I bother because I know that if we don't do it this way, the smoke-filled
rooms of the Carvilles and Begalas will be right back. This is about all
we are going to get for this 06 election...boots on the ground hired by the
party and a little hope. That's why I bother.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/5/173123/9585

Of course, the fruits of this strategy aren't concentrated on presidential
elections. In the book we spend time looking at the House picture as well.
But the DNC exists for presidential races. We have the DSCC for the Senate,
the DCCC for the House, and the state parties for state offices.
But for too long, these organizations have worked in their silos to the
exclusion of the bigger picture. That's what allowed the DNC to focus
primarily on the ever-shrinking number of battleground states to the
detriment of House and Senate races elsewhere, in places like Oklahoma and
Alaska.

Dean, for the first time, has decided on a more holistic approach. He's no
longer focused on just bolstering the presidential ticket in 2008. Rather,
he will go down to the precinct level and build locally. And, over time,
this will have effect not just at the local or state level, or at the House
or Senate level, but also all the way up the ticket to the top dog him- or
herself.

This is exactly the sort of thing we argue for in our book. It's good to see
Dean gets it. The states definitely get it. What's left is the old rotting
establishment -- the consultants and party hacks who wish things would go
back to the way they were.

This is already going on. The precinct planning has begun in teh DNC. There was a wonderful graphic in the shape of a down arrow...with the precinct at the top and the DNC at the bottom. When he was in Durham last week, the locals had displays of the organizational charts. It was amazing. A lot is going on.

Graphics of the state partnerships that are beginning:

http://www.democrats.org/a/2006/02/she_wasnt_kiddi.php