"A Party Inverted"...like a pyramid resting on its point, not its foundation.

madfloridian

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Sun Dec-05-10 10:43 PM
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"A Party Inverted"...like a pyramid resting on its point, not its foundation.

I keep remembering something Bill Bradley wrote in The New York Times in March 2005. He said we needed to start building the party on the solid base. Howard Dean became chair of the DNC in February 2005, and that was his goal as well...to build a party from the ground up.

Bradley described the Democratic party this way:

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on.

From Bradley's op ed:

A Party Inverted

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media. To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

He describes how they built on the base of large donors, built think tanks, and took it to the political level with the Karl Roves and Ralph Reeds and others.

Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas. At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

Bradley showed how the GOP built a solid foundation and then worked their message. Their messaging may be wrong and may be offensive to us, but it is powerfully done.

We as Democrats seem to kill our powerful messengers, or make life very unpleasant for them.

Bradley pointed out how Clinton retained his charisma, but it did not carry over to the party. The foundation, the base, had been marginalized.....there was no structure.

He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

There was an article by Jerome at MyDD in 2007 which showed how this had been the goal of Dean when he took over as chairman.

The Democrats' strategy

Dean's campaign for party chair was an outsider's run at the ultimate insider's job, spurred by a meeting he had at the 2004 national convention with disgruntled party leaders from eighteen long-neglected "red" states. In his own 2004 run, Dean had "found himself in the odd position of a candidate in charge of a movement that grew up almost accidentally around him," says Elaine Kamarck, a Harvard public-policy lecturer and highly unlikely "Deaniac" best known for encouraging the party's break with New Deal liberalism as a Democratic Leadership Council strategist. "That gave him the insights that led to the fifty-state strategy."

Dean had also studied the national rise of Republicanism, when the GOP built from the ground up in Southern and Western states that had long been tough terrain for them. "The Republicans sat down thirty years ago and figured out how to do this," Dean says. "Through disciplined organization they were able to take over the country." He spotted another kink in the Democratic works, says strategist Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager. "Republicans start the campaign the day after an election, win or lose. They don't wait to have a nominee before they start putting together a battle plan," she says. "Same on down the line, state and local. Democrats have started the day the nominee is selected, which is just bass-ackwards. We haven't had a party; we've had candidates and campaigns." That's one reason, Dean believes, Democrats haven't projected a strong national image, while GOP themes of low taxes and high morals have resonated loud and clear. "It's been a problem that presidential campaigns are where our themes are developed," he says. "Presidential campaigns are risk-averse by their nature, and it's not the best place to be developing your message and thinking big picture about where your party stands."

Matt Bai compared the DNC to a club.

Dean's analysis ran contrary to the entrenched interests of those who had long run the DNC, Matt Bai wrote last year in The New York Times Magazine, as "essentially a service organization for a few hundred wealthy donors, who treated it like their private club." Also being served at this "club" were Congressional leaders who had risen with help from the old DNC. And then there were the big-ticket consultants, the James Carvilles and Paul Begalas, who had shot to fortune and fame with their image-driven, big-media Bill Clinton campaigns, their pricey polling data and "strategic targeting."

In spite of the emphasis on building a ground game, building a solid base for the party..things changed after our big wins in 2008.

Ari Berman tells about it in Herding Donkeys and in this recent article.

What Obama 2010 Can Learn From Obama 2008

....in a bid to avoid the youthful mistakes of the Carter and Clinton years, Obama packed his White House with well-worn veterans of previous administrations, who embodied longevity over innovation and connections over change. A candidate who ran as a vessel for bottom-up politics assembled a surprisingly conventional, top-down, insider administration. “‘Yes We Can’ became ‘Yes I Can,’” said Harvard University community organizing expert Marshall Ganz, a key adviser to Obama’s campaign.

As a result, the spirit of grassroots organizing that animated Obama’s campaign has been largely missing from his White House. His post-campaign arm, Organizing for America, became a mere afterthought and extension of the White House political operation. After running as change agents in ’06 and ’08, Democrats became the party of Washington and the status quo in 2010. They were punished accordingly.

Interestingly enough, at the very moment that Obama demobilized his grassroots movement, the Tea Party adopted the Dean/Obama playbook and ran with it, fielding insurgent candidates across the country, injecting much-needed energy into the GOP and taking over local parties from the bottom up.

Bradley's comparison of the party to an inverted pyramid was an apt one. We had a chance to change it, but it was easier to accept the status quo after our party took back control. The incentive to change was not strong then.