Plus, as much as I hate to admit it, the movement of Dean is incredibly limited. Sometimes we forget this. We generally surround ourselves with like minded people. So as you, Cos, who is awesome and incredibly involved, attend all the DFA meetings in the state (or so it seems) and all the PD meetings, you start to see only the progressives. You forget about the incredibly rigid and stagnant town committees and state committee that still dominate our state. (Just think of Somerville, the same people run the machine there as have for a decade or more.) Our job, and we are doing great at it, is to spread the movement but the reality is we have a LONG way to go. We can continue as progressives generally do, myself included, pretending that we are on some meteoric rise but to do so only creates false hope and a false sense of accomplishment. It also sets us up for big disappointment as time passes and we realize that progress is not being gained.
While it might not seem it from my comments and my posts, I am an eternal optimist. I believe more in what is possible in politics and people. JFK taught me to hope for a better tomorrow but also reminds me that it is a struggle to get there. For all of my hope I try to balance it with reality. Dean did not win but this does not mean we don’t have great lessons to learn for the successes his campaign did have and I am happy to see, as our dialouge here and BMG in general shows us, that we are learning those lessons. But the biggest lesson to learn is that his complete strategy was not a winning one and should not be replicated in whole, in part maybe, but not in whole.
As for the changes you challenge me to lay out I have many. The biggest in my opinion is ideas. I think progressives and Democrats win when the debate is for ideas. Unfortunately I think we are relying on tired and used ideas. This is a new century, a new millenium with problems we have not faced. This means new ideas, not updated ideas. Social security is an idea from a generation ago to deal with a problem that does not fully exist. Let us dare to dream anew; let us be thankful for the solutions of those who came before us but recognize that the problems are not the same so the solutions must not be either. We need to reconnect to academia to find these solutions. We need to retap the brain power in this country and challenge them. A long time ago this party stood for the preposterous proposition that we could eradicate poverty. We did not but how amazing was the journey in trying? We were the party that had the improbable idea to land a man on the moon and then bring him back. With ideas like these we got an entire country to look inward and use all its best talents to tackle these challenges. When we challenge America to dream and think I believe Democrats win not only elections but we win as a country because we are putting our best foot forward.
I also would suggest that Democrats change the tone. One of the best parts of Bob’s original post his dedication to the best idea, whomever it may come from. Washington used to be a place dedicated to finding the best solution; it was partisan to be sure, but the object of the partisanship was not scorched earth but instead a dedication to finding a real solution. Democrats and Republicans want wins, they want to run up the score as often as possible and be damned to the consequences of total victory. We cannot achieve what we set out to when the destruction of our enemy is our goal. Dems and Reps have lost sight of the undeniable fact that as sure as the seasons change no one stays in political power forever. Being mindful of this those in power should take advantage of the country’s stamp of approval on their ideas but also remember that when that approval is over the minority party they have been trampling on will only want to give back twofold. We need to be the “bigger man” and step back from the edge in this game of partisan brinksmanship. Moderation in tone, liberal in ideas.
Finally we need to find new blood. We cannot let ONE RACE go uncontested from school board to US Senator; each of those positions is of equal importance for they both serve the same function: representative to the people. While we cannot fund and back every race to the degree we want we need to rely on the net roots and grassroots to support these candidates. We need to rely on sites like BMG to not only be a clearinghouse of information on the candidates but also fundraising tools to help direct, as was the case with Dean’s campaign, small contributions that will, in total, be big bucks. We want to get our neighbors and friends involved by reminding them that civic engagement makes us all better; civic engagement can create communities where there were none and strenghten communities that already exist. We may find ourselves in a perpetual cmapaign but that is not bad if the campaigns are about they should be: ideas and betterment. Would any of us think it is bad to be engaged in a constant discussion of ideas and how to better our communities? I think considering that is largely what political blogs are about!
The challenge to us then, to those of us who are pumped and people like you Cos who are wired in and motivated, is to not only fight our battles behind these screens but also to make sure that we are coming together personally by volunteering and being active in campaigns and causes. I have been too lax on this myself. I am ready for action and eager for a fight. By organizing online and on the streets we stand to be the most amazing wave of civic re-engagement history will ever know; we will resemble the revolutions past and we will truly change not only Democratic politics but the country in the process. I think that is what Cos and Bob and everyone else has been saying and with that Bob is right, we really don’t disagree at all.
To the stars, through difficulties. (Or the moon, anyway, as Andy notes one Democratic President said). Among other take-aways from Andy’s excellent comments, I think this one is particularly important:
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We need to rely on sites like BMG to not only be a clearinghouse of information on the candidates but also fundraising tools to help direct, as was the case with Dean’s campaign, small contributions that will, in total, be big bucks.
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I will talk with David and Charley to see how we might ramp up that aspect of our operations. Any suggestions welcome.
I have to say, I was turned off from reading this fairly long post (which may actually be quite good, I don’t know), after the first few paragraphs. Because those first few paragraphs look like a very deliberate and blatant missing-of-the-point. It feels like, whatever you’re responding to, it sure isn’t what I said. You’re just keying on keywords and jumping off from them. But because you cast it as if it’s somehow a response to me, it makes it very hard for me to read, and very frustrating if I do try. In particular, I can’t fathom how your third paragraph (the one beginning with “However”) could possibly come from someone who read my comment. It re-states several of things I spent paragraphs dissecting and answering already. It doesn’t answer my objections, it just restates, as if I’d never said anything about them at all.
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It also doesn’t help that you make unwarranted and incorrect assumptions about me and my experiences. But people do that all the time. For the record, I don’t just spend all my time with like-minded people. I’ve canvassed literally thousands of doors in the past couple of years, to begin with – on all sorts of campaigns with very different target universes. I’ve also spent probably hundreds of hours listening to Christian and right-wing radio, in places like Florida and Kansas, and online (American Family Radio, NRA News, SRN News, …). I’ve gone to many states and sought out contact and political discussion with strangers – poor black men at a downtown bus stop in Cincinnati; a gay coffeehouse owner in Louisville KY; union picketers at a grocery store in southern California who were fans of Nixon and opposed to voting; … heck, I even went to bed with a Republican several times in the past year 🙂 All of this is to say, there are few things that turn me off from a substantive debate more than having the other person attribute my views to incorrect assumptions they have about my context and experiences.
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Therefore, I am going to disengage from this particular branch of the debate, and not read the rest of this post 🙁
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I will continue to follow other branches.
You are disengaging because I do not agree? You are disengaging because the post is too long? You are disengaging because I said you attend a lot of DFA meetings and see a lot of progressives? I did not make one assumption about you that is not true. You do in fact attend tons of meetings and do see a lot of progressives, I have heard you say as much.
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“Because those first few paragraphs look like a very deliberate and blatant missing-of-the-point.” What does this mean? You think I am blatantly missing the point because I think you are dead wrong? Hardly, I am just not agreeing which does not mean I am missing your point. I have to admit my total annoyance with you taking your marbles and going away because I refuse to concede your bad points about the Dean campaign.
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Furthermore, as for my third paragraph for which you “can’t fathom how [it] could possibly come from someone who read my comment,” I say only that my third paragraph comes from a direct quote of yours. You said: “First of all, Dean did not ‘lose’. By any reasonable measure, he was either 2nd or 3rd out of 11 (2nd, in my opinion).” My third paragraph is about how that is sort of silly and therefore is exactly how it came from reading your comment. I don’t know where 2nd place is confused with winning. I felt bad after reading your comment and thought perhaps I wasn’t fairly reading your comments. I have reread everything your wrote and realized my post is a complete response to what you have written including your challenge to me of what I would change. I am sorry it was too verbose. I also must admit total annoyance to you not reading completely what I have to say but still being able to dismiss it. That is sort of arrogant isn’t it?
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Nonetheless my whole first two paragraphs were my attempt to agree with you that the Dean campaign taught us valuable lessons, great lessons about reconnecting to our communitites. I didn’t make a single assumption about you other than that you are a dedicated guy whose activism is admirable. I am sorry if that offends you. I am sorry more though for the fact that you are quitting because I don’t see events the way you do. That is hardly how we improve as a party and even more importantly as people.
2nd out of 11 is neither “winning” nor “losing”. I never called it winning. You called it losing, however. I think you’re wrong. But, that’s a nit-picky sort of tangent to focus on. My real point is that you were missing the true lessons of the Dean campaign by saying that he “lost”, and using that to dismiss the value of anything he did. I spent most of my comments not talking about the meaning of “won” and “lost”, but about the reality of what Dean did achieve (a lot!!!), the reasons he was able to achieve it, and various factors that led to him not winning the nomination, but nevertheless emerging from the contest with some real power. You seem to ignore all of that, entirely, and continue to harp on the shaky claim that since Dean lost, that means “his strategy” (whatever it was) obviously doesn’t work.
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Here’s a simple analogy: Four people get together to play a game of Scrabble. We’ll call them A, B, C, D. For reasons we don’t need to get into here, player A starts the game with a cache of extra letters, and he can add one of them to his hand at any point during the game. Player B gets to carry over part of his score from several previous games, so he starts with 400 points. Everyone looks at this as really a contest between A and B. C and D aren’t considered to have much of a chance.
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At the end of the game, the score turns out to be:
A. 1426
B. 655
C. 387
D. 1296
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What you’re saying about Dean, is the equivalent of looking at that game and saying, “I thought player D was really good at Scrabble at the begining, and I hoped he would win. But he lost! He must not have had a good strategy, and his vocabulary is useless. Learning the words that he knows is not going to help us play better Scrabble!”
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Now, say someone saw that and wrote a long response, described some of D’s good moves, and explained why learning from his vocabulary would be useful regardless. Say that person, as part of their long response, also said, “D didn’t lose, he came in a close second.” Say you responded to their response by saying, “It’s silly to claim that D won!” and ignored the rest.
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That’s where I feel we’ve come in this thread.
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I don’t want to take this analogy too far, because all analogies fail when you over-broaden their reach. So let’s bring it back to my main points, and see if you want to respond to them with substance instead of just repeated disagreement:
I will quote my second paragraph verbatim:
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“I agree that the Dean campaign did phenomenal things, many of the successes are rightly implemented in various form by numerous groups. This is an excellent thing and one part of the Dean legacy I am happy to see survive. Like I said, I love(d) Dean and was incredibly energized by his campaign and was devastated to see the stupid mistakes his campaign made and the way the Dems turned on him to bring him down. So we agree on the successes of the Dean campaign and both agree that we need to work to remember them and implement them as best we can.”
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Cos if that is not too long to read you will see that you and I agree. I am saying, directly, that the Dean campaign teaches us many lessons and we must implement the ideas that were successful. There were many successful ideas, his use of the internet and his fundraising techniques being the best ones. You cannot twist those words. You keep ranting about nothing and misquoting me so that is why I provided the excerpt above.
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Let me ask you a question, do you think we should implement, whole scale right down to the last detail, John Kerry’s primary and general election strategies in the 2008 campaign? I hope you would say no because ultimately the strategy did not produce it needed to which was a victory. That is what I am saying for Dean. Let’s take what worked and ditch what didn’t. I think it is bad strategy to look at the election and play the what if game. IF Dean had two more weeks he would have won New Hampshire. That is nice and possibly true. Would you tell a professor or employer that if you had two more weeks your product would have been perfect or successful? No. You must win in the borders and parameters as they are set by the circumstances.
do you think we should implement, whole scale right down to the last detail, John Kerry’s primary and general election strategies in the 2008 campaign?
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I think that’s a ridiculously pointless question. It’ll never even be possible, and we’ll never be in the same situation. If you asked me that question, I’d blink and ask, “what do you mean?” What election strategies are you talking about? I can criticize in detail what I think Kerry did wrong, and I can also point out things I think he did right, and there are various lessons I would draw from his campaign, both for things to do and things not to do – and in drawing those lessons, I would explain why I thought each of them made sense.
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On the other hand, aren’t you undermining your whole point? Shouldn’t you say, “Kerry won the primaries, so that means if we want to win primaries, we should all do what Kerry did?”
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You must win in the borders and parameters as they are set by the circumstances.
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1. Circumstances are always different. We’ll never again be faced with exactly the same circumstances that Dean’s campaign was. So saying that is utterly meaningless when applied to this argument. If you want to talk about specific things Dean’s campaign should or shouldn’t have done, at the time, then sure, let’s consider the specific circumstances. But you don’t want to, you repeatedly avoid talking about that. You want to generalize, to talk about what lessons we can learn from Dean’s campaign that apply more generally. And that’s great, that’s something we should be doing. But then you turn around and pretend that the specific particulars that shaped Dean’s outcome somehow trump the larger more general themes we can learn from. That’s what I was trying to show.
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2. You’re still missing, or ignoring, the larger point. You focus almost obsessively on the fact that Dean didn’t win the Democratic nomination.
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You know what? That isn’t even what he set out to do. When he started running, he had no idea he could win, and neither did most of us who got involved early (I started actively supporting Dean in the spring of 2002, when he said he’d run). At first, he thought he was in the race to give the party a kick. To get them to talk about Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility, to get them to adopt universal health care as an essential part of any Democratic presidential campaign, and to force the party to start being an opposition to Bush’s agenda rather than an enabler of it. Guess what? He successfully did all of those things!
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By the time mid-2003 rolled around, and it was obvious both to Dean and to most of his supporters that he did in fact have a chance of winning the nomination (which, unfortunately, he didn’t do), he had added some new goals. He wanted to involve common people in politics again, to reinvigorate American Democracy, to move the Democratic party away from dependence on big-money donors, to build a large new grassroots movement that would stay involved, to inspire more people to run for office… and guess what? He successfully did all of those things except winning the nomination!
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In sum, Dean was an enormously successful candidate, who accomplished far more than any other candidate in the race – even more than Kerry, despite Kerry’s getting the nomination. Because Kerry couldn’t translate that into winning the presidency (something Dean could have done), but Dean could translate his campaign into meaningful, lasting, long-term political influence and movement-building. And in the process, he came far closer to winning the nomination than anyone would’ve guessed when he embarked on it.
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By focusing on that one frustrating failure, you’re entirely missing the point of how tremendously successful Dean’s “strategy” was, as a whole. How powerful and influential it was. How we should emulate it in many ways. And you’re completely ignoring the reasons for that frustrating failure, most of which were specific particularly that either don’t apply more generally, or that none of us suggest anyone emulate.
I truly can’t do this anymore. I have to think that we are upsetting anyone reading our comments. I don’t know how many more ways to tell you that Dean was very successful in a many areas and in those areas where he was successful we are wise to emulate his strategy and stupid if we do not. I am not missing how successful Dean was, I understand it and say let’s replicate his success. Is that clear to you? Probably not because I have said that before; your reply will likely be that I am missing the point and failing to see how successful Dean was. I have never had so much trouble agreeing with a person before. Can someone other than Cos tell me what is so confusing about what I am saying? Does anyone else think that we should take what worked and run with it and take what didn’t and leave it behind? I really thought that was a no brainer.
It’s not about whether Dean was successful or not, that’s a tangent. It’s about what you mean by “his strategy” and what you’re claiming we should “not emulate”. You never clearly explained either, and no matter how often you repeat that you think Dean was successful, if you write messages that say that “following Dean’s strategy” is a bad idea, I’ll continue to refute them and ask for specifics. When people say “Dean’s strategy” without being specific, they’re usually referring to all the things that worked remarkably well. I hate to see things on lefty blogs that might dissuade people from adopting those techniques or seeing their effectiveness. It’s also not something I am likely to let go of, because it’s a view that’s so prevalent in our political community, and yet so destructive to our potential power.
I realize something I have been guilty of, I was guilty of it when Dean was running as well. I am not completely sure Dean ever stood a chance of getting the nomination. His plan in Iowa was a disaster. I think it has to be called a disaster because when push came to shove Dean didn’t have the support of the voters he thought he did. The orange hats were great but the swarm they were supposed to create didn’t materialize. Sure we all loved him but he wasn’t getting the people in the Iowa caucuses to love him. He also failed in New Hamshire as well. I was duped into believing the cover of Time and Newsweek meant success. As I read Cos passionately defending Dean I realize that I have been blind to some degree about Dean.
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My blindness is reflected in my first meeting of the great Dean in a backyard in New Hampshire. I shook the Governor’s hand and asked him not to run to the center. He looked at me with a puzzled look, still holding my hand, and said “I am the center.” Dean never viewed himself as the progressive I viewed him as and really when you look at his record he was a great Democrat but not necessarily a great progressive (can you be a great progressive with a 100% rating from the NRA?). I still loved Dean, probably more because he was a realist, a pragmatist and not just a bleeding heart liberal.
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All of this is by way of saying that I and I think a lot of others, believed the Dean campaign to be more than it was. He cetainly taught us a better way to raise money. He showed us the power of the internet to organize the people around us and to create new communities. He showed us how powerful the internet was as a message medium. What we haven’t learned yet though is how to parlay all of those really great things into a successful campaign that wins primaries, the nomination, and the White House. Dean was awesome in nearly ever category but where he was not awesome was tying them all together to win it all.
Had 1) the Dean campaign in Iowa obeyed the edict from Vermont headquaters to count as a “1” only those supporters who had been to caucus in the past rather than merely any eligible voter who said they would caucus this time; and had 2) Kerry not fired his campaign manager and hired Mary Beth Cahill, and thus continued to complete primarily in New Hampshire rather than Iowa …
Then, 1) Kerry would not have won Iowa, and 2) Dean would have won New Hampshire.
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Furthermore, had that happened, Dean would likely have become the nominee, and Kerry would most certainly not have (failing to win NH would have completely killed his campaign).
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I think this is a very plausible proposition. In fact, I think it almost certainly would have played out that way, if those things had happened.
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I’m using this to show why I think the criticisms you make of the Dean “strategy” are so wrongheaded – I think you’re attacking the reasons he did well, and not even noticing the reasons Kerry beat him. If you came out swinging against the way the Iowa campaign counted 1’s and called that a bad strategy, I’d agree with you. If you advocated that the Dean campaign should have emphasized primarily New Hampshire, and not publicized that they were competing for a #1 in Iowa, I would wholeheartedly agree. If you said that to win a caucus state, a campaign needs to focus on training precinct captains, I’d say yes! All of these were very serious mistakes made by the Dean campaign. But none of them seem to be connected to “Dean’s strategy” that you seem to think we shouldn’t emulate – but which you haven’t actually explained.
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Now here’s a second proposition:
Had there been two weeks between Iowa and New Hampshire, Dean would have won New Hampshire.. Now, that one’s probably harder to support, and you can choose not to believe me. Based on what I know — which includes intimate involvement with the New Hampshire campaign including canvassing and volunteering at 6 of their 12 field offices, and working on the voter database in the days shortly before the primary, and also includes spending a week volunteering full time for Dean in Iowa’s second-largest city, and also conversations with the people who ran the New Hampshire campaign, and a lot of other things — based on what I know and what I saw, I believe this proposition too. So I ask you to accept it as a hypothetical: What if what I’m saying here is true? What if, indeed, as small a change as an extra week before New Hampshire voted, was all it would have taken to turn the campaign around? Because you know that if Dean had beaten Kerry in NH at that point, he’d have had the nomination.
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So if that were true, what does that say about your take on the whole Dean strategy?
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What are you actually saying about the Dean strategy? What shouldn’t we emulate? You’ve never explained.
Merry Christmas to all, by the way.
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I think there is a danger with attributing one’s ideas to personal experience or identity. This way lies madness.
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I seem to remember Salman Rushdie describing the intellectual environment at Oxford (Cambridge?) this way: You could be as nasty and as sarcastic about an idea as you wanted, but you always had to show respect for an individual. I think we should aspire to that. i.e. Someone who spends a lot of time with progs could have a terrific insight about reaching out across partisan lines, and someone who spends a lot of time on the couch might have something to say about knocking on doors. Ya never know — and if we get caught up in personal credential-touting or -slagging, we won’t allow ourselves to test ideas properly.
Hurray for discourse. Here is a nice frothy stein of virtual beer for every BMG reader, and I’m making that a double for both Cos and Andy. Cheers, good luck in the new year, and Merry Christmas.
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Bob
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