I was thinking of writing this last night (for the record, before I heard Dean's announcement, which I knew was coming), but Joe Trippi's endorsement just clinched it.
I'm throwing my considerable (read: nonexistent) weight behind Simon Rosenberg to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. Not because I share his politics -- his background is as a centrist New Democrat -- but because he fundamentally gets it when it comes to the future of political organization and communication, in a way that I'm not convinced Howard Dean really does.
I have enormous admiration for Dean, and for many of the bloggers and activists who are gunning strongly for him as DNC chair. But I think it'd be good to consider what the job entails before deciding that Dean's the man for it. Though the chair does get to do a fair bit of press interviews, his primary responsibility is not to be the public face of the party -- it's to be the chief strategist and fundraiser, providing institutional support to candidates around the country. Republicans understand this, which is why they choose lobbyists and other political pros for the role.
Which gets me back to Rosenberg, who has this to say about the GOP's' institutional advantages:
The Republican/conservative alliance has built a superior information-age political machine. By investing billions of dollars over 40 years in a vast array of powerful institutions and capacities, the Republicans have changed the national political playing field. Their combination of mature and modern intellectual, political and media capacities is simply bigger, better, more coordinated and more strategic than the arrayed set of institutions on the progressive side. We like to think of it as an information-age Tammany Hall.Even at the campaign level they have a much more modern model for reaching voters. They began investing heavily in databases and direct one-to-one marketing in the 1970s, and have built a campaign communications system that has much greater ability for “smart” narrowcasting – personalizing messages to specific groups and individual voters and reaching them through specialized communication. Though we made great strides in the last two years, our campaigns are still built around an aging “dumb” broadcast model that blasts a more generalized message to a larger and much less differentiated audience ...
As an intellectually-based movement born when the Republicans were a true minority Party, their infrastructure is built on a foundation on the need to persuade. At the very core of their collective institutional ethic is that they must persuade, persuade, persuade. The institutions and leaders were born and grew when few listened to them, let alone agreed.
A look around his website, and the fantastic New York Times Magazine cover story from last Summer, shows that Rosenberg has a lot of very innovative ideas on how the Democrats can begin building their own "information-age Tammany Hall", many of which involve working more directly with the grassroots (including bloggers). I want him in a position where can implement them.
Which is not to say that there doesn't continue to be a fundamental ideological problem with much of the Democratic Party -- i.e., acting like Republicans without the (faux) populism. But that's fundamentally a problem with elected officials (especially the congresscritters) and policy leaders, who the DNC chair has little sway over. Fixing it is a whole different ballgame (involving better politicians, think tanks, and labor unions), and it's a moot point if we don't have the organizational infrastructure to win elections in the first place.
Oh, and let's find a way for Howard Dean to be on TV a lot more often. If for no other reason than to make the editors of The New Republic cringe.
UPDATE:
Just stumbled into this very cogent endorsement of Rosenberg at the Gadflyer. In particular:
It is not the role of the party chair to develop the Party's core themes and policy agendas; that job falls to the party's top leadership, even if that leadership presently consists of congressional minority leaders and two dozen governors. It's also why blaming Terry McAuliffe for failures of theme or message during the past four years is misguided; that ire should have been directed at Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, among others.
Meanwhile, Zephyr Teachout has a beautifully written piece on MyDD endorsing Dean without saying anything about the DNC. This is exactly what I'm talking about...
Posted by Michael at January 12, 2005 12:28 AM | TrackBack