Pam Spaulding suggests that this unbelievable speculation is a trial balloon:
Some big name Democrats want to oust DNC Chairman Howard Dean, arguing that his stubborn commitment to the 50-state strategy and his stinginess with funds for House races cost the Democrats several pickup opportunities.
The candidate being floated to replace Dean? Harold Ford.
Says James Carville, one of the anti-Deaniacs, “Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager.”
If that’s a trial balloon, let’s all hop into our Sopwith Camels and shoot it down. The Democrats succeeded beyond expectations last Tuesday; Dean’s strategy is working. Harold Ford is a conservative loser, one of those Republican Lite candidates so beloved of the disastrous old-school beltway management. This unlikely proposal would represent a retreat from a path that is working to the old strategies that were obviously not working. They’d have to be insane to do that.
Also, somebody needs to stage an intervention for Carville.
See Lance this morning (and the links within)
Here is the correct permalink.
According to Glenn Greenwald, this suggestion was an off-the-cuff remark by one person, James Carville, who has no power whatsoever to implement it and was merely expressing sour grapes that his brand of political strategy did not work out in this election. It’s only become “some big name Democrats” thanks to standard media practices of exaggeration and distortion.
Still, it would be good to hear Hillary Clinton oppose this suggestion, full cloth.
The whole thing is much ado about nothing. Carville has all the power of a wet noodle to change anything about how the DNC leadership is run, since he has no formal connection and the state party leaders (who actually choose the DNC chair) aren’t going to ditch Dean on his word. They voted for Dean in the first place and like the 50-state strategy just fine (it’s been pouring money into the state party organizations and was one of the sources of the great ground game the Democrats put on this time.) Carville’s just trying to press his sour grapes into wine because we won by ignoring his strategies. Just look at the response to Carville on DailyKos and you’ll see what a non-starter this idea is. Dean’s a hero to too many of the new Democrats in Congress and too many party activists for him to be removed in favor of a losing Senatorial candidate (and favorite of Carville’s.) This too shall pass…
Actually, considering that the wave actually materialized, there were MANY seats we should have won but didn’t due to lack of focus and poor national/state organization. Seats in Ohio, Minnesota, California, maybe Florida. It’s all well and good to talk about what the public saw, but behind the scenes, a lot of balls were dropped (especially in Ohio, which was, contrary to what the public saw, a near COMPLETE disaster)
Winning can’t be an excuse to pretend nothing went wrong and that there were no mistakes made regardless of all the kerfuffle over who is chairman (frankly, obsessing over who the DNC chair is like worrying about one many heads of the hydra, and I have a feeling that Carville’s suggestion of Ford has more to do with Ford being black, given that the Republicans are floating Steele for their chair)
I have a feeling that Carville’s suggestion of Ford has more to do with Ford being black, given that the Republicans are floating Steele for their chair
That was my take too. Like we’re staging the Battle of the Loser Black Guys.
I realize that Carville isn’t fond of Dean, but Ford? Bible-banging, homophobic and puckered at both ends? Yeah, swell idea. Was he high when he said it?
plunge,
A different strategy would have gotten us different seats, sure. But would we have gotten Senators in Montana and Virginia? Would we have picked up seats in Indiana? Would we have had any chance in hell of unseating that complete bastard, DeWine, in Ohio? It’s all Tuesday-morning quarterbacking, but I think Dean’s strategy paid off. Even if it hadn’t, a homo-bigoted DNC chair would turn so many dems green so fast we’d have a one-party state on our hands. Brilliant “strategy”.
Time for Carville to figure out Mary Matalin has been putting worms in his brain. And, not the good kind of worms.
And PZ, you saw Carville’s other brilliant idea was to run Zell Miller as a VP candidate? Feh.
Carville is very witty but outside of that he is one of those DLC guys. He is also married to Eva Braun.
We are talking about Carville, the guy who liked Zell Miller for VP in ’00, and chats to the Reps when Dems talk presidential recounts. Sure Zell was not outed yet as a nutter, and was a major speaker at conventions, but that doesn’t make you VP material. He and Ford have a strong conservative streak in common. To Carville, that’s victory. And to Carville victory is all. One reason to distrust him. Who will he sell out to win, who will he get to go back on their beliefs for a bump in the polls?
Why did he, in ’04 call u his wife and given Kerry info? I think, because he considered it a lost cause, or a pyrrhic victory. That wasn’t good for his plans, long range ones. Better to loose and get to the next election. Whether others feel it is right is immaterial.
That is his problem, for him politics and civics are games. And his success at the game has made him arrogant and myopic.
So the concern some have is that this is not his idea, but one for his friends/Player-2 in the coming campaigns. 50 State Strategies, or inconvenient for people who want most of the that money going to them, and to people who want to focus more on corporate funding of the party…after all that helps you win, right?
We are talking about Carville, the guy who liked Zell Miller for VP in ’00, and chats to the Reps when Dems talk presidential recounts. Sure Zell was not outed yet as a nutter, and was a major speaker at conventions, but that doesn’t make you VP material. He and Ford have a strong conservative streak in common. To Carville, that’s victory. And to Carville victory is all. One reason to distrust him. Who will he sell out to win, who will he get to go back on their beliefs for a bump in the polls?
Why did he, in ’04 call u his wife and given Kerry info? I think, because he considered it a lost cause, or a pyrrhic victory. That wasn’t good for his plans, long range ones. Better to loose and get to the next election. Whether others feel it is right is immaterial.
That is his problem, for him politics and civics are games. And his success at the game has made him arrogant and myopic.
So the concern some have is that this is not his idea, but one for his friends/Player-2 in the coming campaigns. 50 State Strategies, or inconvenient for people who want most of the that money going to them, and to people who want to focus more on corporate funding of the party…after all that helps you win, right?
If Carville was the slightest bit serious, he’s lost his mind.
Dean did a fabulous job – who thought we’d win as big as we did? Ford is black. That’s his only “Democratic” value. Leave Dean there.
Didn’t you get the memo? The Democratic party doesn’t have ‘values’, it has survey-driven ‘position statements’ that change according to what the American people are willing to support at any given time. Ford’s cryptoconservative views are selling like hotcakes, and the DNC needs to get in on the action.
I know Rahm Emanuel dropped $3 million on Tammy Duckworth in IL-06 only to lose it handily. I know some will say that $3 million sucked up Republican money that could have been used elsewhere. Maybe it did. But that $3 million could have helped a dozen other Dem candidates over the line in their already close races, too.
It’s the Lieberman Wing of the democrats, led by Jim “Sleeping with the Enemy” Carville.
“A different strategy would have gotten us different seats, sure.”
Maybe. I’m actually a fan of the 50 state idea in theory, but the execution of it has been pretty uneven. Take Ohio: pouring money into the state party there was about as smart as pouring it into a garbage disposal. Winning the Governor’s race and DeWine’s seat were forgone conclusions no matter what anyone did in terms of a coordinated. But we really needed three of the house seats in the state, and we only got the easy one. It wasn’t a matter of message, it was a matter of almost criminal mismanagement.
“But would we have gotten Senators in Montana and Virginia? Would we have picked up seats in Indiana? Would we have had any chance in hell of unseating that complete bastard, DeWine, in Ohio?”
Yes, yes, and very much yes.
“It’s all Tuesday-morning quarterbacking, but I think Dean’s strategy paid off.”
How would you know though? Not to be insulting, but most people don’t have access to NCEC data or really know what they are talking about: it’s like when real estate agents try to talk about how biologists have everything wrong. There’s a lot of hype in politics, and some of it intentional (to decieve). For instance, the 72 hour program is something the Republicans hype a lot, but its basically just a field program. Field programs are important, but they generally only move a percentage point or two at best IF unopposed by another field program. But listening to the hype, most people, including most Republicans, never seem to have figured that out.
Dean’s approach to the campaign has to be evaluated not only in terms of its immediate results, but as part of a larger program of reviving the Democratic party as an inclusive, populist institution. Despite the outcome of the election, Dean’s inside-the-beltway critics may claim that he didn’t manage the campaign as well at they would like; but what really bothers them are the signs that his larger strategy is altering the character of the party and threatening their status.
Stogoe- you beat me to it. One can make a strong argument that Rahm was the one whose strategy cost us seats. Not to mention that we won with some liberal candidates in spite of him, and he lost with some of his Republican-lite types- a net gain for anybody who likes, you know, actual Democrats.
Fear not, though. Can you picture Dean being voted out by the very same state party chairs to whom he’s been funneling resources after years of scandalous neglect by the Beltway crowd? Neither can I.
I should add that the original article where I saw ado being made of this was on DailyKos, and every article I have seen discussing it links back to a single short article in New Republic. I have not seen any additional commentary on the matter from either Dean or Carville. Therefore, at present the quote appears to be uncorroborated single-source, and not a source I’m overly inclined to trust at that.
If someone tells me that Carville goes on CNN pushing this suggestion, I’ll start believing it. As of right now, I demand more proof before I firmly accept that such a counterintuitive oddity was uttered.
The question is: how are you evaluating it? Do you know how things worked out on the ground? Who got what money and did what with it? It seems to me that a lot of the netroots praise for what Dean did comes without any idea, or even any INTEREST in having any idea, what actually is done or how it works in practice…. as long as it sounds vaguely counter-culture and good.
That’s the hype: but what’s the reality? From where I sat, the chief effect of the difference seemed to mean is that a lot of totally incompetant and corrupt people in state parties are being handed more money. You know what the Ohio Dem party spent a lot of that money on this year, when they weren’t just frittering it away (I fully believe that Kerry would have won in 2004, no matter how badly he did otherwise, if the Ohio Dem party hadn’t been a complete muckup)? Settling personal scores with OTHER STATE DEMOCRATS.
So you tell me: aside from a lot of talk about how the strategy works, what did it actually, physically do differently that got more votes in this or that place? Why are Michelle Bachmann, Doolittle, Drake, and all the rest of the Republican nutcase squad heading back to Congress in a wave year where they were all beatable?
How much help did their opponents get from DCCC? Could they have done better if some of the vast sums Rahm spent on a few of his pet, unsuccessful targeted races had gone to them instead? I intend those as genuine questions, to which I am not plugged-in enough to know the answers.
“Fear not, though. Can you picture Dean being voted out by the very same state party chairs to whom he’s been funneling resources after years of scandalous neglect by the Beltway crowd? Neither can I.”
I don’t see it either, for the record. As I said, I like Dean’s general picture, but in practice, I don’t see a whole lot of new or innovative work being done. We DO need year-round organzing in every state, pre-building all the resources of effective IDs and voter contact and so on. At bottom, there are a lot of key organizing tasks that local parties need to do, need to be REQUIRED to do, year round. Welcoming new voters. Keeping track of important local knowledge and development of districts. Aiding in constituent outreach.
But by large, I don’t see state parties doing much more than sitting around bitching about things and not doing very much of the productive work: they certainly aren’t doing those things very much now in most states, money or no. Handing them more money doesn’t seem to have made them anything but happier. Every campaign STILL seems to have to start from scratch on the ground every year with either the tacit handwaving approval of the local party, or even their active disgruntled opposition, and this year was no exception.
This is what I mean about the netroots hype vs. the reality of what the politics is like.
“How much help did their opponents get from DCCC? Could they have done better if some of the vast sums Rahm spent on a few of his pet, unsuccessful targeted races had gone to them instead? I intend those as genuine questions, to which I am not plugged-in enough to know the answers.”
They got some help, but not enough: I don’t think Rahm is all wine and roses either. But it’s important to recognize that Dean and Rahms strategies aren’t and weren’t exactly opposed to each other: they sort of operated on different levels of things. Dean’s people created a lot of the coordinated statewide campaigns (many of which were just bleeding disasters of mismanagement). Rahm flushed money and consultants into key house races more directly. If the argument is that Rahm overspent on certain races and not enough on others, you won’t get any argument from me. But both of them could have been wrong rather than one having to be right and the other having to be wrong.
I certainly don’t think Dean is the Second Coming and I live in Ohio where the Democratic Party was moribund until this election (which they didn’t really win, the mega-corrupt Republicans lost). So don’t worry, I’m not buying anybody’s hype. I just think that as a matter of overall strategy, Dean’s 50-state approach is a much better idea than recruiting lots of crypto-Republican candidates who supposedly can win in red areas. We saw in Montana that a candidate who fits in quite well with the liberal wing of the party on everything but guns (which I consider a state / local issue in any case) can win in a place the Beltway crowd would have written off in the past.
Nothing about Dean’s strategy precludes recruiting candidates that actually fit their electorate. I keep coming back to Wetterling, because she’s local to this blog. She was way too liberal to have a shot in her district. Ironically, SHE HERSELF agreed this after losing the last time!
She ran in MN06 for one reason: she had lots of federal money left over from her aborted Senate primary run, and she couldn’t spend it anywhere but another federal race. She jumped back into the district and overturned a pretty stable centrist Democratic campaign that she herself had endorsed and promised not to disrupt, throwing all planning and fundraising out of whack. A proven winner in the district was replaced with a proven loser.
But the activist left? They cheered her move back in. Are they cheering now that Michelle Bachmann, a creationist and the AUTHOR of the anti-gay ban, is representing them? Because that’s the result of picking candidates that have no hope of winning districts like that.
Carville’s strategy will work – if Ross Perot runs against every democratic candidate in every race.
Dump Dean? If the Republicans pin medals on people who screw up, then I guess it makes sense that the Democrats fire someone who succeeds.
Plunge, sorry, but … you’re complaining that the strategy that Dean only put into place two years ago has not completely changed the entire landscape of American politics, so we should get rid of him immediately?
Dial back the impatience and let some party-building happen. Two years gave us a good start, but there’s still a lot that needs to be done and no reason to retreat back to the Emanuel/Carville DLC way of doing things just because the Dean strategy wasn’t perfect and “only” gave us the majorities in both the House and the Senate that we haven’t had in 12 years.
Carville is nothing more than a toady for the Democratic Leadership Council which saw the only business of the party as electing presidents, the Congress and the court be damned. When I saw this developing in the eighties, I said that it would ultimately doom the party. And sure enough, by 1994, we’d lost the Congress and the Supreme Court, leaving us helpless when Bush stole the White House in 2000.
This trial balloon can be taken down with a pea-shooter. The evidence never lies.
“Plunge, sorry, but … you’re complaining that the strategy that Dean only put into place two years ago has not completely changed the entire landscape of American politics, so we should get rid of him immediately?”
Er, sorry, but who said that? Not me. I think my biggest complaint is the amount of netroots people running around who are experts on “what needs to be done” when they don’t seem to have any idea what is being done, how it affects what, and so on. Take this:
“Dial back the impatience and let some party-building happen.”
What is party building exactly? How do you know when it’s done or moving in the right direction? Does all these people really know, or do they just respond to buzzwords like grassroots and “run in every state” and so forth without any idea what’s being done to who and what? In my experience, it’s by far the latter.
“Two years gave us a good start, but there’s still a lot that needs to be done and no reason to retreat back to the Emanuel/Carville DLC way of doing things just because the Dean strategy wasn’t perfect and “only” gave us the majorities in both the House and the Senate that we haven’t had in 12 years.”
I don’t think anyone really has any clue what worked, what didn’t, and who’s theory of what was the right way to go as of yet. NCEC hasn’t even cranked out the prelims yet. But clearly we both had a lot of unexpected successes as well as made a lot of miscalculations we need to correct before 2008 rolls around.
The question of whether what Dean is doing is working well really isn’t something you can easily tell from just the fact that we flipped Congress. You’d have to actually know what shape the state parties are in. In my experience, we won a heck of a lot of races in spite of ourselves, and lost a lot of others because of it. Ohio is, again, a great example. We’re unlikely to see such a lopsided partisan blowout at the top of the ticket in our history. But that was almost entirely because of the candidates. The coordinated, on the other hand, was a disaster from top to bottom. That CANNOT be the case in 2008, and as far as i can tell, things are getting worse not better.
And you know what? The “we won big, so we don’t need to change” attitude that you seem to be pushing is pretty popular in Ohio. Easy victory has a way of teaching all the wrong lessons.
The 50-state strategy gave Democrats gains in the states other strategies would have written off. States like Montana and Virginia. Democrats would absolutely not have won them by ignoring them. They barely won them as it was, so unless you think that money has no role in influencing elections, it’s hard to deny this.
(Note that, while I consider it *presently* vitally important to elect Democrats, I don’t necessarily have a lifetime commitment to them. The Republican Party has a long hard road to travel to regain anything resembling trust from me or from a lot of people, but it could be done with real, substantial reform of the party and a commitment to honesty and openness toward the people. This is clearly not going to happen while the current authoritarian clowns are at the helm, though.)
Despite the fact that Howard Dean raised vastly more money than the previous Clintonian incumbant, and has an actual constituency with votes…
Carville’s poeple didn’t do so swift in the past, did they?
Yeah, time to piss off the netroots and the state parties.
I can think of many things to call Carville. Democrat isn’t one of them.
Carville is married to a Partisan Right Wing Republican member of the puditocracy. Why is he still billed as a Democratic Strategist/Consultant? Why do Democrats take this clown seriously?
Someone needs to lock him up in a closet somewhere so that he can come to grips with his Corporate Republican Toady Tendencies. Only then should he come out of said closet. Carville and the rest of the DLC/DCCC suck ups have done enough damage to the body politic with their thinly veiled corporate and Wall Street friendly policies. It’s time for the Democratic Party to ignore those traitors. They’ve stood idly by as and aided in the destruction of the Middle Class.
I’ll take a stronger line than plunge. Take Virginia, for example. Under McAuliffe the DNC pledged about $5 million to the 2005 Virginia governors race, which was key to building the Virginia state party that won this year. Dean complained bitterly about it when he came in (it took money from his 50 state program) then took credit once Kaine won. This scenario has replayed in 2006, the Democratic Congressional and Senatorial committees pleaded desperately since April for the DNC to focus some money on winning in 2006. The DNC refused, saying their focus was on the long term, but now claims credit for the wins.
Dean’s fund-raising has not met expectations, and his spending has been very high. In 2004 the DNC outraised the RNC for the first time in my lifetime and left Dean with a massive small-dollar donor base. This cycle Dean barely beat inflation over 2002 (when the DNC had 20% as many small donors) and the RNC raised almost twice as much as the DNC. The DCCC and DSCC each raised nearly as much as the DNC this year, a first for sister committees, so clearly the problem is not the political environment.
I voted for Dean in the 2004 primaries and contributed to his campaign. But going into the 2008 presidential he is going to have to make changes. The DNC is the only committee that can support the presidential campaign, those campaigns (other than Hillary’s, which is flush with cash) will look to the DNC to raise money for the general and will expect the DNC to focus resources on targeted states. If Dean can’t improve his fundraising and control his spending then the presidential campaigns will pressure him to move on.
tib, I of course keep the Kaine campaign close to my heart, since that was one of the races I worked on. :) So I’m with you there.
Again, I don’t think the 50 state strategy is bad in theory, but I have two problems with it as it stands: one it seems to involve just handing out money without enough requirements or demands for improvement. Two, I just don’t see how it can possibly cost what it costs to the point where it supposedly takes money away from targeting races. I mean virtually all of the personnel needed already exist, employed by the state parties themselves. They just have to DO THE WORK, and they aren’t doing it. Handing them more money is acceptable if they actually do something, but Chris is wrong here: yes, sometimes spending money has almost no role in influencing elections. When its spent poorly.
And again, my overall point here is less “Dean bad, Dean go!” especially since I have no idea why Ford would be qualified. It’s more that all these netroots people get all worked up defending Dean’s tactical decisions when they seem to have NO IDEA, aside from just Dean’s rhetoric, what his strategy really involves, or what the political money landscape is like, or why anyone does anything in politics.
You know, I really found Dean’s scream back in ’04 as an attempt to rally the crowd, not a sign of madness. I still like the guy and would have voted for him in the MA primary if he hadn’t already dropped out.
Truth be told, I think the 50-state strategy is a smart one. There’s no such thing as the Solid South anymore — places like Atlanta, Austin, New Orleans are all very blue compared to their red surroundings, as is most of the Mississippi Valley.
What I really think needs to be dispelled is the “real Americans are country folk” attitude of many of the red-staters — city residents and the “elite” are Americans too. But that’ll require a cultural change, not a political one. And the comments in that thread that PZ linked — wow. Some of those are just plain unhinged. Lots of snottiness.
What exactly is the function of Dean’s organization? Is it to act as a clearing house for money for candidates, or as a policy center, or what? (As a non-American I do not have to feel ashamed by my ignorance. :))