You Talking To Me, Republicrat?

Why can't the left get traction? I mean, let's just throw this out here. We are statistically an "educated demographic", sometimes excessively so- and we are committed, passionate people. Aren't we? We have righteousness and evidence on our side. And yet, we seem unable to translate our outrage into constructive actions...(continued)

It goes around, this little chat. "Its a lack of message" "lack of credibility""lack of sincere dedication, too much talking, not enough doing" etc.

Now I often think it is a matter of people embracing a certain position without really thinking it through simply because it is the position of others, and this occurs on both sides. And it is hard to commit to what you have handed to you versus what you have determined about the way you genuinely feel.

Further, people cannot get past their assumptions about what the other side is about, what they stand for, and the view is fixed and inflexible. You CANNOT be a liberal but oppose affirmative action, or be a feminist and be pro-life, or be a conservative that cares about the environment!! And yet- there are many such hybrid freaks.

And what gets lost from the strategy end is the fact that elections are often decided by that pool of voters in the middle. What do we do to reach out to them? Should we? Do we insist on extremes that alienate the 'middle'? Are we unwilling to yield on issues because we view everything as a rope being tugged back and forth, and conceding one thing will send us tumbling? Is it "selling out" to try to appeal to mainstream America? Is it about which party 'wins' or what is best?

My Republican friend tells me: "Its not a message issue, its a focus problem. You guys cannot seem to separate your priorities from your fantasies. You vascillate, you flit around from cause to cause like issue addicts. You end up with too much information, but too few skills to apply that to anything constructive. You speak the same language, know the culture, but are too wimpy to step away from your comfort zones to really align yourselves with mainstream concerns."

So whats the problem from our point of view?

On the subject...

The New York Times reviewed the book "Crashing the Gate" by Armstrong and of course the founder of Daily Kos-the lefty must read blog. Here are excerpts from that review if you are interested:

In early 2004, journalists began noticing
something strange about Democratic primary voters
in Iowa and New Hampshire: they talked like
political consultants. Instead of gushing about
which presidential contender had won their heart,
they analyzed who could attract swing voters in
the general election. Large numbers said
"electability" was their greatest concern.
Expecting to speak to birds, the journalists
found themselves speaking to ornithologists
instead.

In retrospect, this phenomenon is not hard to
explain. First, the long exodus of conservative
white Southerners has made the Democratic Party
more ideologically homogenous. As late as 1976,
when Henry (Scoop) Jackson and George Wallace
sought their party's presidential nomination, the
ideological differences among Democratic primary
contenders exceeded those in the general
election. Today, by contrast, a liberal primary
voter can focus on electability, secure in the
knowledge that anyone his party nominates will be
far more ideologically congenial than any
conceivable Republican opponent. Second, cable
television and the Internet have made
do-it-yourself punditry much easier. Now everyone
has access to the polling data and fund-raising
numbers that insiders have long used to gauge
electoral horse races. By the time a voter
decides whether she likes a candidate, she
usually knows who else likes him too.

If the 2004 Democratic primary represented one
milestone in the democratization of strategic
thinking, "Crashing the Gate," by Jerome
Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Z�niga, is
another. Armstrong and Moulitsas are
self-conscious outsiders, successful liberal
bloggers determined to overthrow the "Beltway
mafia" that runs the Democratic Party in
Washington. And yet they have written a manifesto
devoted almost entirely to political procedure.
Behind their indignant, even revolutionary
rhetoric, Armstrong and Moulitsas seem angry
about just one thing - that the Democratic Party
continues to lose.

As a critique of how the party organizes itself,
"Crashing the Gate" is persuasive. The authors
detail how unmeritocratic the world of Democratic
political consultants actually is. They argue
convincingly that the party hasn't adapted to a
newly diffused media environment, in which
campaign messages must be far more narrowly
targeted than in the past. They call on
single-issue groups to abandon their litmus tests
and band together in common cause. They even
criticize liberal organizations for not paying
their employees a market wage, and thus failing
to nurture political talent as effectively as
their counterparts on the right.

With their shrewd proposals for changing how the
Democratic Party does business, Armstrong and
Moulitsas nicely illustrate their larger point:
that in the Internet age, you don't need to be a
Washington insider, or a veteran operative, to
run a political party. It's probably no
coincidence that Moulitsas, the founder of the
popular blog Daily Kos, did a stint in Silicon
Valley. In his complaints about the Democratic
establishment, he sounds like the head of Google
describing General Motors: the party is slow,
top-heavy and destined for obsolescence unless it
makes a radical change in its culture.

What Moulitsas, along with his co-author,
emphatically does not sound like is a denizen of
the far left. Ever since Howard Dean's
presidential campaign, from which many of the
party's Internet-based critics sprang,
commentators have depicted the liberal
blogosphere as a revolt against the centrism of
the Clinton years. But "Crashing the Gate" is
explicitly nonideological. "Even though we have
described the obstacles to modernizing the
progressive movement," they write, "our
criticisms aren't fueled by significant
disagreements of vision." Most people in the
Democratic Party basically want the same thing,
they suggest. The insiders are just too timid and
outdated to achieve it.

Only in an age in which ideological divisions
closely track partisan ones would such an
assertion be possible. In the past - when the
Democratic party included both George McGovern
and George Wallace - it would have been
inconceivable. The problem is that while
Armstrong and Moulitsas are confident that
Democrats largely share the same principles, they
concede they can't define what those are. "This
hasn't been a book about policies or new ideas or
message," they write, "even though those are
critically important in taking back our country.
We like to believe the ideas that will lead the
Democratic Party to a new governing majority
already exist, but they need to be articulated
clearly."

Armstrong and Moulitsas don't deprecate the
importance of ideas. To the contrary, they insist
that "without ideas we have nothing." Yet having
written a book about process, they are forced to
argue that from the procedural changes they
advocate some kind of coherent vision will flow.
"Someday," they suggest, "we will get past our
divisions and our old ways and rebuild our
institutions of power. And when we have all that,
we will approach 10 random people on the street
and ask them, 'What does the Democratic Party
stand for?' and they will all give the same
answer."

But that's probably not true. Armstrong and
Moulitsas' template for a Democratic revival is
the Republican Party after 1964. In 1964, the
Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who,
though he lost big, starkly highlighted the
differences between the parties. Then, in the
1970's, they say, Republicans created the network
of think tanks and pressure groups later labeled
the "counterestablishment," which helped lay the
groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan.
Since this model starts with a clarifying,
uncompromising presidential candidate and moves
to an organizational overhaul, it suits Armstrong
and Moulitsas' purposes. Just substitute Howard
Dean for Barry Goldwater. The problem is that
it's historically inaccurate.

Modern conservatism didn't begin in the 1960's,
with a presidential candidate followed by a burst
of institution building. It began in the
mid-1950's, when the founders of National Review
fused antistatism, cultural traditionalism and
fierce anti-Communism to create the core vision
of the American right. Goldwater gave that vision
broad exposure, and institutes like the Heritage
Foundation turned it into policy. But the vision
came first.

During the 1980's, the Democratic Party tried to
reinvent itself by concentrating on procedural
changes. In 1984 and 1988, Democrats addressed
their post-Vietnam weakness by limiting the
influence of liberal interest groups in the
nominating process. In the run-up to 1984, the
party created "superdelegates" - politicians who
were presumably more in tune with average voters
than the issue activists who had dominated
Democratic conventions since 1972. In 1988,
moderate Democrats instituted Super Tuesday, a
bloc of mostly Southern primaries intended to
steer the nominating process to the center. Both
these reforms failed.

What worked, in the years after 1988, was the
Democratic Leadership Council's effort to recast
party principles: to insist that the
beneficiaries of government programs act
responsibly; to embrace market mechanisms as a
means for achieving social justice; and to
identify stronger communities and families as a
key liberal goal. Bill Clinton made those ideas
the centerpiece of his 1992 presidential
campaign. Of course, he was a more gifted
politician than Michael Dukakis or Walter
Mondale. But equally important, he had a stronger
vision to run on.

Armstrong and Moulitsas may well be right that
the next great partisan transformation will be
theirs. In "Crashing the Gate" they have written
an insightful guide to how the Democratic Party
can retake power. Now all they need to do is
figure out why it deserves to.

Credit: NYT, Peter Beinart
Peter Beinart is editor at large at The New
Republic. His book, "The Good Fight: Why Liberals
-- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror
and Make America Great Again," will be published
in June.