I'm going to go ahead and ramble on about Dean and his 50 State Plan again...
Sure, I am no Deaniac, but his 50-state plan is great (don't get me wrong, I love the Ragin' Cajun as much as anyone...). Reading DailyKos today allows me to remind you how important it is to keep Dean and how we lost the South in the first place. This is what not to do now:
"Now, this doesn't mean we need to abandon the South, belittle the South, mock the South, piss on the South, or ignore the South. A national party with a real mandate needs to be competitive in every corner of our great nation."
He's exactly right. I read What's the Matter with Kansas and hated it. But, I am (sort of) from the South and I understand exactly what Kos and Thomas Frank are saying. The people of the South have been mislead, just as much of the Midwest had been, by Republicans but the Democrats need only to step in. The South was written off bu all of us, especially after '04 with the maps detailing "JesusLand" (http://www.basetree.com/graphics/jesusland.jpg) as everything that was not California, New York, and Hawaii. If I considered myself a true Southerner and planned on living in the South forever, I would have become enraged and voted with the party that was accepting me. Clearly the left wanted nothing to do with the South!
Coming from Northern Kentucky, where a Democrat 2-term incumbent couldn't beat a one-term, Republican party liner, George Bush lover to win his Congressional seat back, I could very much say "Write it off, the South is done! It's finally over", but the Democratic party can not. This year, we picked up seats in the South, which should tell us that these people are just looking for the quality candidates they have not gotten in years. We finally have a chance to encourage good Democratic candidates to run and bring the South to the good side. Let's keep putting money (and faith) behind these Dems in the South and they might just win.
Many of you have probably noticed the unbelievably virulent civil war that's developing between James Carville and the major progressive blogs. The short version: earlier today, Carville trashed Dean's chairmanship and suggested replacing him with Harold Ford. In response, the major progressive blogs are threatening civil war, with Kos literally calling for a war and Matt Stoller at MyDD threatening to have the netroots pull all funding from the Democratic Party.
Seriously? I mean, seriously? We just scored the biggest political victory for the Democratic Party in a generation. Let's be honest-- for all the media drama about a war between Dean, Rahm, and Schumer, all three did a phenomenal job this cycle. I know people who say Dean sucked, and I know people who say Rahm and Schumer sucked. I like all three. At the end of the day, these three people waged the most successful Democratic campaign of my lifetime.
Carville and the blogs have different ideas of how to win elections; that's fine. I have my own ideas, too. We can and should debate which strategy will carry the party forward. But the absolute last thing we need right now is a civil war in the Democratic party over such a non-issue as who James Carville thinks should chair the DNC. I love James Carville, but he made his reputation in politics by making various inflammatory statements to the media. It's won him a lot of elections-- some would say he single-handedly got Clinton out of the draft-dodging hole that threatened his primary campaign by vigorously fighting the allegations on camera. But is an inflammatory Carville statement really the best reason to launch a Democratic civil war? Come on. Dean won't be replaced as DNC chair; he's done a damn good job, and most of the party realizes that. The blogs need to calm down.
On a related note, Lieberman today reassured reporters that he's still committed to voting with the Democrats. I'm as loyal a Democrat as they come; I supported Lieberman in the primary and Lamont in the general election. Unfortunately, we lost in Connecticut-- but I'd have rather lost that seat than any other Senate election this cycle. Regardless of our problems with Joe, he's going to vote on our side and he's going to give us a Democratic majority. Let's welcome him back (if not with open arms) and move on to dealing with what really matters: implementing Democratic policy and keeping the Senate blue for years to come.
Okay, I know I've earned some flames. I'm ready.
The rabid West Wing fans among us (okay, fine, this is the GUCD blog… let’s face it, that’s probably all of us) probably remember a sub-plotline of the Season 4 midterm elections wherein the Democratic campaign for the California 47th, Horton Wilde, actually lacks a pulse. While this is obviously a made-for-TV scenario, if we take a look at the upcoming midterms, a Democratic congressional candidate who is actually dead suddenly doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Anyone who follows Democratic politics closely has probably picked up by now on the schism between DNC Chairman Howard Dean and DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel. For more a detailed report on the Dean-Emanuel smackdown, check out Tom Edsall’s May 11th Washington Post article on the subject, which reports on a month-long inside the Beltway rumor of a conflict between Rep. Emanuel and Gov. Dean over campaign strategy for the midterms.
Dean has long since championed what he dubs a Democratic “50 states” strategy, arguing that Democrats can and should contest races in all 50 states, even those that polling and demographics suggest are near-unwinnable. The idea behind this philosophy is that Democrats can’t strengthen themselves in the long run unless they compete everywhere. Emanuel (a former ballerina and Clinton strategist from Illinois upon whom, rumor has it, the West Wing character Josh Lyman was largely based), on the other hand, has been very vocal with concerns that the DNC is spending too much money, too fast, on races that are uncompetitive for the Democrats, with the fear that it will leave the Democrats with empty pockets come the October election crunch. Emanuel has argued for spending DNC money where it can do the most good—in races that look competitive for November.
This debate is more than just about how or where to spend money. Dean’s 50 state strategy raises some interesting issues for the Democrats—mainly, how to make the party competitive in blood red states. This includes spending money on races that will most likely go Republican, yes, but it’s also about more than just money; it’s about recruiting qualified candidates to challenge GOP incumbents.
So far, the national Democratic mood seems to be treading Emanuel’s way, if we take a look at a few November House races. Many races in strongly Republican districts have literally no declared Democratic candidate, robbing voters of these districts of a chance to vote on their officeholders. (Some states, like Louisiana, have no Democrats running in in more than half of their congressional districts.) This smacks of un-democratic government. (“Saddam Hussein for President of the Republic of Iraq, vote yes or no,” anyone?) Democrats are letting legitimate chances to make their voices heard go unanswered, like in the CA-44, where Republican incumbent Ken Calvert has been strongly implicated in some of the schemes that downed his ethically-challenged colleague Duke Cunningham in the CA-50. It's strange that no Democrat has stepped forward to challenge Rep. Calvert on his, ahem, little ethics problem. (All of this is to say nothing of districts where the Democrat is on the ticket merely as a formality, with little in the way of a campaign and no support from the National Committee.)
I agree with Governor Dean. It saddens and angers me that in 2004, we didn’t even try in the South. Had Sen. Kerry won Ohio, he would have been elected president without a single Southern state. The last time that happened, the South seceded from the Union. Now, I’m not saying that the situation is quite as dire as 1860, but it’s embarrassing that we claim to be a national party and yet aren’t even bothering to really campaign in more than half of the country.
I’m also not saying that it will be easy. Yes, we have limited funds, and yes, it is difficult to get qualified Democratic candidates to act as sacrificial lambs on behalf of the party. But it shouldn’t be impossible. I’m not proposing a complete solution here, but it’s a start. There are lots of proud Democrats out there who would run given the promise of even an iota of support from the national party. Yeah, they’d probably lose, and nobody likes to be a loser, but I like to think that there are a few patriotic Americans in red states like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Indiana that could step up to the plate and get the debate started. Heck, I’ll even do it, just give me a few years to work on my southern drawl. Politics is about more than just winning; it’s about the ideas. Gov. Dean’s 50 State Plan is a step in the right direction. But as long as large parts of the US are de facto one-party states, we’ve already lost.
