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Thursday, February 17, 2005
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THE SECOND COMING OF "YEAAAAARRRRRRGH!"
I greeted the news that Howard Dean would be seeking te chairmanship of the Democratic National Commiittee with great amusement. I felt this way because I knew that he was almost certain to win. And win he did. In fact, by the end, he was the only candidate still in the race and he was acclaimed as chair.
Both the Republicans and Democrats have had stupid people chair the parties before. However, neither has actually been lead by a psychopath before. It should be very interesting to watch.
Most people can't name the party chairs, and with very good reason. When a party holds the White House, the national committee couldn't be less consequentional. This goes back to the days of Lyndon Johnson. When Johnson succeeded to the Oval Office, he was so distrustful of lingering influence of Kennedy's people that he centralized all political operations within the White House. Fortunately for the party, Johnson had massive coat tails in 1964 and several Democrats were brought to Congress just by mere association with the president. However, this wasn't the case in 1968 and Vice President Humphrey paid a heavy price for it.
The scenario was even worse during Richard Nixon's presidency. Nixon seemed to keep the committee alive only as a target of his abuse. The Chairman, then Senator Bob Dole, tells of recieving a telephone call from White House Chief of Staff H.R Haldeman. Haldeman asked Dole if he would like to see the president. Dole, who couldn't get an appointment with Nixon for months at a time, said that he would. "He'll be on television at 9", Haldeman said before hanging up.
President Nixon decided that the RNC would be completely frozen out of his 1972 re-election effort and that the campaign would be run by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). This lead to Watergate. Perhaps you've heard about it.
When a sitting president names a party chair, he tends to name a mouth piece and little else. However, when a party is out of power and they elect the chair, things tend to get interesting. And Dean may be the most interesting yet. While much has been made of his mental illness, mostly by me, Howard Dean is particularly adept at something the party is in desperate need of, raising shitloads of money.
During his doomed primary campaign, the governor raised some $50 million and he raised it in small donations. This is important for one reason. With the passage of McCain / Fiengold, small donations are pretty much the only ones allowable. In the past decade, Republicans have pretty much owned small donors while Democrats relied almost entirely on PAC soft money donations. In suppporting campaign finance reform, the Democrats committed financial suicide.
It gets worse. With the dearth of small donations, the Democrats generally - and the Kerry campaign specifically - became reliant on 527 advertising. The problem is, a campaign is legally prohibited from engaging in message co-ordination with a 527 group. The Democrats weren't wanting for money. But, in the end, they couldn't control their own message. You'll notice how that turned out.
Dean actually managed to give a strategically smart victory speech as well. Here are some excerpts.
The first time our nation balanced its budget, it was Andrew Jackson, father of the Democratic Party, who did it. The last time our nation balanced its budget, it was Bill Clinton who did it. Democratic governors do it every single year.
Not one Republican President has balanced the budget in almost 40 years. Borrow and spend. Borrow and spend. Borrow and spend. Americans cannot trust the Republicans with their money.
Americans want a strong and smart national security.
It was Democrats who pushed to create a Department of Homeland Security. It was Democrats who pushed to make our airlinessafer. It is Democrats who are now working to make sure we close the remaining gaps in our security. It was Democrats who demanded reform of the intelligence community.
And it is Democrats who are pushing for a foreign policy that honestly deals with the threats of today, and the threats of tomorrow — like securing the nuclear materials around the world.
Republicans had to be dragged kicking and screaming to our side on all of these issues. There is no reason for Democrats to be defensive on national defense.
If a Democrat would ever like to be elected to anything ever again, this is the kind of message that they will have to take to the country. "I voted for it before I voted against it" didn't seem to work out as well as planned. If the Democrats can position themselves as the midwives of fiscal responsibilty and national security, that leaves the Republicans with little else to run on.
Allow me to elaborate. If there are two highly desirable groups in American politics today, they are suburban mothers and Catholics (best represented by Hispanics.) Bush / Cheney 04 crafted their entire campaign to capturing these two groups. In fact, the President's entire first term was cultivated to these two groups.
As Dick Morris has pointed out, successful Democrats run on what he calls "SHE" issues. "SHE" stands for Social Security, Health Care and Education. This explains where private accounts, the prescription drug benefit and "No Child Left Behind" came from. Senator Kerry himself was open to the first in the Ninties and voted for the second and third. His attempts to wiggle free during the campaign were transparently pathetic.
in short, George Bush co-opted the Democratic platform and won twice.
Dean's plan of doing this on balanced budgets and national security is the only hope that Democrats have at a comeback. If they don't field test this next year, they're insane and stupid.
Dean also took a shot at the President's Social Security plan.
And finally, we believe that a lifetime of work earns you a retirement of dignity. We won't let that be put at risk by leaders who continually invent false crises to justify policies that don't work… in this case, borrowing from our children and shredding our country's social safety net in the process.
The President's plan for Social Security does nothing to guarantee Social Security's future. But it will cut benefits and cost an estimated 2 trillion dollars. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we will have to borrow 4.5 trillion dollars to finance the privatization of Social Security in the first 20 years alone.
Let me give you a sense of how much money that is. There are 118 million people under the age of 30 in America today. That means borrowing nearly $45,000 in each of their names.
That's a legacy of debt our children don't deserve.
This is what is generally accepted as a winning argument. Whether it's factually correct or not is beside the point.
Dean brings a couple of important things to the table, money and message. These are two things that national Democrats desperately need. The fact that the Washington Democratic establishment hates Dean is also a plus. Washington Democratic insiders have been running their campaigns forever and what has it gotten them? Their asses kicked 7 times out of 10 is what. The situation gets much more dire when you look at the winning Democratic campaigns. Carter '76 was run by Georgia operatives. Clinton '92 was headed by James Carville and George Stephanopoulus, both of whom were far more familiar with Congressional races than presidential ones. The Democratic professionals at the presidential level have therefore lost ten of the last ten elections. The last president the Washington Democrat power structure elected was Lyndon Johnson......forty years ago!
Christ, most anybody else can do better than that by accident.
On the other hand, Dean has several significant down sides. Firstly, he's nuts. Crazy people have a nasty tendancy to make themselves the issue, rather than their party. This is ultimately what happened to Dean's presidential campaign. I may be alone in believing this, but I think that Dean could have survived losing in Iowa. It was the psychotic scream that killed him. The scream became the story and he couldn't survive that.
If Dean can somehow remove himself from his message, he could do well. He's not off to a great start, though.
Chairman Dean is scheduled to debate Richard Perle today. Perle, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense and adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, is a serious person. Does he believe ridiculous things? Sure. Anyone who has read his book An End to Evil knows that. But he is very smart and a very gifted debater. Howard Dean has risen to challenge by......being Howard Dean.
In the space of two hours, the debate was open to the media, then under a blackout, then open again. This is the public decision making process of Howard Dean and that, instead of the debate, has become the story.
And this is why having Howard Dean as DNC chair is going to be fun. You never know if, or when, his otherwise sensible political strategies are going to be squashed by his personality.
Jesus, this is going to be fun to watch.
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