Stop Relying On The Party (Or, How We Can Win)

Submitted by Oliver Willis on Tue, 11/23/2004 - 9:52am.
Brand Democrat | Democrats

Republicans are supposed to the be the political affiliation obsessed with a top-down hierarchy that forces them to wait for commands from headquarters before they act. Increasingly, I'm finding that to be true with the Dems.

As this Brand Democrat deal has ramped up - way more than I ever expected - I keep hearing from the odd person or two that I should take this to the DNC or Dean or Other Important Democrat. Why?

I'd be thrilled if the official Democratic Party adopted some of the ideas we've presented or if President Clinton called me up tomorrow, but that's beside the point.

Stop waiting for the party to fix things, because that's not going to happen. Yes, they have a lot of power, but they are nothing without us, their constituency. When the GOP was the party essentially lost in the wilderness, post-Goldwater, Republicans didn't sit around waiting for the RNC to craft a strategy for them. They went ahead and did it anyway. Some of the things worked, some of them didn't. The things that worked caught on, and were integrated into the party message and ideology - this is the opportunity we have now.

I certainly didn't want to lose the election, but I have noticed before that the Dems (including myself) think a long-term plan is a four year strategy. What we are just now seeming to understand is that it often takes a candidate of Clinton's style to overcome the structural problems inherit in running against the GOP machine and a media that is willing to just be stenographers.

In other words, simply appealing to the good sense of the American people is a loser strategy. Relying on the party to figure this out is even more of a loser. We've got to do it.

We have to get marketing. Get the moans and groans out now, because this is how you win, and I don't wanna hear it.

• Brand Democrat: A cohesive set of principles that define the party in the minds of America. Even Democrats don't "get" the Democratic stance, because we've been doing this ad hoc. It's not talking about health care in Michigan or jobs in Boise. It's having a set of commandments, as it were, for what every Democrat coast to coast can identify as his bedrock. This will always vary depending on the politician. A Democrat in Oklahoma is almost always going to see the world differently from a Democrat in New Jersey. The principles of the party will be the narrative threads that unite them.
• Getting the Message Out: Jerome has hit on something here with how Meetups and the like can get many of us on the same page. It isn't about getting everyone in your neighborhood to a Meetup. That's never going to happen, and it shouldn't happen. The people who sign up for a Meetup are most likely going to be connector types, influentials. If you're the one in your network of friends/family who tends to evangelize things ("You should really get a Tivo", "Have you tried that new Vanilla Coke"), then that's you (among my friends/family, this tends to be me). We should look at Meetups and other online components as a way to get the Democratic ideals out to the folks that can get the word out to their less involved/active friends and family. This doesn't mean hitting them over the head with a bunch of political nonsense. It means getting a message out into the world coming from a trusted source. People are a lot more likely to see the relative merit in an idea gleaned from "my friend who knows about politics" than 1,000 commercials on television.
• Plugging in the Candidate: Only then does the party's role become integral to the success. Once you've got a bedrock set of "what is a Democrat" ideas succesfully out there, its time to throw in a candidate who can put the philosophy into reality. This is not just a presidential candidate. A political movement goes nowhere without a candidate, but a candidate is not a political movement. The idea is, if you can plug in an articulate person that is able to tell you that they are a Democrat, you're halfway to the endzone already. What their job is now is to tell you what their personal take is on being a Democrat, and pound the ball into the end zone. They are part of the greater narrative tale.

We can make it so that their job is fixing the country, and not a party.