Paul Glastris -- Kevin Drum's regular guest-author -- makes the Simon case as well. Glastris' focus is not praktike's -- of how Simon "gets it" on foreign policy." Rather it's how Simon "gets it" about the party itself, and what politics is becoming. I'm much of Glastris' view (and for that matter, prak's on the foreign policy angle), as I summarized in the comments to prak's initial post endorsing Rosenberg.
Few in the current crop of legislative leaders and office holders qualify as charismatic. Nonetheless, it's from that class of party figures that highly visible leadership should come from, not from the DNC itself. The desire to have a prominent politician in the role of the DNC chair -- one with name recognition beyond the party itself -- is understandable but, IMHO, a big mistake as a matter of principle.
A household-name politician places the visible party leadership in the wrong place within the US political system. Party leaders aren't supposed to be powerful within the narrative of US politics. Power is supposed to be in the hands of elected officials, who are representatives of their party. This is not a minor distinction within fundamental attitudes of the public and prospective voters, including independents and swing voters. There's still a lot of suspicion left over, even among younger voters who don't know the history but have picked up the vibes from their elders, of backroom party politics of the machines and smoke-filled rooms of the old party conventions.
The notion mentioned in passing by Glastris -- of a Dean/Rosenberg CEO/COO -- would I suppose be better than a pure Dean-run DNC. But the fact that Simon's an insider, not a pol, doesn't count against him in my book right now. He doesn't bring the personal baggage in the party and in the public eye that any pol would bring right now. So he would be much more likely to have his message disseminated and heard as he means it to be, rather than have it filtered by both MSM and the GOP through the distorting prisms past inter and intra-party battles.
The choice of DNC chair should reflect the strategic direction the party intends to pursue -- start the way you mind to go. That strategy must be based, first and foremost, on recognizing that the GOP fully intends on every issue -- starting with Soc Security -- to paint the Dems as a tired bunch simply out to defend their old turfs. The Democratic Party must position itself on every issue as forward-looking, not defensive. That means they have to stop fighting the last battles, not just on debates with the Republicans, but within the party itself. And I believe it would be a grave error to select as a "standard bearer" one of the personalities associated with the most recent round of internecine struggles.
Seems to me, although I'm most likely projecting more than a bit of my own opinions, that Simon's pushing a sensible strategic "recipe" familiar to business planners: align clear definitions of your core objectives with the tactics you use on on specific matters. Here's the way I'd formulate that strategy (with some gratuitous recommendations and thoughts tossed in along the way).
- Pick the issues that really matter and group them into a small number of "themes" or "programs" (e.g. electoral and Congressional reform as the equivalent of Gingrich's Contract with America).
- Stop fighting the last war. Forget the bloody 2004 elections for a moment. Frame a forward-looking position in each issue area (not a detailed "plan" for everything a la Kerry, just easy-to-remember phrases that sum up core objectives), even though the Dems don't have the power right now to enact that position. The forward-looking program serves as both the basis for both how to attack Republican proposals and for giving coherence to each electoral campaign season.
[An aside, but not a tangent. Defense isn't the best offense, offense is the best offense in the Dem's current position as a party totally out of power. As a number of Dem party members have remarked, the British model of opposition isn't a bad one for the Dems to think about in current circumstances. It's not enough just to oppose -- whether it's the conduct of the war in Iraq or Social Security or tax "reform" etc etc. Although KISS is good advice as a communication strategy, that doesn't mean limit your arguments to one simple idea -- why the Bush poliices are wrong. That's simply not enough. The Dems must offer a positive future and keep explaining why the BushAdmin proposals as not going to deliver on their positive promises. (See as an example of the way to dismantle the BushAdmin frames, the previous post with the WSJ's excellent piece on Social Security, what Bush's attachment to privatization is really about, and what, therefore, the national debate should be about.)]
- Pick their fights. Choose the Bush Admin items that the Dems are really going to fight, and throw all the major energy and, if really really important, "obstructionist" tactics like a filibuster at those issues. And on those issue, give no quarter, stay united.
- On the rest of the stuff, which the Dems are, let's be honest, powerless to oppose, they should use issue debates as an excuse to repeat the core set of principles on the relevant broad theme or program.
Simon's idea of having an in-house think tank, complementary to the legislative "war room" on Capitol Hill, is lMHO the right way to go to build up the necessary execution capacity and to promote better coherence across issue areas and across various "levels" of the party (geographic, polticians, activists, "public intellectuals"). The potential advantages of such an arrangement for communicating with and influencing the broader electorate are also readily evident.
I think it will take a manager and a bridge builder to get the party to execute that strategy, and Rosenberg appears to be the candidate who best fits the bill.
{further UPDATE 5 minutes after the last one 1-14-05 } by Nadezhda
This is getting tiresome. When will I learn to check the most recent NDOL "Idea of the Week" before I hold forth on Democratic Party matters. I'm truly not a shiill for the DLC.
Here's from their most recent email, sitting in my inbox, which I could have used as my text for the list I just posted. [note: I'm not talking about the merits of the specific items they include in their "new tools for budget reform package." It's the way it's packaged, that it makes the case against the Bush policies, but more important is a coherent and forward-looking set of objectives for a brighter future.]
New Tools for Budget Reform
[...]
Democrats should champion a whole new generation of budget reform proposals tailored to the extreme nature of the current fiscal crisis, and to the underlying abandonment by the GOP of the bipartisan commitment to fiscal discipline that produced such spectacular results during the Clinton administration.
[...]
These steps, and the larger goal of restoring fiscal responsibility, aren't just a matter of green-eyeshade accounting; they reflect a return to basic honesty in government and the application of middle-class family values to the use of taxpayers' dollars. Stopping the flow of red ink is also increasingly critical to our national economy. As New York Federal Reserve Board president Timothy Geithner warned yesterday, there's a real danger that left unaddressed, our burgeoning deficits could shake the confidence of the international investors who have been financing our debt, and in turn, the health of the U.S. economy.
Finally, Democrats must understand that today's and tomorrow's budget deficits will inevitably make it difficult, if not impossible, to promote truly valuable new public-sector initiatives such as universal access to health care or early childhood education. Becoming complicit in the conservative claim that all government spending is equal -- and equally wasteful -- represents both a political and a moral betrayal of true public-sector activism.
As Weinstein noted, becoming the party of fiscal responsibility "will come with a price, but the rewards will be far greater for the party, and more important, the country."
OK, I promise, that's it for tonight on the DNC.
{UPDATE Jan 12 2005 10:00 PM EST} by nadezhda
I'm moving this post of prak's up to the top of the front page so it doesn't get lost. It's terrific, should be read, and then read again, if I do say so myself.
Original posting by praktike Jan 12 2005 11:16AM EST
Quick hits: The new, more purple Matthew Yglesias explains why Kevin Drum is wrong about Howard Dean as DNC Chair so I don't have to:
There's two problems here. First off, a substantive moderate with an image as a radical is the reverse of what you want. Check out Sara Posner's article about progressive radio host Ed Schultz. The point is that what's good about Schultz (if the story's accurate, I've never heard the show) is that he's able to wrap substantive liberalism (except on gun control) in a package that plays against negative liberal stereotypes and allows him to go after the right full-tilt without constantly trimming and apologizing. Dean is basically the reverse. That's fine in a state like Vermont (and many other parts of the country) where what might call "lifestyle liberalism" is a very large demographic element, but it's not right for the country as a whole. Substantive policy moderation doesn't cut nearly enough ice with the voters to make up for it.
Beyond this, there's simply too much bad blood between Dean and other important people in the party. Many centrist Democrats (and, frankly, non-centrist Democrats) are simply bitter about Dean's over-the-top "Republican-lite" rhetoric. Dean, too, is bitter about the over-the-top "Mondale-McGovernism" rhetoric that was directed at him. Neither side is blameless in this, and I don't really care to adjudicate who's more in the wrong. But that's the reality. The party could use a shake-up, but it certainly doesn't need a bitter, emotion-laden pissing match. Nor (as Markos is constantly pointing out, though I believe he's supporting Dean and drawing the wrong conclusion from this) does it need a grand ideological battle. A Dean Chairmanship will give us a pissing match that will be coded as -- and may well develop into -- a confused ideological struggle. The sort of shakeup we need is really about process, personnel, and other basically non-ideological matters.
Where I differ from Matt, however, is that I think that the substantive criticism of Dean from the right side of the Democratic Party has some merit to it. Dean was right about the Iraq War in many respects, but his general national security stance is not something the Democratic Party should get behind. Take, for instance, his statement announcing his candidacy:
As important as organization is, alone it cannot win us elections. Offering a new choice means making Democrats the party of reform -- reforming America's financial situation, reforming our electoral process, reforming health care, reforming education and putting morality back in our foreign policy. The Democratic Party will not win elections or build a lasting majority solely by changing its rhetoric, nor will we win by adopting the other side's positions. We must say what we mean -- and mean real change when we say it.
Okay, most of that is good--I'm a reform Democrat and, though I don't blog about it enough, I utterly despise the cesspool of utter wankerdom that Congress has become--but take a look at the text in bold. It's the wrong idea, not because we don't need to put morality back into our foreign policy, but rather because the whole shebang needs reworking in order to keep Americans safe and lead the free world.
I got into a bit of an argument back in November with the illustrious Katherine about this diagnosis what is wrong with the Dean approach by of the Truman Project:
The Party of Idealists, embodied by the Howard Dean movement, talks in the ethically-based language of Democratic activists. But scarred by the post-Vietnam aversion to American power, they remain deeply uncomfortable with American national interest, and with the harder tools of foreign policy, particularly the military and intelligence communities. This vocal and visible camp scares Americans, who feel that the Democratic Party does not value their safety.
As it turns out, the Truman Project was mostly right, although I think that Vietnam was a disaster that was worth some aversion thereto, although that doesn't mean that there aren't some positive lessons we can draw from it.
In any case, it turns out that Howard Dean does, in fact, talk in ethically-based language. Now, there are some real ethical problems with our foreign policy at the moment--notably the apparent endorsement of torture on the part of the Office of Legal Council and the assertion of presidential kingship on the part of the Pentagon's legal team, on which more here.
I'm also troubled by the chaos and violence we've been unable to stop in the wake of Saddam's ouster. But job one for the Democrats ought to be KEEPING AMERICANS SAFE. The Bush Administration's policies are making Americans less safe and eroding our influence around the world. And many of them are ethically grotesque. Although we make mistakes, American influence is, on the whole, a very good thing for the world.
But as John Gaddis writes in Foreign Affairs:
It is easy to say that this does not matter--that a nation as strong as the United States need not worry about what others think of it. But that simply is not true. To see why, compare the American and Soviet spheres of influence in Europe during the Cold War. The first operated with the consent of those within it. The second did not, and that made an enormous difference quite unrelated to the military strength each side could bring to bear in the region. The lesson here is clear: influence, to be sustained, requires not just power but also the absence of resistance, or, to use Clausewitz's term, "friction." Anyone who has ever operated a vehicle knows the need for lubrication, without which the vehicle will sooner or later grind to a halt. This is what was missing during the first Bush administration: a proper amount of attention to the equivalent of lubrication in strategy, which is persuasion.
Now, I don't agree with Gaddis when he more or less says that the Bush Administration is actually substantively right about everything and has a totally awesome "grand strategy." It does not--I will also cry foul here because under my definition of grand strategy, you also have to marshall all of the other elements of national power such as economic and moral clout, energy policy, etc. Ergo, if you suck at those things, too, YOUR GRAND STRATEGY SUCKS.
As for Iraq, the bottom line is that there was, in fact, nothing to prevent--I'm talking about the nukes here--and this was known before the war and publicized by the IAEA. There was one guy, a junior analyst at the CIA who thought otherwise regarding the aluminum tubes, as well as a bunch of forged crap about Niger that was quickly exposed. It was also the case that not even the kooks at the OSP had any pseudo evidence that Saddam and Osama were sittin' in a tree, so they had to resort to bullshit like the slide highlighted here by Paul Kerr. Now, I think it's impossible to know whether the Iraq War was an inherently bad idea, or a bad idea only because it was going to be implemented by the Bush Administration.
But I do agree with Gaddis that, just as in the Cold War, American leadership in world affairs needs to be accepted as legitimate and responsible for it to work. And that, in addition to the fact that it is wrong and illegal to boot, is why we shouldn't torture people or enact policies that would legitimate it. But I digress ... the real point here is that Howard Dean has the wrong approach whereas Simon Rosenberg has it right, as noted below.
In other DNC Chair news, Trippi endorses Rosenberg. A savvy if somewhat nasty ploy destined to garner lots of media attention, but just don't let Joe anywhere near the DNC warchest, mmmkay, Simon?
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