Reply #8: The 50 state strategy is a long term [View All]

[BootinUp]

effort that involved spending money in areas where we were not competitive in 2004 or 2006, to build up the grassroots. This was not a one year plan. It was never planned as a strategy to win the 2006 midterms. Go read Deans own words on why it was important. What Emmanuel and Schumer and Dean were fighting about, was that tHe DCCC and DSCC wanted to put more of the DNC money into competitive races. Anyone who doesn't get this has a problem with critical thinking or reading english or just doesn't give a fuck as long as they can boost their guy whovever it may be.

from a recent article in the NYT:

Before this midterm election-year began, but not long after Dean became party head, Emanuel and Schumer decided that if Dean wasn’t going to raise anywhere near as much money as his rivals at Republican headquarters, then he ought to at least give them whatever resources he could muster. They went to work on Dean, pleading with him to transfer as much as $10 million to the two committees to help them respond to the Republican TV barrage. Emanuel told anyone who would listen that back in 1994, when Republicans sensed a similarly historic mood swing in the electorate, the R.N.C. kicked in something like $20 million in cash to its Congressional committees. (This argument was impressive, but not exactly true; the R.N.C. spent roughly that much on federal and local races combined in 1994, and little, if any, of that money went directly to the committees themselves.) Dean categorically refused to ante up. Having opposed the very idea of targeting a small number of states and races, he wasn’t about to divert money from his long-term strategy — what he calls the “unsexy” work of rebuilding the party’s infrastructure — to pay for a bunch of TV ads in Ohio. He wanted to win the 2006 elections as much as anyone, Dean told them, and he intended to help where he could. But Democratic candidates and their campaign committees were doing just fine on fund-raising, and the party couldn’t continue giving in to the temptation to spend everything it had on every election cycle — no matter how big a checkbook the Republicans were waving around.

For Schumer, Emanuel and their allies, this rejection was irritating enough. When they heard the stories of how Dean was actually spending the party’s cash, however, it was almost more than they could take. Dean was paying for four organizers in Mississippi, where there wasn’t a single close House race, but he had sent only three new hires to Pennsylvania, which had a governor’s race, a Senate campaign and four competitive House races. Emanuel said he was all for expanding the party’s reach into rural states — roughly half the House seats he was targeting were in states like Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, after all — but he wanted the D.N.C. to focus on individual districts that Democrats could actually win, as opposed to just spreading money around aimlessly. The D.N.C. was spending its money not only in Alaska and Hawaii, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. Democratic insiders began to rail against this wacky and expensive 50-state plan. “He says it’s a long-term strategy,” Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said during an appearance on CNN in May. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.

The 50 state strategy is very important in my opinon, I am glad Dean stood up to the DC apparatus on this, but an election wave that resulted because of the failed and corrupt Repulican Revolution is not the doing of Deans 50 state strategy, that is ridiculous. I have no problem giving Dean credit for his efforts but can we stop the fantasy world posts? What Deans strategy will do is to help us maintain and grow what we just won and thats why it is important.