We're going to places like MS and Alaska, talk to them, tell them who we are.

madfloridian

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu May-15-08 05:10 PM
Original message

We're going to places like MS and Alaska, talk to them, tell them who we are.

Edited on Thu May-15-08 05:45 PM by madfloridian

That is what Howard Dean said not only during his campaign, but when he became chairman.

Knock on their doors, let them know they don't need to be afraid to be Democrats...paraphrased but closely.

From TPM today:

Poll: Two Major Republican Incumbents In Serious Danger -- In Alaska!

Dean was criticized for putting paid staff in Alaska. Also for his staff in MS and Utah and other states.

Now this is really something. New polling shows that not one but two scandal-plagued incumbent Republicans are seriously in danger of losing their seats -- and to top it off, both are in a state that has historically been a GOP stronghold, Alaska.

The two GOPers in question are TPMmuckraker all-stars: Sen. Ted Stevens, who is at the center of a corruption investigation; and Rep. Don Young, whose potential involvement in the Coconut Road earmark has landed him in the hotseat. Both are trailing their Dem challengers.

From the new polls commissioned by Daily Kos, and conducted by the non-partisan firm Research 2000:

Senate
Begich (D) 48%
Stevens (R) 43%
House
Berkowitz (D) 50%
Young (R) 40%

Sample size: 600 likely voters.
Margin of error: ±4%.

In The Return of the Angry Man Howard Dean talked of this also.

One of his stops was at Vanderbilt University, where he faced a standing-room-only class. For the next 45 minutes, Dean lectured, bantered and spoke like a candidate. ("I do not believe that you can run enormous deficits year after year after year and not have consequences. I do not believe you can run a foreign policy based on petulance.") But Dean was almost as critical of Democrats. The class evolved into his first lengthy public explication of his view of the party, and his "idears" for fixing it, as he pronounces the word. "It is socially unacceptable in some parts of the country to be a Democrat," he observed. "The first thing we have to do is show up in 50 states and compete in 50 states. Second thing we're going to do is talk in a way that is not condescending."

"The number one thing you can do is run for office."

"I'm absolutely serious. I am not kidding."

The class grew quiet. Here was Dean as a Johnny Appleseed, sowing civics in the young. While Democrats have conceded parts of the country considered hostile, Republicans have left no office untested, he pointed out. The result is that Dems have no farm system, no ability to find young political talent in red states and groom it.

Run, he urged the students. Run for county road commissioner. Run for city council. "If you don't have people running for offices like county commissioner, who do you think is going to run for Congress a generation from now

Mississippi got a Democrat elected, thanks to all those folks denigrated by Paul Begala when he called them "nose pickers" and criticized Dean for hiring them.

Bush and his cronies have done a lot of this single-handedly by being fools and idiots and just plain incompetent.

But there was staff in place for our party to do something when opportunity arose.

Alaska, of all places.

Matt Bai did an interview with Dean, even traveled to Alaska with him. It was called Inside Agitator

I remembered this part about their trip to Alaska today.

That night, after meeting with Dean at the sad little storefront office that houses the state party, Alaska’s party chairman, Jake Metcalfe, announced to 400 assembled Democrats at a fund-raiser that Dean had just promised to hire an additional organizer for the state. The ballroom erupted in grateful applause as Dean sat there beaming. The members of his staff, gently rolling their eyes, began calling back to Washington, warning the political staff that they would need to find the money for yet another salary in, of all places, Alaska.

In just a few hours, Dean had nicely demonstrated why so many leading Democrats in Washington wish he would spend even more time in Alaska — preferably hiking the tundra for a few months, without a cellphone. It’s not that Democrats in Congress don’t like the idea of building better organizations in the party’s forgotten rural outposts. Everyone in Democratic politics agrees, in principle, that party organizations in states like Alaska could use help from Washington to become competitive again, as opposed to the rusted-out machines they have become. But doing so, at this particular moment and in this particular way, would seem to suck away critical resources at a time when every close House and Senate race has the potential to decide who will control the nation’s post-election agenda, and when the party should, theoretically, be focused on mobilizing its base voters — the kind of people who live in big cities and listen religiously to Air America.

Now, at power lunches and private meetings, perplexed Washington Democrats, the kind of people who have lorded over the party apparatus for decades, find themselves pondering the same bewildering questions. What on earth can Howard Dean be thinking? Does he really care about winning in November, or is he after something else?

The mere fact that Democrats would consider a “50-state strategy” to be novel — as if a national party might reasonably aspire to something less — says volumes about the rapid deterioration of the party that was, for most of the last century, America’s dominant political force. Back when Democrats were the established majority, the state parties were run by bosses who doled out jobs and delivered votes, while the national party, functioning as a subsidiary of whoever happened to occupy the Oval Office, worried about electing presidents. For decades, the party claimed a sizable majority of the nation’s governors, senators and congressmen, and in every one of the states where it controlled those seats, there was a centralized organization — a party “infrastructure,” in the parlance of today’s activists — whose job it was to recruit candidates and make sure voters got to the polls.

Alaska, amazing. And possible.