“We Can Do Better”

Like most Americans, Strindberg-style morbidity and pessimism quickly becomes tiresome around Casa Tristero. For all I know, Swedes get sick of Strindberg, too, but one of the most striking features of our national consciousness, that folks from other places never cease to comment on, is Americans’ sense of optimism with purpose. Often, it is true, this is carried to a dangerous fault. But it’s a country-wide tic we have and it can’t easily be denied. So, being an American, I can’t write a post like The Third Way And The Highway without reflexively thinking, “Lighten up, man! Your audience is dying out there.” So I won’t draw attention in this post to the untidy fact that the Pakistani death toll has reached 42,000 or that there’s a serious food crisis in the Guatemalan villages ravaged by the mudslides or even that dozens of people were killed today in a suicide car bomb in Iraq. Nope. Below, I’ll accentuate the positive. Enjoy!

Here is an article that provides a rough outline of Dean’s plans for the Democrats. It sounds, like many of Dean’s proposals, extremely intelligent and well thought out:

”What I’m trying to do is impose a system and run this place like a business,” Dean said during an expansive interview in his office overlooking the Capitol.

[snip]

Among Dean’s goals are:

–Making Democrats the party of values, community and reform. Armed with extensive DNC polling, Dean is consulting with party leaders in Congress, mayors and governors to recast the public’s image of Democrats with a unified message.

–Improving the party’s ”micro-targeting,” the tactic of merging political information about voters with their consumer habits to figure out how to appeal to them.

–Building a 50-state grass-roots organization, using the same Internet and community-building tools that took Dean’s presidential bid from obscurity to the front of the pack before Iowa.

[Snip]

”I tapped into a craving for community in a society where we’re becoming increasingly isolated from ourselves,” he said.

A look at Dean’s approach: MESSAGE:

The DNC is getting outside help from private-sector consultants who specialize in creating and strengthening corporate images — or ”brands.”

”The last time this party was branded was Lyndon Johnson,” Dean said. ”We’d been in power so long that we didn’t think we needed to do it.”

The lack of a message or brand makes it difficult for Democrats to capitalize on Bush’s political slump and a series of GOP scandals. While the party is unified in accusing Republicans of creating a ”culture of corruption,” Democrats still need to give voters a compelling alternative to GOP rule.

A March 23, 2005, memo by DNC pollster Cornell Belcher found that most voters view politics through a values-laden prism rather than through the economic framing traditionally used by Democrats.

On a list of issue choices, ”moral values” ranked in the middle of the pack and well ahead of abortion and gay rights. That suggested to Belcher that moral values has a broader meaning for voters than do social wedge issues.

”When voters think about moral values, they may in large part be thinking about the strength, leadership and moral fortitude of the candidates … rather than the candidates’ positions on specific social wedge issues,” Belcher wrote.

Dean’s take on the polling is that Democrats must recast the values-and-morals debate.

”It’s morally wrong that so many children live in poverty. It’s morally wrong that we have so many working poor people who can’t pull themselves out of poverty,” he said.

He also believes that voters are more interested in a candidate’s intangible leadership qualities than his positions on lists of issues.

”We have to appeal to people’s hearts and not just their heads,” he said.

A Sept. 26 memo by Belcher found that people are placing a greater emphasis on community and sacrifice for the greater good. Dean tries to appeal to this sense of higher purpose when he says, ”We can do better.”

MICRO-TARGETING:

[Snip]

The Bush campaign worked with consumer data-mining companies to place every battleground state voter into one of 20 to 30 ”clusters” of like-minded people. The DNC’s current system has eight to 16 clusters.

If the DNC can afford it, Dean’s advisers hope to have 40 clusters in time for the next presidential race.

This personalization of politics harkens to pre-TV days when ward bosses and precinct captains, acting largely on instinct, tailored campaign messages to their friends and neighbors.

ORGANIZING:

Dean is putting four or five DNC staff members in every state with orders to organize every precinct. One of the organizers’ first mandates is to conduct four major events a year, one or two of which are mainly social.

Dean learned from his own campaign that it is critical to form relationships that turn into small communities and build into networks of people who feel part of a bottom-up operation with a purpose larger than themselves.

It’s a long-term investment that runs counter to the political culture in Washington that, in the last years of the 20th century, has valued multimillion-dollar TV buys over grass-roots organizing.

”You’ve got to recruit people. You’ve got to ask them to do something,” Dean said. ”You have to treat them like a community.”

Methinks this is the beginning of a plan. It gives us an indication of how mangy things were when Dean took over, as they seem pretty basic to me. A few random comments:

Note the echo of a point I also made yesterday, that voters view politics through the prism of values, not as power centers onto which values can be grafted and changed at will. This is critical towards finding solutions for a modern national party to oppose the Republicans. I think, however, that they may be mistaken to discount the importance of economic issues, especially for the working class and mid-level executives. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Republican yuppies (including my brother, for heaven’s sake!) tell me they were voting for Bush because, all things considered, they always voted their pocketbook. Yes, values. But values includes a responsible attitude towards money (on which, of course, liberals and Democrats can easily demonstrate far more probity than Republicans).

The emphasis on genuine moral values as opposed to wedge issues is about 25 years overdue. This is exactly right. Moral values entail a serious federal and state commitment to aid the poor and disadvantaged. Why? That’s what great countries do. They see such expenditures as axiomatically moral. The GOP wedge issues – contraception, marriage rights for all couples that want it, and so forth – have been cherry-picked, not because they’re vitally important, but because the right can address them with crisp, quotable zingers. It’s not that abortion rights are unimportant, they are very important (bottom line: support for Roe should be unequivocal and unwavering, no matter what one’s personal beliefs). But the right has obsessed about sex-related issues, tying up the discourse into knots while, to America’s shame, the entire country has neglected the poor. The Dean team’s emphasis seems exactly right. Not to give up on Roe for an instant, but to insist that the country as a whole start to look at other moral issues, issues that, incidentally, the Republicans can claim no moral standing.

Dean’s appeal to hearts and not just their heads is also exactly right. Note the phrase “not just their heads.” Dean’s saying Americans are reality-based, and need to be persuaded by reason and knowledge. But he is also saying, that is not enough by a long shot. Americans also should be moved, deeply moved, by the individuals for whom they will vote. Dean makes it clear this is an issue that must be addressed by the party leadership. Yes, indeed.

The emphasis in organizing on the social is an important insight. Yes, there’s Drinking Liberally and I’m sure tons of stuff that I never heard of, but liberals and Democrats need to develop a rich, localized sense of shared community, with faces, voices, and shared memories. Not to talk politics and scheme, necessarily, but simply to hang, make friends. Doing fun things – whatever that might mean, from hunting clubs* to knitting clubs to just great parties – builds friendships and enables peer group pressures, in a good sense, to build activism for political goals.

Finally, it has not escaped my attention that Dean seems not to be addressing – yet – the importance of developing a a clear Democratic stance on national security issues and foreign policy. A clear indication that what Dean’s talking about is the beginning of a plan but there is a long, long way to go. Building a viable national party is exceedingly difficult, even if the tattered infrastructure of a of a once-great political organization can be mended, patched, and improved.

*As a strict vegetarian for 25 years and counting, the suggestion that Democrats and liberals go duck hunting is proof positive I’m not advocating ideological purity (grin).

[UPDATE: Original NY Times link to AP article replaced with ABC News Link. Hat tip to kathyp in comments. A second update corrected an inadvertent slip of the pixel.]