Getting Out The Message

by digby

So, as expected, Regina Thomas lost her primary challenge against Blue Dog incumbent John Barrow last night. And this morning I’m hearing a lot of the usual talk from those in the know that this is just another example of silly netroots posturing and that we waste our time trying to help these primary challengers. Incumbency is incumbency. Yawn.

Let me repeat this One. More. Time:

The point isn’t that anyone thought they would win these races. Indeed, they didn’t expect to even come close. What they did believe is that activists need to take the opportunity to get into these races, see what they have to learn and educate people in these districts about their representatives. Primary challenges are the institutional vehicle for changing the party apparatus. If you don’t lay the groundwork, nothing will ever happen.

It takes time and it takes money to change the way people think about politics. None of this happens overnight. Nobody’s asking any of the Very Important Political Consultants to put their Very Important Reputations on the line to do this unsatisfying, disappointing work. The Dirty Hippies and their readers have agreed to throw a little bit of money and time toward these races so that long shot progressive candidates in these districts have a chance to get the message into the ether and build a little foundation for tomorrow. It gives the netroots a chance to learn what needs to be done to make these primary challenges more successful in the future.

Matt Stoller wrote about this yesterday:

It’s going to take a long time to turn this ship around, but we’re doing it. The losses are as important, more important perhaps, than the wins, because that is how we learn. Next cycle, Obama’s infrastructure is going to leave a lot of fresh campaign operatives unemployed, and a lot of new talent looking to run for office. There will be people who know how to run a voter file, know how to micro-target, understand field campaigns, and mail, and radio, and TV, and paid media online, and integration with the blogging world. They will have learned this on the Obama campaign, and will be able to deploy these skills elsewhere.

In fact, the energy is clearly there. This cycle, there were primary challenges against John Lewis, Ed Towns, Leonard Boswell, Carolyn Kilpatrick and Dennis Kucinich. Not all those challenges were from the left, but the jostling loose of the incumbent protection racket will in general help progressives. And so it’s important to have test runs with people like Regina Thomas and Ed Fallon

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There is nothing magical about making the Democratic party more progressive. You have to elect more progressive Democrats and to do that you have to get people who aren’t paying close attention, who vote on name recognition, who are reflexively reactionary to vote for them. That’s hard. It takes organization and money and persuasive political rhetoric. But there is no other way to do it unless you think that in our two party system, the Republicans are going to be more receptive to the progressive agenda. (And if you do, then I think you are deluded.)

The netroots are out here trying to do some things that all the very smart people consider pointless. But then they consider fighting for liberal values in any way to be pointless. What else is new? If we cared what they think we’d be doing something else, wouldn’t we? It’s not like online activism is great resume builder or anything.

Keep the faith, folks. Blue America has backed a bunch of winners since 2006 and they’re going to have more winners in the fall. But primary challenges are always going to be the toughest thing they do, and probably have the highest failure rate. It’s the nature of the beast. But every time they put up a fight and make some noise, the easier it’s going to be for the next progressive challenger to put a little fear into a fat cat politician. We’ll get there.

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