“Inspiration can come from unexpected sources,” a friend tweeted this morning.
I’ve said it before:
I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.
This how the right wins and we lose. The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.
The usually dissmissable Chris Cillizza was right about this in 2015:
Traditionally, Democrats — and, in particular, the party’s major donors — have not been terribly good at either a) seeing the big/long-term political picture or b) getting excited about downballot races. (Republicans, on the other hand, have been brilliant at both.)
Marketing has never been a strong skill for the campaign industrial complex, the “fraternity-like network of former staffers who move from public service into the private campaign industry and back.” Washington insiders hire their friends. Plus, Democratic donors are too cheap to hire the pros, a friend observed recently. Relentlessness and long-term investment have never been a strong impulses among Democrats’ donors. They want quick fixes, and cheap ones.
Democrats also have an “a tree falls in the forest” problem, I wrote yesterday. No matter what their message is and no matter how impressed they are with it (even if it’s lame), it matters little if no one hears it.
Speaking of … this 2006 Dave Johnson post from Seeing the Forest speaks to what too many fail to understand about the sales job “Democrats” are not doing:
First, it is not the Republican Party that does that sell-job. To me, this is a key point to understand if we’re going to work on countering the conservatives and bringing the public back to understanding and accepting progressive values and ideas and candidates. It is not the Republican Party. And when you understand this point, you understand that it is not the Democratic Party that is falling down on selling progressive ideas.
It is not the Republican Party, it is the “conservative movement” infrastructure that does the selling. It is the Heritage Foundation and the (oh-so-many) other marketing/communications think tanks. It is the anti-tax and anti-government organizations. It is the Christian Right organizations. It is the corporate lobbying groups that would be selling it. It is the right-wing media that would be selling it. Rush Limbaugh and 100 other radio talk-show hosts would be selling it. Fox News would be selling it. The Drudge Report would have headlines about it. The think tanks would be dispatching 100 pundits to the TV news shows to be selling it. The Ann Coulters and the Cal Thomases and Jerry Falwells would be selling it. There would be professionally-crafted op-eds in every newspaper selling it. There would be an organized letter-to-the-editor campaign selling it. There would be e-mail chain letters selling it. There would be anonymous posts on internet sports forums selling it. There would be PR firm-produced-and-placed YouTube videos selling it. There would be strategically-placed MySpace friends selling it. They would ALL be selling it, in concert, using the same polled-and-focus-group-tested talking points, repeating the same message over and over and over… But they are not the Republican Party.
Winning is about being relentless, and relentlessness doesn’t work on a campaign cycle, nor on funds raised specifically for election/reelection campaigns. The deepest-pocketed among us need to ante up if we hope to compete in this messdaging environment. Hell, the Lincoln Project is doing more than the left, and devoting real resources, another friend observes. Campaign finance fixes won’t fix this.