Short-term anxiety
Watch this clip of Guy Cecil, the departing chair of Priorities USA PAC. He provides a pretty concise breakdown of where Democrats go wrong.
The right takes a long view of politics, Cecil argues. They invest in long-term ideological change. It took the conservative movement 50 years to repeal Roe, but they retained that focus and worked at it until they did. Democrats’ think in election cycles. They need a broader, longer approach to building their coalition and infrastructure.
“One of my concerns is that we have fetishized the use of data and analytics,” Cecil tells MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In so doing, Democrats reduce their electoral coalition to “a confederacy of caricatures.” This groups cares about this issue, and that group cares about another. In fact, people are people, and they care about many things.
I wrote recently about the fixation on data:
Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Hit your targets whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers measured supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton seemed to measure measuring. Coordinated campaign staffers here knew what they were sending up the chain-of-command was crap, but it was what superiors asked for: numbers.
Read the room. What Democrats need to do better, says Cecil, is communicating their vision for where they want to take the country, for how they want to build a more perfect union. A laundry list of issues is not a vision. It does not tell an underlying story.
Cecil is stepping aside because “organizations benefit from change.” From “new leadership and fresh thinking.”
I couldn’t agree more. If only the gerontocracy atop the party itself felt the same way.
“We need to think more long term about how we are going to engage at every level of the ballot and across all these different spheres of influence,” Cecil continues. Most Americans agree with Democrats’ positions, but we must ask, “whose fault is it that we are not effectively communicating those things?”
Not to overstate the problem, Cecil observes, “Our love language is anxiety in the Democratic Party.”
Paul Waldman observed in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 win:
Democrats are forever worried about whether they might be criticized, whether Republicans will be mean to them, whether they might look as though they’re being partisan, and whether they might be subjected to a round of stern editorials. Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t care. What they’re worried about is winning, and they don’t let the kinds of criticism that frightens Democrats impede them. It makes Republicans the party of “Yes we can,” while Democrats are the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.”
But that was 2017. With Joe Biden in the White House knowing he has one shot (and at best two terms) at making the union more perfect, he’s accomplished more than I expected. But Biden is not the Democratic Party and eight years is an eye-blink.
Cecil is right. Who he has to convince as much as a party leadership past its sell-by date is the clique of high-rolling Democratic millionaire/billionaires more interested in hanging their names on short-term victories than on financing long-term goals. Advancing a progressive agenda (and saving democracy) is not just about raising money. It’s about commitment.