Maximizing The Strategy
Everybody needs to read Liberal Oasis every day. Bill Sher’s analysis of the way the game is played in invaluable. It will make you feel better and it will give you things to think about.
Today he has a long post up about our marching orders called “Your Mission: Maximize The Strategy.” The following is just a small excerpt and I urge you to read the whole thing:
At this stage of the game, those of us on the outside do the most good by helping the campaign execute strategy in the grassroots, not by rehashing strategy.
There may be news items to flag, and specific attack lines to suggest, but wholesale strategic overhauls are not worth batting around anymore.
And they can be debilitating.
What was worse in 2000?
The fact that Al Gore didn’t ask Bill Clinton to campaign much for him?
Or the fact that people wouldn’t shut up about whether Bill Clinton should campaign with him?
In that case, Gore had a tough call to make.
While partisans were convinced Clinton was gold on the campaign trail, polls showed he turned off a large chunk of independent voters.
Monday morning QBs still lambaste Gore for his call, under the “every decision was a bad decision” logic when assessing “losing” campaigns.
But to this day, they can’t be sure that a heavy dose of Clinton would have meant a popular vote loss too, or if it just wouldn’t have made a difference.
And we also don’t know what would have happened if the party just got in line and backed Gore’s strategy to the hilt.
I’ve been thinking about this all day and I think part of what is going on with us Democrats is that while it is natural to treat the race like it’s a sporting event our mistake is in thinking that we are the fans. We sit around the metaphorical bar and kibbitz about what the manager should and shouldn’t do. Don’t pull Pedro! That’s nuts!
But this isn’t a sporting event in which we are all observers. We are players in this game and it actually matters what we do and say. Our attitude, our intensity, or energy and our willingnesss to walk the precinct and put up signs and talk to our friends can all affect the outcome. The manager can’t listen to all of our conflicting advice, but he sure needs us to play to the best of our ability.
There’s a lot we can do and each of us has to figure out what that might be, from work on the ground to calling up Grandma Millie and making sure she’s registered to vote (and knows that Bush’s pals at Enron said they were screwing her during the energy crisis.)
And, the very least we can do is make sure that if the issue of politics comes up in our daily lives that we unequivocally say out loud that we support Kerry and think he’s a good man even as we make our case against Bush. (The ABB meme served its purpose and it’s counterproductive at this point.) Kerry’s working his ass off on our behalf to take down little Junior. We owe him some respect for that and we need to help him make that affirmative case for change.
Here’s a little idea for a personal political project that each of us can undertake. Surely, we all know one person who doesn’t usually vote, an apolitical type who isn’t interested. This country is crawling with them. This is the election to get them registered and make sure they vote, whether by sending them the link for an absentee ballot or offering to pick them up and take them to the polls on election day. Everybody knows somebody like this. If we all make sure that we each get one person to vote who wouldn’t otherwise give a damn, we win.
So, think about it. Which of your slacker friends can you get to vote this year? Take the initiative. They won’t mind. They don’t care. Make that work for us.