[No More Liebermans]

Part One: Blueprint for a Machine.

Why did John Kerry lose to George Bush in 2004? It is seductive to offer an oversimplistic answer—”moral values,” say—when we know that the causes are many. On the other hand, sometimes a pithy example can cut through the tangle of confusion and point to the heart of the problem. Here are two.

The first is the Republican Party’s “Team Leader” program, which combined a vast database of information and a sophisticated online tool and turned average citizens into media lobbyists. Each week, the RNC posted a new topic, complete with talking points and background information. This might have been an initiative the President wished to highlight, or an attack campaign against Kerry or the Democrats. Loyal party activists would swing into action using Team Leader. Following a personalized interface through a series of drop-down menus, Republicans could select e-mails for talk radio hosts, reporters, and columnists for local newspapers, or producers and reporters for local TV. Using the (often misleading and always one-sided) GOP talking points, they would then compose brief messages urging the media to parrot their position. If you wished to telephone or fax, this information was also provided.

Team Leaders were encouraged to create a network of friends and relatives to join the effort, all of them sending out coordinated messages promoting Bush’s ideas. The interface was so easy that in a half hour activists could easily send personal messages to scores of journalists. For their effort, Team Leaders were rewarded with GOPoints that could be redeemed for merchandise, like bumper stickers or tote bags, which themselves promoted Bush.

The program worked. I would receive my weekly e-mail from RNC Chair Ed Gillespie, reminding me to get to work (I had signed up, of course—no reason to let the GOP hog such a powerful tool). Like magic, within days, our local right-wing columnist at the Oregonian would have an op-ed voicing support for the topic of the week. I can’t say if he was specifically motivated by Team Leader, but the GOP and its surrogates presented remarkable message discipline throughout the election.

If the Team Leader program demonstrates where the Republican Party is organizationally, then my second example, from a regular meeting of my local party, the Multnomah County Democrats (Multco Dems), may serve to illustrate where our team is.

In the autumn of 2003, I had recently gotten religion from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean and decided to get involved on the party level. I had been doing other volunteer work for area activists as well as spreading propaganda on my subtly-titled blog “Notes on the Atrocities,” but it was clear that if Bush was going to be shown the door, it would be a Democrat holding it open. So I wanted to see what I could do for the local party.

I knew the guy who was trying to update the party’s early-‘90s website aesthetic (also a blogger), and so we met outside the Hollywood Senior Center on an uncharacteristically hot afternoon to begin our new careers as party volunteers. (Try not to dwell too firmly on the rich symbolism of the Multco Dems meeting site, lest you miss the real point I’m about to raise. But yes, a senior center. Hmmm.)

Inside it was just as hot, but airless, and a couple hundred precinct committee persons sat around folding tables fanning themselves. The election season was in full swing, and the room buzzed with side conversations about the primaries. At the front of the room, the chairman droned on about party business—the budget, the agenda, welcoming new committee people, and so on. It had the insidery feel of groups with long histories and long-time members, and I was busy looking around as much as listening to the chair. That is, until he dropped this bombshell, which caused my ears to prick and my jaw to drop. There was exciting news to relay, he said with animation: after a long period of discussion and coordination, the party had finally secured a credit card machine.

On the one hand, a fleet of citizens across the country acting as coordinated messengers and lobbyists for the GOP; on the other, my local party able, near the end of the third year of the new millennium, to receive donations via MasterCard.

Is it any wonder we’re getting worked over at election time?

*

Despite the restrictions imposed by McCain-Feingold, which political observers predicted would disproportionately affect Democrats, in 2004 the money race was nearly a dead heat. (1) Democrats received support from a previously nonexistent network of internet PACs and via websites and blogs. Throughout the campaign, Kerry stayed even in the polls with an incumbent president who was running with the lowest approval rating since Jimmy Carter. And on election day, Democrats increased Kerry’s total by more than 12% over Gore’s.
But here’s the shocking thing: despite those low approval ratings (dipping periodically below 50%), on election day, Bush brought out his base as well, increasing his numbers by twenty percent over 2000. Twenty percent!

The ten million additional people who showed up to vote for the president weren’t persuaded to do so because of his position on “moral values”—never mind what David Brooks may have said. Those ten million came out because the Republican political machine is extremely well-organized, targeted, and on message. It wasn’t something they slapped together in a few months, but an accretion of methods developed over a generation. Here’s how they did it, a playbook from which Democrats need to steal liberally.

Identifying and Nurturing Constituencies
Ruling parties are formed by coalitions of interlocking groups. The voters who elected Bush in 2004 were a patchwork of carefully-identified constituencies. Some voted because they believe in the neo-conservative ideal of active interventionism. Some voted because they are Christians and identify with Bush’s position on social issues. Some voted because they believe in free markets and small government. Some voted because they believe the economy will collapse under a Democrat (contrary to all historical evidence).

In some cases, the constituencies were tiny populations targeted to tip the balance in battleground states. For example, Bush’s seemingly quixotic effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage helped him appeal to conservative Catholics in battleground states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico. It didn’t work in Pennsylvania, but in New Mexico, Bush increased his share of the Latino vote by 11% (2)—enough to tip the state.

The coalition groups may have very little in common. For neocons, arguments about abortion and school prayer are often as irrelevant as policy on North Korea is to Evangelical Christians. But they don’t conflict, either, and that’s why they both see Bush as champions of their causes.

Identifying groups that together would help create a ruling majority was the first piece of the GOP puzzle, and fine-tuning these groups has allowed them to continue to enlarge their overall support. Democrats have been far less effective at identifying new constituencies, and as a result, traditional groups like women, minorities, and labor continue to shrink. No matter how effective their vision or messages is, or how charismatic individual politicians might be, Democrats will fail to build a ruling consensus until they clarify which groups comprise their coalition.

Holding a Cohesive Vision
Over the course of several election cycles, the Republicans began to knit together a vision of how they wanted the United States to look. What began as a haphazard statement of divergent policy positions ultimately developed into a vision. Americans instinctively understand what Republicans stand for: a shift in responsibility from the government to the individual that leads to small government; personal freedom and opportunity as exemplified by low taxes and free markets; an aggressive foreign policy unencumbered by the UN; and a defense of moral values, as embodied by the teachings of the Bible.

As the vision grew, each of the elements informed the others. Personal responsibility, initially code language to criticize welfare and social programs, became a key principle in the emerging focus on freer, unregulated markets. But personal responsibility also shifted the focus away from government and toward the family, which harmonized perfectly with conservative Christian beliefs.

As this vision grew and became the dominant political currency, all other ideas were measured against it. Democrats either tried to argue that their policies were more in keeping with the spirit of the Republican vision, or they were relegated to trying to carve out small niches in the shadows of the dominant vision. Either way, Democrats lent credence to the vision’s very dominance.

The Democratic vision had once squarely been focused on social and economic justice. But after a generation of assault, it has been reduced to policy positions. Despite the longest post-primary period of any presidential candidate, voters still said they didn’t know what John Kerry stood for. (3) Democrats favor a social safety net, progressive taxation, multilateral diplomacy, a living wage. But how do these relate to each other? It’s no wonder voters don’t know where candidates stand; candidates often don’t know themselves or send mixed messages. Once they have identified key constituencies, it will be time to Democrats to again find their vision.

Crafting and Delivering a Message
Perhaps more than anything, the GOP have been remarkably successful at getting out their message. When Republicans began building their ruling coalition, they felt their message had no outlet. What did they do? They began manufacturing new ways of distributing it. Because university studies inevitably endorsed liberal policies, they began creating think tanks to do research that would produce pro-conservative findings. Republicans saw the mainstream press as a mouthpiece for liberal ideas, so they took their message directly to the people via mass mailings. Eventually they discovered talk radio and cable television. Along the way, they also learned that they could target population segments directly, by appealing to church groups to support pro-values causes, for example.

Getting out the message accomplished two purposes for the GOP: it attracted and converted on one hand, subverted on the other. At first, creating a message machine was designed just to get the word out—to attract and convert. But once conservative opinion began to hold sway in Washington, the message machine became the principal mechanism for creating opinion and, by extension, exerting control.

To cite just one example, following the 2004 election, Karl Rove called the president’s margin “a bigger percentage of the vote that Bill Clinton had.” This was a classic subversion of truth—while remaining technically correct. In fact, Clinton easily beat Dole in his re-election, winning by nine percentage points—more than three times Bush’s margin over Kerry. But Bush, running in an election year of heightened interest, won a larger percent of the total population. But by Rove’s math, Kerry also had a much bigger percentage of the vote than Clinton had. Of course, Rove wasn’t celebrating the triumph of civic engagement, he was trying to create the perception that Bush had a mandate—which supported Republican spin of a popular president with broad support.

One of the key challenges to building a successful machine for Democrats will be offsetting the GOP spin machine. They need to not only wrest control of news cycles, but prevent Republicans from subverting the dialogue. This will require a coherent message to spread their vision, and a network of media through which to deliver it.

Running Candidates Who Embody the Vision
The eleventh commandment of Ronald Reagan was to “never speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Once the GOP began to take back power in the eighties, candidates exercised remarkable discipline in sticking to the script. The final piece of the puzzle doesn’t depend on a single charismatic figure who can energize a party, but a national slate who will work together and carry the vision forward.

In some cases, the weakness of current GOP candidates speak volumes about the success of the party machine. In Oklahoma, Senate candidate Tom Coburn argued that abortion doctors should receive the death penalty. He won. In South Carolina, Senate candidate Jim DeMint argued that gays shouldn’t be allowed to teach in the public schools. He won. And in Illinois, uber-conservative Alan Keyes argued that Christ would have voted against his opponent, Barack Obama, and that that incest was “inevitable” for children raised by gay couples. Okay, even in the age of Bush, Alan Keyes is unelectable—he lost. But the point is still clear: build a successful machine and then run candidates who will get on board.

Democratic candidates will never have the kind of party discipline seen among Republicans, but they must voice a basic fidelity to the vision and message if the Party as a whole is to regain the majority.

*

Following a half-century of control, the power of the their machine was so absolute that Democrats began to forget that there was a machine. We began to regard politics more as a logical proof: our vision is the vision most Americans hold, therefore, most Americans will vote Democratic as a matter of course.

Instead of rebuilding the machine after the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s —constituencies, vision, message, and candidates—Democrats and their leading strategists have been too quick to reach for the next glamorous candidate or issue or clever message as a magic bullet for success. The party grew top-heavy in its organization, forgetting that it was the shoe leather of local precincts that built up the party in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Even now, as Democrats survey the devastation following 2004, there has been an immediate instinct to clamor for the easy solution (Hillary Clinton? Moral values? The two Americas?). But if that’s the direction we pursue, we’ll continue to list along, rudderless, hoping that our credit card machines are a match for the GOP Team Leaders.

The lesson of 2004 is that a successful machine wins elections. Despite Bush’s enormous weaknesses—low approval, war, a weak economy—he managed to find a way to beat Kerry. But Bush’s victory wasn’t evidence of his strength as a candidate. Quite the opposite—it was evidence of the GOP’s success as a party, of the effectiveness of their machine. They didn’t win because of Bush, but in spite of him.

If Democrats are going to begin to win back real estate in the Capitol, we must first rebuild our machine.

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(1) Bush raised $367 million, Kerry $323 million.

(2) According to CNN exit polling done in 2000 and 2004.

(3) For example, a late September LA Times poll found that only 30% of voters felt Kerry had done an adequate job describing his policies—despite the fact that he had done nothing but describe his policies for six months. See Ronald Brownstein, “Bush Leads Kerry Going Into Debate,” September 30, 2004.