Joseph Marshall at A Straight Shot of Politics reflects on Kerry's defeat and suggests that the problem might have been the absence, not just of messages, but of a candidate:
A week or so back, while padding around downtown Columbus, I came upon the John Kerry for President headquarters. It was, as you might expect, empty and forlorn. But still spread across the second story was a storefront wide banner, starting to grunge in the downtown pollution, that read:
JOHN KERRY-- FIGHTING FOR THE REST OF US.
It seemed to me emblematic of all that is still wrong with the Democratic Party. Just who are "the rest of us", anyway? Did John Kerry know? Did Tom Daschle? Does Terry McAuliffe? Hillary Clinton? Henry Reid? Nancy Pelosi? The Democratic Leadership Council? Barbara Boxer? Charles Schumer? I certainly don't. Why are we "fighting" for them and who are we fighting? What will we do when we defeat them? I don't know any of this either.
It's about time we all admitted that "fighting for the rest of us" is a meaningless platitude, blazoned on buildings as a substitute for political thought, and as a "strategy" to create an "image" for a candidate so he can be "electable".
We Democrats do not need a new "image". We do not need a new "strategy". We do not need meaningless platitudes. We need a genuine presidential candidate. We need a real man or woman with sane and intelligible views about how to run this country who can communicate them with conviction. And we need those views and ideas to be significantly different from those of the Party in power.
I'd argue -- as I often do in either/or debates -- that both are true. The Democrats need both a candidate, and an image. They need a strategy, too. All of these are interrelated. The candidate is a kind of message; the message sets the strategy and helps you choose your candidate. Messages aren't just something you say -- they're a filter for opportunities, and a guide to action.
The 2004 Democratic Party stance -- we don't know quite what we stand for, but it's not Bush -- led to a candidate who didn't know quite what he stood for -- but he wasn't Bush.
Marshall continues:
We did not have that candidate who could speak with conviction and communicate clearly. We did not have those sane and intelligible views. We still don't. The closest we came to it was Howard Dean.
Now I am biased, and you can discount that, if you choose. I signed on with Howard Dean early and am still involved with his political activities, which, in my town, are STILL making meet-ups too big for all of us to fit in one local coffee house. What are we doing? Nothing spectacular. Just trying to elect Democratic state representatives and county commissioners to build the next generation of Democratic ideas, leadership, and candidates--what the Democratic National Committee ought to be doing but isn't, and hasn't for decades.
But I will share with you something I did a year ago, when the Dean candidacy was marching to the Iowa caucus. I looked at the political website of every declared candidate: Dean, Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Clark, Kusinich, Moseley-Braun, and Sharpton. They fell into three categories. First there was the fluff: Sharpton, Moseley-Braun, Clark, and Kusinich. Their websites contained little more than a message of, "Gee whiz! Look at Me! I'm a presidential candidate!". The nearest thing to a real policy alternative in any of them was the Kusinich proposal for a Department of Peace!
The websites of Senate and House candidates--Kerry, Lieberman, Gephart, and Edwards--were essentially interchangeable, dense with policy information, but virtually the same policies, clearly cribbed from legislative speeches, written by diligent congressional staffers, and probably never even looked at and signed off on by the candidate himself. And most of these policy alternatives were retreaded tires from as far back as the Carter Administration and the Mondale/Ferraro campaign. You could have placed any candidate picture on any of the websites and it would have made no difference.
Then there was Howard Dean. Unquestionably, Dean's policy ideas were very thin and sketchy in many places, particularly on those issues, such as war and international affairs, where an ex-Governor of Vermont would have limited experience. But they were clearly the ideas of a specific somebody, and somebody who had actually made unilateral policy decisions and acted on them at a state level.
The campaign was originally on such a shoestring that Dean may have even written some of them himself--the prose in places did sound like it. But even if they were ghosted, the writer had clearly spent some time with the Governor discussing what to say, and Dean clearly had made sure to read it and approve it as what he meant to say. They were policies, not platitudes, and he was a definite man with definite personal opinions, and not an image and a strategy.
Let's say that they were the beginnings (though this only) of a clear, new, and fresh set of policy ideas that, with Democratic Party organization behind them, and intelligent experts regularly talking to Dean about them, could have presented a real alternative to the actions of George W. Bush.
He's got a point. I say that as someone who hasn't been, to date, a Dean fan. But on the other hand, I've been saying that the Democratic Party is a party of white papers, and you aren't going to touch hearts, or win votes, with white papers, especially incrementalist ones. Dean, at least, has convictions -- and that's a starting point. I'd still rather not have Dean and his supporters get the last word -- but I agree with Marshall to this extent: I think a debate among several Deans would lead to a better strategy, and better messages, and better candidates, than a debate among several Kerrys -- or among the party professionals who brought us the Kerry candidacy, and all of the gray incrementalism that went along with it. Let's start with the Dean wing, and the Beinart wing, and go from there.
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Posted by: EmersonRUTH | September 08, 2011 at 08:57 PM