Fixing the Democrats: Messages, Messengers, Consultants, and the System Problem

Greg's Opinion picks up on yesterday's question -- do the Democrats need a message or a messenger?  His answer, like mine, is, "yes."  He links to Mark Schmitt, who -- in commenting on this Ed Kilgore post -- nails it.  Kilgore suggests that the messenger the Democrats are pining for is... Bill Clinton.  Schmitt responds:

That's true, but I don't think content and character are so easily separated. During the summer, commenting on the Kerry campaign, I wrote that the campaign didn't seem to have a good sense that the positions it took on issues had to be not just the right positions, or the positions that polled well, but those that best showed the candidate's own strengths or told a story about the candidate's character. After all, we elect a president not just because of his position on issues we know about, but to make choices that we cannot foresee...

Clinton, on the other hand, not only had a very substantive message, he understood exactly how to use that message to say something about the kind of person/president he was, and to change it as necessary... Policies were one of several tools that he used to connect with people. The same policies, and even the same language, would not have the same resonance in a Michael Dukakis simply because Dukakis embodied the stereotypes of the party. Those stereotypes were not a particular set of policies so much as an attitude: technocratic, aloof, knows-what's-good-for-you, secular, overeducated.

Kilgore says "right now we ought to focus on what our party stands for and what we would do in power--on our message--on what we can say to persuadable voters, with or without a charismatic leader or a nifty 'narrative'--and then worry about how to add the sizzle to the steak"... But a messenger does more than adopt a set of ideas already adopted by the party. Clinton certainly did. He came into national politics at a time when a lot of ideas were floating around, and uniquely, he absorbed all of them and then crafted from them a substantive message that worked for him. (And then another one, and then another one.)

And his ability to do that also brought about a flowering of ideas about public life that we had not seen in decades. I've written about this earlier: "We were reviving ideas at a mad pace. Communitarians, the 'politics of meaning' groupies, those interested in 'civil society,' the Clintonites who wanted to incubate 'bottom up' community-development strategies, and the thinkers around the Democratic Leadership Council were among many factions engaged in a deep, ongoing, and not at all destructive debate that was thoroughly rooted in history."

Since then, the fields have been mostly fallow, and liberals have fallen back to either envious emulation of the institutional structures of the right, or ideas like the Patients' Bill of Rights that are actually leftovers from the previous decade. I believe that flowering of political ideas had something to do with Clinton, and the fact that he was a sponge for them...

Dead on.  It's an interplay -- messenger, strategy, message -- that adds up to a single system.  Sure, it would be nice if you could separate out one of those threads -- say, remove the messages, fix them, and re-insert them.  But that's not the way it works.  So, a first recommendation for Democrats -- stop thinking about the parts, start thinking about the whole.  Take a systems approach.

Which is, of course, neither an easy nor a quick thing to do.  But the state of the party is such that those of us who want to fix it had better be prepared to dig in for the long term.  Hint: recommendations that begin with "All you have to do is", probably won't work.  You have to do many things.  Develop a credible anti-Islamist policy, as Beinart suggests.  Build an idea machine, as Simon Rosenberg and the New Democrat Network recommend.  Clean the consulting house, per Amy Sullivan. Create better narrative -- but not only that.  Frame more effectively -- but not only that. 

Above all, follow Ruy Teixeira's lead.  Don't get locked into a single critique.  Mine all of them for what they have to offer.

In the spirit of pragmatism, I'll offer a suggestion of my own.  If a new crop of consultants is needed, find them -- some of them, at least -- outside of politics.  A business communications consulting sensibility can be as useful to the Democrats as it already has been to Republicans.  I'm not referring here to the need for branding or packaging -- that kind of superficiality isn't the answer.  The value of business communications -- the best of it, anyway -- is that it's designed to build relationships over the long term.  Too much of traditional political consulting is focused on winning the election.  That's critical, of course -- but it's a sort of artificial spike that leaves open the question of what to do the next day, and the next day, and the day after that.  You can see the limitation when political consultants make the move to business -- they're so locked into the campaign sensibility that often they can't adjust to the reality that in business communications, there generally isn't a single day when you win.  There's a whole series of days when you have to maintain and deepen relationships, by really understanding what it is your customers and your partners are dealing with, and what they care about.  Ongoing engagement is something the best businesses do well, and the Republicans do decently, and the Democrats do hardly at all.

It's interesting that the most innovative Democratic campaign to date -- Howard Dean's -- was the one that drew most heavily on crossover consultants, with both business and politics under their belts.

Full disclosure -- I'm a business communications consultant with an interest in politics, so this is in part a self-interested message.  But I'm not claiming that I'm the answer, personally.  Sure, I'd be glad to be a part of it.  But more to the point, having seen the best of the business sensibility in action, I know what it could contribute to the system problem of policy, strategy, message, messenger, audience and feedback.

The whole solution? Of course not.  A part of it?  Maybe.  If so, to be folded in, alongside everything else, on this big, long-term reconstruction job.