Purple America: the 50 State Strategy

[illinoisprogressive]

the Nation has an excellent article on Dean and the 50 state strategy. How it began and where it may go depending on what the outcome of the 2008 election. It is 4 pages but, a fast read and very good.



Why? For starters, look no further than the other modifier often attached to the effort: "Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy." From the moment the former Vermont governor launched his campaign for DNC chair in the wake of the Democrats' 2004 debacle, the party establishment--that shadowy claque of high-paid consultants, big-money donors, lobbyists, pundits, Clintonites and Congressional leaders--has been at pains to paint Dean's vision as another manifestation of the out-of-control tendencies they fretted about, and whispered so gainfully to the media about, when he ran for President.

Dean's campaign for party chair was an outsider's run at the ultimate insider's job, spurred by a meeting he had at the 2004 national convention with disgruntled party leaders from eighteen long-neglected "red" states. In his own 2004 run, Dean had "found himself in the odd position of a candidate in charge of a movement that grew up almost accidentally around him," says Elaine Kamarck, a Harvard public-policy lecturer and highly unlikely "Deaniac" best known for encouraging the party's break with New Deal liberalism as a Democratic Leadership Council strategist. "That gave him the insights that led to the fifty-state strategy."

snip -


Dean's analysis ran contrary to the entrenched interests of those who had long run the DNC, Matt Bai wrote last year in The New York Times Magazine, as "essentially a service organization for a few hundred wealthy donors, who treated it like their private political club." Also being served at this "club" were Congressional leaders who had risen with help from the old DNC. And then there were the big-ticket consultants, the James Carvilles and Paul Begalas, who had shot to fortune and fame with their image-driven, big-media Bill Clinton campaigns, their pricey polling data and "strategic targeting."

snip-

The real fear is that a second Clinton presidency would mean a return to the Washington-centric ways of the first--to party control by "the very people who ground down the activist base in the 1990s and have continued to hold the party's grassroots in utter contempt," as Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos wrote in the Washington Post. The harshest public critics of Dean's strategy are also among Hillary Clinton's most trusted advisers: Emanuel, Carville, Begala. As Thomas Edsall reported in The New Republic last year, many top Clintonites so loathe and mistrust Dean that their campaign is "laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC." There is talk of Clinton's team keeping its own field staff with the campaign after winning the primaries, rather than shifting them under the auspices of the DNC for the general election, as has been standard practice. "The DNC is going to be peripheral" if Hillary wins the nomination, one Clinton aide said. Clinton acolyte Harold Ickes Jr. has raised millions for a private voter database, to avoid relying on the DNC's.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/moser

[movonne]

1. Well this is one good reason I don't back hillary...

[beyurslf]

2. I am a Hillary supporter and this worries me. I am from a "red" state.

I have seen the tangible fruits of the 50 state strategy too. If we keep writing off every place that has a majority republicans, we will soon only be in the largest of cities. What then?