San Francisco Chronicle: State Dem group played hardball to kill GOP election system plan
Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer
Sunday, October 7, 2007
They called themselves "The Lincoln Brigade."
Even as Democrats feared having to spend as much as $40 million for a bruising, bloody fight expected to drag on for months, this makeshift group of California Democratic operatives needed just weeks to pummel a Republican-funded push for a ballot measure that threatened to change the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The ruthlessly effective battle plan of the California Democrats' group raises the specter that, as the 2008 election looms, Republicans may have to confront a far more aggressive Democratic ground game that has revived the old "Clinton war room" philosophy.
"We need to fight back and not be reluctant - that if they come after you with a knife, to pull out a gun," said California Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, former spokesman for President Bill Clinton's White House and Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign....After two terms of Republican control of the White House - and angered by what they perceived as a history of electoral "dirty tricks" by GOP strategists such as President Bush's key adviser Karl Rove - the Democrats' response in California could serve as an indication of what lies ahead in the 2008 battle for the White House....
Lehane and (Margie Sullivan, a former chief of staff to three Clinton Cabinet secretaries) are some of the lead players in the group, which includes many former insiders from the Clinton administration. They named their group after the brigade of American volunteers who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. After events such as the 2000 Florida presidential election recount, the 2003 California recall election that ousted Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign against Sen. John Kerry, "Democrats are waking up to reality, " said Doug Boxer, the son of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and a Bay Area consultant who was political director for the effort against the ballot measure....
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The goal, Sullivan said, was to "strangle the baby in the cradle" and kill the ballot measure early, rather than let it qualify for the ballot - where it would be much tougher and more expensive to beat. As the campaign in favor of the measure prepared to circulate the petitions and get the voter signatures needed to qualify it for the ballot, Doug Boxer contacted every major Democratic elected official from mayors to state legislators to California's U.S. senators...(Tom Steyer, a longtime major party donor and lead fundraiser for Kerry who heads San Francisco-based Farallon Capitol) and Sullivan hit the phones, rounding up financial backing and commitments from deep-pocketed donors...Pollster Paul Maslin's early focus groups found that a slim majority of Californians initially backed the Republicans' call for an end to "winner take all," so the Democrats began a daily drumbeat aimed at the media - press conferences, meeting with the state's leading editorial boards and outreach to Internet Web sites and blogs....At one point, "Norman Lear pitched in on a script change," Lehane said. "That made us nervous ... it's was kind of like Picasso giving you advice on painting."
Frank Russo, publisher of the California Progress Report, a popular Democratic Web site, said the strategy achieved "a clarion call that went out to all the troops," prompting netroots activists such as the Courage Campaign and Daily Kos loyalists to pound the issue to the grassroots. "It was like the old Who song: We won't get fooled again," he said....
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/07/MNSESIOTG.DTL
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