The Democratic Party

The NYTime's Matt Bai is a hero. He's very good. He's writing a book now on the future of the Democratic party, and so while the article I'm about to link to is very wonky, rest assured Bai is capable of less intimidating reading. Excellent stuff.

Bai's article in this week's NYTimes magazine is about the struggle between Howard Dean and the elected Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer, who chairs the Democratic Senate committee. Dean is chair of the Democratic National Committee, of course.

In the past, the DNC has shuttled most of its funds over to the House and Senate committees. The funds have been spent in targeted ways on specific, swing races. Also, the DNC has been raising more money than the RNC.

Dean has changed all of that. Not only is he not raising as much money, he isn't giving it to the Senate or House committees. Instead, he's spending the money on state Democratic committees, and not necessarily in swing states. For instance, Mississippi got four new full-time positions, which doesn't sound like a ton of money (and I don't think it is), but which sounds to Schumer et al like wasted money nonetheless. Mississippi has no close races.

I'll let Bai do most of the talking, but let me copy these final paragraphs to pique your interest:

If Democrats fall short of retaking the House of Representatives in November, the party’s elected leaders will almost certainly blame Dean for the near miss. They will say that he squandered their best chance in more than a decade to control the country. They will say it proves that Dean’s risky strategy has badly hurt the party.

And yet, you could make a compelling argument that anything short of total victory in November would prove precisely the opposite. With polls consistently showing voters to be deeply nervous about a protracted war, high gas prices and stunted wages, this is that rare election that should turn less on tactics than on fundamental choices about the direction of the country; in other words, this election season is about the fear and fury of the electorate, not the addition of a few more door-knockers in New Haven or some negative 30-second spot broadcast in Columbus. As the Democratic strategist James Carville told Al Hunt, the Bloomberg News columnist, in August, “If we can’t win in this environment, we have to question the whole premise of the party.”

Most analysts in both parties now believe that Democrats have better-than-even odds of winning at least the House. But if they don’t, rather than dissect the mechanical failures that cost them a few thousand votes here or there, Democrats might be forced to admit, at long last, that there is a structural flaw in their theory of party-building. Even a near miss, at a time of such overwhelming opportunity, would suggest that a national party may not, in fact, be able to win over the long term by fixating on a select group of industrial states while condemning entire regions of the country to what amounts to one-party rule.

Anyway, here's the article.